I don’t know about you, but there are brands I deliberately avoid. In this world of perpetual distraction, loyalty is a much talked about subject, but disloyalty rarely gets the airtime it deserves. This is a problem. Loyalty is often transactional in nature. Only few brands manage to create true advocacy among their customers. Advocacy requires the customer to proactively associate with a brand’s reason for being, and few companies achieve that at scale. Anti-loyalty is much more easily generated, typically highly emotional and very detrimental to business.

Many people believe loyalty is about capturing repeat transactional behaviours, but this perspective is flawed. During my Honours Bachelor back in university, I researched the motivations triggering loyalty program participation. We like to build habits to simplify everyday life, but that’s only the surface.

Most loyalists, we found, look to achieve one specific emotional goal: They are either maximisers that enjoy the goal progression to a reward, or social caregivers that look to maximise contributions to their family or group. While not exhaustive, these motivations show that loyalty is a very personal subject. It explains why many people passionately hate certain brands they’ve had a bad interaction with, but few put the same energy and emotion into the names they habitually purchase.

This matters greatly in a world where most of us have very little control over the things people say about us. Anybody can voice their opinion online, give ratings and reviews, endorse us and promote their views around what we do, whether we like it or not. This means we are well-advised to give people as little incentive as possible to emotionally condemn our work and business. But how? Ironically enough it comes back to purpose.

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Those with the genuine purpose to build towards a better world need not worry so much about transactional loyalty, because they are the candidates most likely to benefit from genuine advocacy. Companies and people focused on transactional loyalty must perpetually find ways to hack our decision-making so we build habits around their products. Financial or product incentives are the weapon of choice here, and with enough coupons and discounts in the mix we start to believe that loyalty to Product X is a good way of satisfying our deeper and less obvious needs. Except this does not work for everyone.

Hardly any of the loyalty programmes currently out there are properly designed around the personal emotional needs we seek to satisfy through brand loyalty. Transactional approaches get the job done, but miss the point. The transactional and faceless approach to customer interaction and loyalty looks nice in theory, but is spectacularly misguided.

As many have argued, we think of brands and companies just like people. This is precisely why we are best advised to build relationships with customers beyond a chain of transactions. Put simply, the anti-loyalist feels offended by the anonymity and sterility involved in having to deal with companies that are incapable or reluctant to cater to their needs, and dissociates him- or herself from those brands through a hostile attitude.

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Interestingly, the troves of passive loyalists many companies have acquired through their programmes over the years are very likely to be influenced by Anti-Loyalists. Loyalists see brands just like ants living in symbiosis with acacia trees – they stick around in exchange for regular doses of nectar. There’s little passion involved in their behaviour, and the trust they have in the brand is transactional in nature. This means Anti-Loyalists are potent predators to many businesses.

This is true even for brands with high NPS. NPS approximates whether someone would recommend Brand X when prompted, but has almost nothing to say about the significance that person attaches to the product, service or company. Few brands have a solid count of true ambassadors among their loyalty base that passionately advocates for what they do. The ones that have achieved it, quite logically, are iconic household names.

All of this means two things: First, companies that are transactional and nondescript in their approach to customers, and visibly lacking purpose in their business, will have a hard time remaining relevant in future. Second, investing in true purpose and a relationship-focused strategy for customer engagement is more satisfying and rewarding for everyone involved.

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This article previously appeared on LinkedIn

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