The Secret to Growing Brand Loyalty––Learn How Customers Feel

Marc Whitehead isn’t a therapist, but he spends his life helping companies grow their businesses by listening to how their customers are feeling.

“As much as 95% of purchase decisions are made subconsciously,” Whitehead said. “They are actually led by emotions and then rationalized after the fact.”

Whitehead is the the CEO and Co-founder of Emotive Technologies based in Toronto, Canada. During HighRock’s Momentum marketing workshop, he encouraged the crowd to listen to their customers and clients with an “emotional ear.”

“If you want to understand the behaviors of your customers, you need to move beyond the actual behaviors and move upstream and understand what are the attitudes that actually inform and influence those behaviors,” Whitehead said.

Whitehead helped develop the Apex Scoring System, a proprietary technology that measures how customers feel about a brand.

“It's good to understand what engagement looks like at a moment in time, but it's better to measure it time after time so you can understand the impact of the actions you take to improve it.”

He said building brand loyalty can pay off in many ways because the most engaged audiences:

• Spend six times more time on branded web and social properties
• Click on nine times more brand advertisements
• Spend 76 times more on advertised products and services online
• Are six times more likely to increase their monthly in-store purchase

Whitehead said companies need to show what purpose they play in customers’ lives because the “what they buy from you can and often is trumped by the why. The why is more human.”

Whitehead previously launched products for Apple and Miele and developed national ad campaigns for Fairmont Hotels and Celestial Seasons teas.

HighRock is organizing another Momentum marketing workshop in August as well as its annual Elevate Marketing Summit in November.