Follow the Yellow Brick Road to Loyalty by brand adviser Tom Asacker describes the four elements necessary for customer loyalty:
- A heart … people want to participate in something worthy, so “give them the feel-good emotions they desire.”
- A brain … people “want to know who you are; what your intentions are; what makes you different and better; and how it is that you can do what others, try as they may, simply can not do.”
- The nerve … “if even a hint of doubt remains about your offering, your audience will go somewhere that eliminates that doubt.”
- A home … “People are strongly motivated to belong. To have a place where everybody knows their name (or, at least, how they feel).”
Public libraries have these qualities … so why are they struggling so much? Hints about what’s missing can be found in another Asacker article, A Brand in Not a Separate Thing. Asacker says of successful branding:
Think of it this way: If you lean a bunch of sticks against each other, they stand up because they support each other. Take one away and the others become less stable, or they fall. Easy to understand, but, like the childhood game “pick-up sticks,” extremely complex and challenging to tease apart. The hard work of value co-creation — viscerally understanding the relationships amongst and between the sticks and strategically propping them up and connecting them to each other is today’s key to sustained marketplace success.
So stop, think, and consider carefully whether your daily activities — your investment of scarce resources — are propping up and supporting real and potential customers, or adding even more noise and confusion to their busy lives. Are you strategically creating value for the marketplace ecosystem, or are you broadcasting messages and defending the status quo. Get your head out of the past and into the present.
The key to a successful brand — a successful relationship — lies out there, in the hopes, dreams and real lives of all of your customers. Because a brand, you see, is not a separate, promotable thing. A brand is not a series of problems to be managed and solved. It’s a co-created reality to be experienced and enhanced with others. The important question to ask is: Who will co-create that reality?
