I’ve been studying the erosion of brand loyalty over the holiday season. Time spent in shopping malls and online retailers will do that to you. As I’ve found, there is seemingly no end to the number of explanations for it. Everyone and everything I read has a different opinion on the matter. The one that makes the most sense to me is this one put forth by Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker and it goes something like this.
“The root cause of this decreasing brand loyalty and the growing inability to see differences between brands can be traced back to much simpler issues: the failure to tell a convincing story or, perhaps better said, the inability to tell a story convincingly and the inability to find and define, in a quite literal sense of the word, the audience.”
I mentioned in the last post that I thought social media was providing some of the means to help with storytelling. It also provides, in a way nothing before it has, the means to define just who comprises a brand’s audience and the tools to connect with them directly. It’s been fun this past week reading all of the social media predictions for the coming year. There has been no end to the different number of those either. For my money, social media will be successful in 2010 if it continues to help companies and brands to define, connect, and build those audiences and to learn how to use stories to build the emotional bonds that enable the audience to see and find themselves within the brand.
