The Science Behind Creating Brand Loyalty that Every Marketer Needs to Know
Matt Bowen • April 4, 2022
Achieving widespread, continuous brand loyalty is the ultimate objective for any company. Whether a B2B or B2C, having a customer base that enthusiastically and consistently chooses your brand over your competitors’ brands is what will elevate you—and keep you—ahead of the pack.
While this may seem obvious, the truth is that “brand loyalty” often doesn’t make the list of a corporation’s goals. Increased revenues? Check. Increased market share? Sure. Increased profit margins? Absolutely.
Increased brand loyalty? Crickets
While most marketing folks will certainly claim that brand loyalty is of utmost importance, turning that into tangible action is very often a different story. Of course, some industries have long ago figured out that brand loyalty is critical. On the consumer front, loyalty cards, points, frequent flyer miles, etc., are all intended to create loyalty. But do they really? I have, and use, a CVS card, but does that actually make me loyal to CVS? Hardly. I go to CVS because it’s convenient for me and sure, I’ll be happy to save $2 off my next toothpaste purchase.
Ana Andjelic, who runs the newsletter The Sociology of Business, describes loyalty programs like these exactly as they are: bribery schemes that have nothing to do with loyalty at all. They are only about driving economic transactions rather than true affinity for the brand.
To really understand what’s behind loyalty, it’s important to first break it down to what it actually means. Brand loyalty is typically equated to customer satisfaction. Yet in reality, while the two are related, they are distinctly different measures.
True brand loyalty transcends mere satisfaction and motivates customers to want to promote your brand for you.
They tell friends and colleagues. They talk about it on social media. If your product isn’t readily available for some reason, they’ll forego buying it rather than settling for a competitor’s offering. That’s the brand loyalty litmus test.
Customer satisfaction on the other hand is driven by consistently delivering on the functional benefits of your product. That is to say, your offering does what you’ve said it will. Brand loyalty is not driven by delivering the functional benefits of your product or service. Even if you do a stellar job of consistently delivering these benefits, it will not drive loyalty, because loyalty requires more than just doing what your customers already expect your products and services to do. If what you offer doesn’t perform as advertised, then you have no business offering it in the first place. Not to mention, it’s a safe bet that some of your competitors’ products perform just as well as yours.
In what we call a Data Conscious methodology to brand strategy, we think of these in terms of brand value drivers. Some are expected—these are the functional benefits, some are critical, a step above and specific to their needs, and then you have value drivers that are delighters. Delighters are at the heart of brand loyalty.
But before you can even get to brand loyalty, an important precursor needs to take place: customer commitment. Studies show that customer commitment comes in two forms: economic commitment and affective commitment. Economic commitment is when a customer keeps buying a certain product or service because there simply aren’t other good options or the cost of switching is too high. A good example would be the binding contracts that mobile phone or cable suppliers require (here’s looking at you, Comcast). But economic commitment is false loyalty. Many of these customers would bolt in a heartbeat if better pricing and terms were available elsewhere.
Affective commitment is a whole different animal because it’s based on an emotional connection. Customers with an affective commitment stick with certain brands because they are emotionally connected to them. They seek out and choose those brands time and time again.
Here’s an example of affective commitment: I live in a small city just north of Boston and like everyplace, the year of Covid put a lot of small businesses in a very tough place. A local restaurant, The Paddle Inn, was trying to understand how it could remain relevant and created what I would call a perfect affective commitment move. Every Tuesday they do what they call curb-side cooking school. Each online class focuses on one dish and they provide you all the ingredients you need in a bag that you pick up the day before. Then, at 5:30 on Tuesday, you jump into a Zoom cooking class with dozens of other people while their chef walks everyone through, step by step (often in a very humorous way), how to prepare that dish in real time. It’s more than just a lot of fun, it’s community. I will forever be loyal to this restaurant because of all of the surprisingly fun and memorable experiences they’ve created. And you can bet I’ve told a lot of other people about it too.
Did they create this as a loyalty program? I doubt it. They likely were just trying to drum up cash flow on typically slow Tuesday nights. But as a result of creating over and above highly memorable customer experiences they are building a loyal community of customers for the long haul.
There’s a key psychological component at play here. What we are really talking about in brand loyalty is actually memory. When we have an exceptional brand experience it gets lodged into our memory. This in turn gets translated into an emotional connection that all positive memories create. While important, the functional benefits of your product or service just don’t cut it when it comes to creating emotional connections. We don’t record functional benefits into memory, and therefore don’t make an emotional connection.
In other words, when you deliver on just what you are supposed to deliver on with your brand, it’s quickly forgotten. But your brand goes beyond what’s expected and create an exceptional customer experience, it gets lodged into memory. It’s that lodging in the memory that is the spark that drives loyalty.
So true brand loyalty is a result of first creating affective commitment. How do you do this? Well, for starters, all brand experiences need to align with the brand positioning itself. Experiences are a physical extension of what your brand stands for and why it is distinct. If your brand is solid in both of those aspects, then you can deconstruct the entire customer experience the way it is now and determine where it can be elevated to something that is exceptional, surprising and meaningful.
If, however, your brand positioning and differentiation is murky, you have to first start there and build from that. Trying to create exceptional brand experiences on a brand that isn’t clearly positioned will likely add more confusion and be a waste of valuable budget.
And speaking of budget, this is where marketers need to rethink how they allocate funds across all of their initiatives. A true brand loyalty strategy based on the principals above means that you need to transition a good portion of your focus from communicating expected functional and technical benefits to creating these exceptional experiences for your customers. This requires a reallocation of the budget; In general, I recommend at least 15-20% of your efforts and budget should focus just on your brand loyalty strategy.
Research can help you further fine tune this by first understanding your reputation. For example, if research shows that your brand has a great reputation for delivering on things that are expected (or worse, unimportant), you can reallocate your budget to focus on improving your brand’s performance and perceptions on delivering experiences that delight which will ultimately will be at the heart of your brand loyalty strategy.
Unless you’re in hospitality, chances are creating over-and-above customer experiences that delight could be revolutionary in your industry. It’s an exceptional way to differentiate your brand.
A few tips to help get you started:
If you aren’t delivering the basics consistently (i.e., the functional benefits of your products or services), you have to start there. You need to do that just to avoid dissatisfaction, and you can’t build affective commitment if you don’t meet the basic requirements your customer base expects.
At the core of affective commitment is the practice of creating over-and-above experiences that generate emotional responses that, in turn, get recorded into memory. What this means to your brand depends on the relationship you have with your customers, but the baseline is true, regardless. Ask yourself, what can you do for your customers that will go beyond their expectations? How can you surprise them? How can you anticipate their needs even before they do? How can you personalize their experience? How can you make them smile?
But remember, and this is the kicker, creating affective commitment is NOT about offering deals and discounts. Those might create economic commitment, but the benefits are short lived and will not lead to loyalty.
Creating affective commitment and, consequently, brand loyalty, should be a top focus of most every marketing department. The financial returns can be significant not just from your existing customer base, but the new customers in their circle they undoubtedly will tell about the crazy great experience they had with your brand. Even better, it should rise above that and be a top corporate objective. Creating true loyalty––and then turning that conviction into a marketing channel in its own right––is what makes some brands so cleverly successful.

Tesla's recent struggles show how controversies can damage a brand. CEO Elon Musk's recent controvercial decisions have alienated a significant portion of Tesla's eco-conscious customer base. The fallout has been severe: Stock Decline: Tesla's stock dropped 36% in Q1 2025, erasing $460B in market cap. Sales Impact: Vehicle deliveries fell 13% year-over-year in Q1 2025, with market share in Europe and Germany plummeting. Customer Trust: Favorability among Democrats dropped 23% from January to July 2024, while Tesla's brand consideration score halved since 2021. This highlights a key lesson: brands risk fallout when taking sides on divisive issues, and this is particularly true in politics. It highlights how important it for brands to remain focused on their core mission, establish authenticity, and earn trust from the market. You may be asking yourself, well hold on, how is this any different that what other brands like Ben and Jerry’s have done over the years. The key difference is that even though they may express views that some may find divisive, these views didn’t counter their core brand essence, in fact it enhanced it. Conflicts Hurting Brand Performance Brand Value Losses Tesla experienced a hit to its brand value following statements from its CEO that many perceived to be divisive or off-brand. Survey results showed that 45% of respondents viewed the impact as "negative," while 40% described it as "extremely negative" [2] . Customer Trust Breakdown Tesla's favorability ratings have sharply declined, particularly across political affiliations:

B2B marketing is a high-stakes game, data is everywhere—but insight is rare. One of the most powerful yet underutilized sources of marketing intelligence is a clear view of your brand’s health. Not vanity metrics, but a deep, diagnostic look at how your brand is perceived at every stage of the buyer’s journey. With perceived being the key word here. This kind of insight doesn’t come from your CRM or website analytics. It comes from targeted audience research that maps how each buyer persona perceives your brand at every key touchpoint in the funnel: awareness, familiarity, consideration, usage, and loyalty. When done right, it’s like getting an X-ray of your entire marketing engine—and your competitors’ too. Think how useful this is for a marketing and revenue team. Defining Brand Health: Perceptions Across the Funnel Brand health isn’t a single number. It’s the sum of how well your brand is performing in the minds of your target audiences—at every step of the funnel: Awareness – Do your ideal customers even know your brand exists? Familiarity – Can they describe what you do and how you’re different? Consideration – Would they include you in their shortlist when making a purchase decision? Usage – Are they choosing you and experiencing the value you promise? Loyalty – Do they stay, recommend, and grow with your brand? When you understand how each of your target personas perceives your brand at these stages, you can pinpoint the exact points where your marketing is working—or where it’s leaking leads and losing revenue. Why You Can’t Rely on Internal Data Alone Here’s the reality: most internal dashboards can only tell you what people do. But they can’t tell you what people think. And what they think determines whether or not they’ll engage with you in the first place. The only way to measure brand health accurately is through targeted audience research—surveys and qualitative insights gathered from your actual buying personas (or those of your competitors). This research reveals how each group perceives you at every stage of the funnel, uncovering blind spots and opportunities that performance data alone can’t provide. The Strategic Power of a Brand Health X-Ray When you can see brand health perceptions by funnel stage and by persona, you unlock powerful advantages for both marketing and revenue teams: Focused Strategy If awareness is high but familiarity is low, you know your messaging isn’t landing. If consideration is weak, you may need to clarify your value proposition or address trust barriers. This enables marketing to focus efforts where the funnel is breaking down—no guesswork. Smarter Budget Allocation Instead of spreading your budget evenly or betting on assumptions, brand health insights show you exactly where to invest to get the highest return. No more overspending at the top of the funnel when the real issue is mid-funnel conversion. Competitive Benchmarking When you include competitor data in your brand health assessment, you can see how buyers perceive your rivals at each stage of the funnel. Are they winning on awareness but losing on loyalty? Are you the most considered, but not the most chosen? This is the kind of clarity that drives smart positioning. The Business Case: Stats That Matter Companies that monitor brand health regularly are 60% more likely to exceed revenue goals. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by up to 20%. Brands with strong funnel-wide perception outperform competitors by up to 3X in customer retention and advocacy. To get started, B2B marketers should: Identify Key Personas – Who are your target buyers? Define them clearly. Map the Funnel Stages – Customize the funnel stages to match your sales cycle. Launch Targeted Research – Use surveys, interviews, or brand assessment tools to gather perception data. Analyze and Benchmark – Compare across personas and against competitors. Act on Insights – Use findings to adjust messaging, content, media spend, and sales enablement. Marketing teams are under more pressure than ever to prove impact. By measuring brand health through the lens of funnel-stage perceptions across key personas, you equip your team with the clarity to act with precision—and avoid wasting time and budget on the wrong problems. It’s not just about knowing how your brand is doing. It’s about knowing why—and what to do next. Want help setting up a brand health assessment for your organization? DM me and let's talk about how to build your own X-ray view of your brand and your competitors.