Here at Leapfrogg, we have a panel of more than 900 premium retail consumers that we engage with on a regular basis to help us understand customer needs and expectations.

Every month, we question them on a range of topics from buying behaviours and brand opinions, to emotional purchase triggers and their recent shopping experiences. We then collate the results into a weekly bite-size edit of the insight we gain in our search to truly understand the mind of the premium customer.

This week we are focussing on the elements our panel believe are most important for brand loyalty and what it is that brands or retailers do to make them feel valued as a customer.

Firstly, we asked our panel to think of the brands they are most loyal to and tell us what category of retailer they fall under:

As you can see, the retail categories that have the most loyalty within our panel are those that sell either fashion or multiple products with 30% of the vote each.

One might argue that this is because consumers are likely to purchase multiple times from these categories as fashion is seasonal and multiple product retailers offer a wider range of products.

However, when we dig into male and female responses there are marked differences. Men are far more loyal to clothing brands. This indicates that men tend to find a style they are happy with and are likely to stick to one brand rather than shop around. This highlights how important it is for men’s fashion retailers to deliver a good shopping experience first time round to encourage repeat purchases.

Only 10% of women chose fashion as their most loyal brands and instead chose multiple product retailers (30%). This highlights how women tend to shop around for fashion and how much harder a women’s fashion retailer or brand has to work to retain customers.

We then asked our panel to rate the factors that influence their brand loyalty:

The quality of the product came out as the most important factor with 89% of respondents rating it as very important. Next was customer service with 62% rating it as very important and then price came in 3rd with 59% rating it as very important. An engaging brand was of least importance to our panel, although 39% still rated it as somewhat important.

We then looked the variations on these responses according to gender, age and income.

We noticed that men found customer service slightly less important than women with 60% of men selecting it as somewhat important vs. 60% of women choosing it as very important.
Men were also less focussed on price than women, with only 30% selecting price as very important to them. Combining this with the fact 90% of men stated that the quality of products is very important shows that if brands have good products and can provide a good shopping experience first time – they will gain long term loyalty from male customers.

We found across the board that age and salary showed a similar response pattern and therefore the importance of product, customer service and price tended to be universal across age and salary. Gender was the only factor that affected opinion on brand loyalty.

The key takeaway from this week’s Insight Edit is that if you have both male and female customers – make sure you are catering to their shopping preferences in order to gain their loyalty.

See you next week!