Knowing which brands your prospects prefer and why can ensure you’re competitively positioning your offerings and help you increase your sales and revenue. It can also help you uncover more opportunities to sell your brands and show you how to shift buyer behavior. But in order to conduct an effective brand loyalty survey, you need to know how to create one and the most common brand loyalty questions to ask.
Why Understanding Brand Loyalty is Crucial To Your Success
Knowing which brands your prospects are loyal to is important, but it’s especially important for businesses and organizations that sell multiple brands. That’s because understanding which brands are currently most popular allows you to change and focus your marketing messaging to ensure it’s as effective as possible. For instance, if your prospects like one brand over another, you can focus your marketing efforts on promoting those brands versus other ones in your inventory or ensure that you’re aligning the right brand with the right persona.
It’s also important to look at the loyalty for the brands your competitors sell. Knowing this can find the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, which can help you create competitive messaging or spot areas that might need improvement. For example, if you notice that brand loyalty is in a state of erosion, your company could be in a great position to focus on conquest sales. That means selling to prospective customers who might’ve preferred other brands in the past, but could be open to purchasing the brands you currently sell.
Creating The Best Brand Loyalty Questionnaire
Whether you’re a dealer, OEM, or in the aftermarket industry, when developing your own brand loyalty questionnaire, start with the brand(s) you offer and two or three of your top competitors. Building your questionnaire around your current inventory of brands and sending it to your customers or prospects can help you see how loyal they are to your company versus the brands you sell.
As you create your questionnaire, it’s important to focus your questions around some key metrics. Those metrics include:
- Trust
- Satisfaction
- Brand Equity
- Perceived Quality
- Perceived Value
Measuring these metrics and analyzing their total impact on a brand’s loyalty can help you better understand the current state and market for the brands you sell or service and give you stronger insights to market and sell them more easily.
Common Brand Loyalty Questions To Ask Per Metric
Here are some common brand loyalty questions you can include on your questionnaire to help you make it as helpful as possible:
Trust
Trust includes not only how much a customer trusts the actions of a brand, but also how much they can trust what the brand advertises about its products or services. Even if a brand produces stellar equipment, if customers don’t trust them, it can quickly create an opportunity for your competitors to make a conquest sale.
Here are some questions you can ask to help you gauge the trust people have in a brand:
- How well do you trust X brand?
- How did X brand earn your trust?
- How would you describe your overall opinion of X brand?
Satisfaction
Satisfaction often includes how much customers appreciate the products a specific brand offers. That includes how well they perform their advertised job, and how they assist customers with their pain points.
Here are some questions you can ask to help you gauge the satisfaction people have in a brand:
- On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being extremely likely and 1 not at all likely, how likely are you to recommend brand X to a colleague or friend?
- How convenient is it to use X brand’s products or services?
- How happy were you with your purchase of X brand’s products or services?
Brand Equity
Brand equity is a marketing term that describes a brand’s value. That value is determined by consumer experiences and perception of the brand. If people think highly of a brand, it has positive brand equity. Though often associated with brand awareness, the two can hold very different measurements. Afterall, it’s possible for a brand to be well-known without necessarily being well-respected. Esteem can also tell you how likely a customer is to recommend the brand to others.
Here are some questions you can ask to help you gauge the esteem people have in a brand:
- How likely are you to recommend X brand to others?
- How would you describe X brand to your friends or colleagues?
- When you think of X brand, how positively do you feel towards it?
Perceived Quality
A customer’s perceived quality determines how likely they believe a brand or its products and services are to fulfill their needs and solve their problems. For example, if you sell a brand of capital equipment for construction sites, and that brand has a design flaw, resulting in down time versus its competitors, your customers might not view its quality as very high.
Here are some questions you can ask to help you gauge the perceived quality people have in a brand:
- How reliable would you consider X brand?
- How would you rate the quality of X brand?
- Would you prefer X brand over X brand?
Perceived Value
The perceived value of a brand is how valuable it is to a customer individually. If the customer finds the current price too steep, they might feel the brand doesn’t hold as much value to them. On the other hand, in the example of the construction equipment, if the value is acceptable and the price is right, it might be a great fit for certain prospects.
Knowing the perceived value of a brand can also help you identify price-value gaps. If a product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to or what it’s advertised to do, it won’t be perceived as good value for the money or price.
Here are some questions you can ask to help you gauge the perceived value people have in a brand:
- Would you consider brand X of good value compared to its current price?
- How likely are you to switch from X brand to another if the alternative is cheaper?
- How likely are you to switch from X brand to another if they were both sold at the same location?
Using Brand Loyalty Insights To Your Advantage
Having the right knowledge about brand loyalty in your trading area can help you shift buyer behavior in your favor. Using targeted ads and knowing the best place to attract your target audience can help you uncover new prospects in your area and potentially make conquest sales in times of brand loyalty erosion. Want to learn more about shifting buyer behavior and using brand loyalty knowledge to your advantage? Download Randall Reilly’s media playbooks. We have the experts and the tools to help you succeed in all of your marketing and sales endeavors.
