How to build passion into your brand for increased customer loyalty

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There’s nothing more powerful for driving customer loyalty than being able to identify and nurture a shared passion with your audience. Speaking directly to that passion and forming a brand that resonates won’t just attract customers – it will create fans. And more increasingly, businesses are realising the true potential of building a community around their brand, establishing loyalty and deep connections with their core audience. But how do you tap into this passion and capture the imagination of your audience in the first place?

Understanding what makes your customers tick

When focussing on the rise and fall of social media in 2020, Disciple Media’s Passion Index Report found that 50% of Britons would join a new social platform or app dedicated to one of their passions – and this is while Edelman reported that global trust in social media was down three points year-on-year on a nine-point scale. This goes to show that passion is hard currency. Just as we discussed how the pandemic has created a behavioural shift that is resulting in consumers turning to brands with real purpose, businesses that can recognise consumer passion and use it to cultivate a real sense of belonging with their brand will be well on their way to driving long-term engagement and loyalty. However, in order to feed your audience’s passion, you first need to understand exactly what their passion is and where it stems from. There are a number of ways you can do this, but they all relate to one fundamental ideal – listening to your audience. Whether you turn to social listening tools, analyse market trends or speak directly to your customers to understand what drives their passion, listening and understanding will be the key to uncovering this. When you know what makes your customers tick and you can align your brand’s passion with this, you can use it to forge deeper connections and drive increased customer loyalty.

Lying the right brand foundations

Once you understand the passion that drives your customers, it’s time to build a brand with passion that will speak directly to them. At Keel London, we have a tried and tested methodology that helps companies develop their brand in a way that will connect with their audience and unlock that same sense of shared passion. We start by focussing on three things – what your brand believes in, what makes your brand different and your brand’s character and tone. These form the very essence of your brand identity that will not just attract customers but will create loyal fans.

And what do fans become? When fans come together, they become a community. The power of building a community around a brand has become more and more prevalent in recent times. One of the best examples of a business that has developed strong passion brand foundations and utilised the power of community, is Gymshark – building a $1.3 Billion business by combining influencers and a pool of great content to feed their audiences passion for health and fitness. Getting this initial phase of your brand identity right is the key to creating fans and building a community around your company.

Creating content that resonates

Nowadays, consumers want personalised experiences more than ever. And there’s nothing more personal than striking at the very heart of someone’s passion. But once you’ve got that passion in your sights, how do you keep feeding it? Being able to provide tailored content that speaks to that passion and offers real value is a great way for brands to form and build communities for successful personalisation. And with Gartner showing that 88% of people globally report not receiving this tailored help, there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to start to cater to this desire. As mentioned earlier, Gymshark has done a fantastic job of drawing people into their community and speaking directly to their passion using their Gymshark Central blog as a hub. A constant stream of articles that include tips, tutorials, and exercises mean that the blog is packed full of useful health and fitness information that their members keep coming back to.

And aside from creating useful and valuable content to feed your audience, being authentic with what you produce is another way to draw people in via their passion. Take the work we produced for Lynx – a snowmobile producer that was founded in 1967 in Kurikka, Finland. As the company was getting lost in a crowded marketplace, we took the time to immerse ourselves in the brand by venturing to the depths of northern Finland to understand the true spirit of Lynx. Having taken the company through our process and successfully repositioning their brand to speak directly to the passion of what we coined their ‘tribe’, we developed a content purpose and strategy that was truly authentic and used the fierce passion of their audience to build stronger relationships and further strengthen that brand loyalty.

Always staying true to your passion

Just as we highlighted with brand purpose, the most important thing with passion is to remain authentic and never veer from what your brand believes in. Just as your brand purpose is your reason for being, your passion is your company’s beating heart. And just as a disingenuous purpose can result in major damage to your brand’s reputation – an engineered sense of passion will never generate the loyalty and trust that true passion will.

Your checklist for harnessing brand passion

Listen to your audience to understand more about their passions
Develop the right foundations for your brand to feed those passions
Rather than trying to attract customers, think about creating fans
Utilise the power of community
Create content that is useful or authentic and speaks directly to your audience’s passion
Be true to your brand’s passion and never let it falter

If you want to understand how you can develop your brand and harness the power of a shared passion with your audience for increased loyalty, speak to us today.