As I was reading my classmates’ blogs, I came across one from May Zhou about brand loyalty that I found interesting. In her post she mentioned that a study has showed that “a meager 3% of consumers surveyed in this age group [of 25 – 49] said they’re loyal to a particular brand”, which shows that there is a trend of diminishing brand loyalty. One reason for this is that consumers now have access to resources online and that they are willing to put time and effort to research for the products before they buy them.
I agree and I say that it depends on the type of products. Brand loyalty still applies to convenience goods and sometimes speciality goods. When we are looking for detergent in the supermarket, we would usually go for the brand we usually buy. For speciality goods, I can relate to this because I am one of those consumers that would research for weeks or months before I decide to buy an expensive and durable product such as a laptop or mobile phone. Before I bought my laptop, I began researching with Apple’s Macbook Pro and researched on from that point. In the end I still bought from Apple after looking at other brands like Sony, Fujitsu… Therefore, the level of brand loyalty still exists in that I trusted Apple for their high quality products. So I don’t see that brand loyalty is slowly diminishing when it comes to expensive products since consumers want to minimize as much risks as possible.
On another note, I see that the trend that consumers are spending more time on research is beneficial to companies in terms of the flow of information – consumers get information about the product while companies gather opinions and feedbacks which helps to generate new ideas for their products or helps to discover a new market segment.