Differing brand loyalties offline and online..
Netimperative features two interesting stories related to branding online. One of them reports on a study that indicates that Internet users in the UK aren’t really brand loyal and they give very little time before they switch loyalties to an alternative website.
What this means is that while a person may always go shopping with Tesco in the physical world, he couldn’t care less about shopping from another grocery store if the Tesco website did not measure up.
Besides conventional reasons like poor customer service or non-delivery, one of the most important factors that is bound to lead customers away is slow loading time….. hmmm…. we are dealing with an impatient bunch of customers here.
It baffles me why or how brand loyalty does not transfer from one medium to another, but the fact that it does not as much as brand marketers expect is probably why the latter are still not spending as much on the online medium for branding purposes.
Anyway, the ‘fickle’ online customer does offer a vital lesson to the affiliate marketer: while it does make great sense to promote a great, well known brand (the advantages of doing so are fairly obvious), one factor they shouldn’t disount when evaluating merchants is the latter’s website — is it good and is it fast? Experienced affiliates do this instinctively, of course, by watching the conversions, but still there is another strong instinct that might be more powerful- of trusting a powerful brand too much.
Sometimes, the affiliate might be better off promoting a lesser known brand, albeit with a user friendly and fast website that can get the customer from the homepage to check out, and the affiliate to the commision cheque, more quickly.
