In 1964, University of Texas professor W.T. Tucker ran an experiment with 42 women where he monitored their purchasing patterns for loaves of bread—but with a wrinkle.
The loaves were identically in product and in packaging, save for a brand marker (the letters L, M, P and H) and rotated in placement before each “shopping” session.
Tucker tracked the women across 12 purchases to understand whether brand loyalty developed even with unknown brands, and roughly identical presentation.
His hypotheses:
“Loyalty will grow in an almost completely infertile field, that biased choices will develop even when products are virtually identical and brands names are close to meaningless.”
He was half right.
In the experiment, 21 of 42 women ended up finding a “brand” that they purchased three consecutive times (Tucker’s definition of loyalty).
Tucker mostly focused his conclusions on this fact, but he also explored how long it took the women in the study to become loyal bread buyers. And that’s what we found instructive.
Of all 42 participants, 29 of them tried each bread brand in order during their first four selections. And of the 21 loyal buyers, 7 of them didn’t reach loyalty status until at least their 10th purchase, meaning they trialed other products until at least their seventh purchase.
Tucker, in his discussion of this, concluded “it can undoubtedly be presumed that additional women would have reached the criterion of brand loyalty with further trial.”
Think about that.
As we all figure out what to make of heightened privacy measures and the resulting impact on acquisition efforts, focus will begin to shift to retention. (Side note: Our friends at Malomo invited us to collaborate on this topic with them. You can check it out here.)
The challenge, however, is adjusting to the reality that there is a gap between trial (first purchase) and loyalty (consistent repurchase behavior).
This, of course, runs counter to much of what is being written about loyalty today. Loyal buyers, it’s often written, are a matter of targeting “better customers,” pushing subscription at the time of acquisition, or building a rewards program.
Call us skeptical.
If you accept Tucker’s study, one of the lessons here is that loyalty takes time. But that time is rife with challenges for a brand looking accelerate payback periods or compress LTV, as a new customer is most likely trialing you alongside alternatives.
As a result, perhaps, the quest for better retention and higher loyalty will not so much be in forcing or rewarding loyalty as it is in better understanding where a brand sits in a trial set and how it can simply remain there longer than others.