What does it take for marketers to reach customers who are already loyal to aparticular brand? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examinesbrand loyalty and the way it affects perceptions of advertising.
Authors Sekar Raju (Iowa State University), H. Rao Unnava (Ohio StateUniversity, and Nicole Votolato Montgomery (College of William and Mary)discovered that consumer brand loyalty heavily influences responses to marketingfrom competing brands. "Consumers who are more loyal to a brand seem tosearch and process competitor brand information very differently than consumerswho are less loyal to a brand," write the authors. "When loyalty is high,consumers search for evidence that a competitor brand is not a good brand,contrary to the advertisement information."
In contrast, less loyal customers look for evidence to confirm that the competitorbrand is a good brand. "This search manifests in the identification of similaritiesbetween their preferred brand and competing brand, resulting in an overallperception that the two brands are alike."
In three related studies, researchers compared people who were very loyal tospecific brand-name products: Sony music players, Saucony athletic shoes, andOlympus voice recorders. The researchers succeeded in changing the perceptionsof low and high-loyalty participants by asking them to shift their focus fromdissimilarities to similarities, or vice versa.
"The change in focus from searching for similarities to dissimilarities hasimplications for marketers. Advertisements that are targeted toward consumerswho are loyal to another brand may have to be structured differently," concludethe authors.