ADOTAS – Some brands can simply do no wrong. Their consumers trust the quality of their products and even trust their opinion as trust agents. They want to preserve their brand loyalty and use this loyalty to maximize ROI. This is because companies are aware that most successful brands rely on returning customers to drive profit. This is why they make products that are of the quality their customers expect or provide some other need their customers are looking for.
Take Ross, for example. The clothing chain makes low-end clothes aimed at a lower-class target demographic. Some of their dress pants are designed to make the wearer cool, which is perfect for service-oriented roles that require formal attire, like security guards and hotel workers. Workers who move around a lot do not want to be wearing stuffy cotton slacks all day. Similarly, their dress shoes often have treads, so they can grip the pavement well.
Building good products first
This meets the customers’ needs by providing a product they will like after they buy it (this applies to services too). But more importantly, Ross hits their customers’ price point, which may be a bigger need than the aforementioned product design decisions. Ross promises that customers can “Dress for less,” not that they can be the most fashionable people in town. When people come into their store and see that they can buy a pair of slacks for $15, when the cheapest pair at the chain store down the street is $50, they think, “Gee golly, I saved a lot of money!”
Your business will be successful if your products and services meet your customers’ expectations. If they are expecting an inexpensive item, then you should focus on making it inexpensive instead of high-quality, and if they expect a high-quality item then you should focus on making it well instead of making it cheap. Of course, even customers with less money have some desire for quality even if it is not as high as wealthier customers’ desire. And for some products they will want the quality to be higher, since durability is important. They don’t have to buy a new one each time it breaks if the one they bought is durable.
Going the extra mile
People will love you if you make good products, but even then you need to reconnect with them. Traditional ways of connecting with customers no longer work as well, because they are less targeted and less engaging. Even if they connect with a personal story, they do not connect with the customer on a personal level like Facebook and other social media. As a result, a lot of PR departments in bigger companies are running the social media arm of the companies’ outreach efforts instead of the marketing departments.
Ross’s Facebook page is full of engagement between the brand and its fans. The Ross social media manager constantly creates great content that allows the business to reconnect with its fans and build a continuous brand presence. Even though Ross sells most of its clothes in its stores, it can still keep itself in its customers’ minds by reconnecting with them on Facebook by providing content that they like and building conversations around those contents.