Brand loyalty starts before the first purchase

Many years ago as a teenager I worked at a commercial door shop. A lot of what I did was to pull orders and get the door hardware ready for delivery. Door handles, hinges, thresholds, weatherstrip, etc.

Door handles were a particular interest to me. Every door had at least one but unlike hinges, there were 100s of options we had in-stock (with more we could order). Each brand had a dozens of different products and each with upwards of dozens of variants.

Knob shape.

Knob versus lever.

Standard hole vs mortise box.

Finish color.

Trim style.

Etc.

This meant I spent a lot of time learning about locks and what made them different.

Fast-forward to this week. We have some construction going on and needed a couple of door handles for two new doorways.

To my surprise, the exact same locks I learned about decades ago are still sold today. Same brands, trim, colors. Even the model names are the same.

That meant I didn't need to do any evaluation of what to buy, I knew exactly what I wanted.

(I also ended up buying enough for the whole house as the existing handles are mismatched junk)

You'd never hear about this level of brand loyalty. Prior to moving in here, I never bought from this lock manufacturer.

While customer loyalty is talked about in regards to your store and your customers, there's a whole level with your customer and the brands they buy.

Getting customers to switch brands can be very difficult.

You might have the most loyal customers in the industry but if you decide to stop selling the brands they love and trust, they'll go to another store.

And in the reverse. If you start selling a loved brand, you can attract new customers who are brand-loyal and happy to buy from you instead.

Use that to your advantage. Create actual landing pages for your main brands. Include the brand name and model numbers in your product pages. Allow filtering collections by brand.

Eric Davis