Emotional Sentiment and Brand Loyalty

To have an emotional sentiment toward a brand or product is to have a strong positive feeling of liking for that brand. Strong brand loyalty involves emotional sentiment. Having a choice makes for the expression of loyalty, as it provides an opportunity to be against alternatives disliked. If the product has attributes that are unique and of central importance to the consumer, together with risks attached to buying, the product is termed a “high-involvement product,” as being most likely to engage the consumer in deliberations when choosing. This is because high-involvement products are those that generate the most consumer concern.

Trust and sentiment are the ingredients of brand loyalty. In contrast to moods (but in line with emotions), sentiments are not persistent conscious states but are dormant until aroused by the object of the sentiment. Emotional sentiment ties into emotional memory, in that memories have sentimental content. Every firm catering to the consumer should seek to develop an emotional sentiment for the firm’s brand by fixing it in the consumer’s memory as part of a valued way of life. It is the vestiges of emotional sentiment that allow the successful resurrection of old brand names, such as the revival of the name Buggatti. It is ignorance of the emotional sentiment that can attach to eminent brand names that leads to many such brands being dismissed as worthless assets. The emotion still attached to the name Pan Am is not simply that arising from the Lockerbie air bomb atrocity.
Loyalty is not just a matter of habitually buying the same brand, since all habitual buys are not grounded in trust and sentiment. Yet this combination of trust and sentiment (loyalty) is the best barrier to brand switching by customers, while it facilitates brand extensions and word-of-mouth recommendations. Of course, there may be no loyalty to any particular brand when the various brands in the market are perceived as mere tokens of each other with diferences that are marginal and of no significance to the consumer. This is not to suggest that meaningful diferences will always be confined to the product itself, since things like brand image and distribution can be crucial. In any case, being a loyal customer does not imply just buying the one brand. Brands in diferent segments of the market may be bought simultaneously by the
buyer for diferent use-occasions or for diferent family members. Thus a woman might want a fresh light perfume during the day and a strong sophisticated scent for the evening.