Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotesYour “most loyal customer” may simply be extremely keen on the category and seeing several other brands behind your back.
Coffee makes the infidelity obvious. The daily buyer uses the office machine, the convenient chain, the independent place and whatever is open near the station. A team can live inside collaboration software while conducting affairs with email, chat and shared documents. Frequent travellers collect points with sincere enthusiasm and abandon the airline when another departure is two hours better.
High consumption creates more occasions to choose you—and more occasions to choose everybody else. Yet marketers look at volume, feel loved and begin writing relationship copy. The customer bought six times. Nobody exchanged vows.
This mistake is commercially expensive because heavy category buyers are often highly aware of alternatives and practised at switching. Their frequency proves the category matters. It does not explain why the brand won Tuesday morning.
Study share of occasions instead. Which situations bring the buyer to us? When do they defect, and what was the other option better at in that moment—availability, price, habit, route, format? Growth may require fewer poems about loyalty and more chances to be noticed and bought.
By all means reward genuine loyalty. Just do not infer monogamy from appetite.