Going beyond metrics to crack customer retention

Improving customer retention benefits businesses – but despite this, few organisations seem to have mastered the art of keeping a customer.

Brands obsess over metrics, tracking clicks, churn rates, and lifetime value; but all of these numbers mean nothing if you don’t understand the humans behind them. Retention is about more than metrics: it’s about exploring who your audience is and what makes them ‘tick’.

Take LEGO, which has harnessed and engaged a wider fanbase of LEGO creators with LEGO Ideas: a micro-site where customers can actively design, share, and vote on new LEGO sets, feeling part of the brand’s creative process and helping Lego define their business strategy. Or Brompton Bicycle (recently profiled on Econsultancy), which hosts its own World Championship within the London Cycle Festival every year for Brompton acolytes to bring their bikes and race around a track.

In a world where we can connect with anyone, anywhere, we somehow understand each other less. How can brands go beyond surface-level data and short-term wins to learn about the wild, wonderful, and occasionally weird world of human motivation?

The building blocks of retention: Keller’s Brand Equity Model

A couple of years ago, I was approached by an agency who had just onboarded a client that they needed some help with. The client sold plants, but the problem was that they weren’t really sure who they were selling the plants to.

This challenge led me to think about when I spent time homeschooling my then-10-year-old son during pandemic lockdowns: I had to learn more about him in order to understand the best way to keep him engaged in education whilst the world was in chaos. We needed to figure some things out when it came to our relationship and what we could offer to each other – mum and son, teacher and student – and the time we spent together helped me to better understand the things that made him want to learn more, not just in the short term, but over the long term.

I wondered whether there was something that might represent the process he and I had gone through to harness his lifetime love of learning; something that would help build customer relationships and loyalty.

Given its depth and practical relevance, Keller’s Brand Equity Model stood out as the strongest framework for translating emotional connections into brand affinity.

Created by Kevin Lane Keller of the Marketing Science Institute in 2001, the model shows how brands can build upwards from a foundation of brand salience towards true resonance with consumers.

Let’s take a look at it. Imagine for a moment that you’re talking to someone new who you know nothing about. You could interpret the model like this:

Identity: Who are you? – Salience

Understanding who this person is so you can find out the sorts of things that will help build a great relationship with them, or conversely, to understand if a relationship is off the cards entirely.

Meaning: What are you? – Performance & Imagery

Now that you know a bit more, will this relationship be a good fit? What can you offer to each other, do your values and more match up? Think social and psychological needs.

Response: What about you? – Judgements & Feelings

You know enough to form an opinion about each other; actions and words start to shape decisions and emotional responses.

Resonance: What about you and me? – Loyalty & Attachment

This is where the magic happens: it’s the distinction between remaining acquaintances or becoming close friends. It’s about deep, mutual connections that result in loyalty and retention.

Now I had a structure to work from, all I needed to do was start at the bottom and work my way to the top.

Identity: understanding customers like an anthropologist

This is the foundation block, and feeds into each tier of the model. To really understand your customers, you need something more than just data reports, spreadsheets and dashboards. You need something more “human”: you need anthropology. This is the study of why we do the things we do and what motivates us to do them.

If you want to dig deeper, you need socio-cultural anthropology. This is about observing people in their natural environments so that you can understand the social dynamics, behaviours, beliefs and customs of a group of people – capturing the messy, beautiful chaos of real life. It allows us to see beyond the data and to understand the humans behind the numbers and their actions.

Sounds wonderful, right? But here are some pros and cons:

• Cost: It can be an expensive endeavour (although potentially not as much as misaligned ad spend or declining customer lifetime value)
• Access: People aren’t always keen on being studied (but you can be discrete)
• Scalability: A few in-depth studies can’t represent everyone (but you can more narrowly target the people you want to be in a relationship with)
• Relevance: Cultures change fast, and your insights can expire before you use them (however, this is applicable to any data or research you use).

This is where a more agile, digital approach can save the day and your budget.

Digital Socio-Cultural Anthropology (D.I.S.C.O)

Digital Socio-Cultural Anthropology is the cooler, faster sibling of traditional anthropology. Instead of chasing customers in the wild, you watch them in their natural digital habitats.

Some of these habitats may include:

• Social communities: as the name implies, these are places where people connect socially.
• Local communities: centred around a specific location.
• Networking communities: these are places focused on professional connections.
• Interest communities: also called fan communities, these are communities for people who share a common interest or passion.
• Communities of action: these are groups formed to focus on campaigns or social change.
• Learning communities: spaces for knowledge exchange.

By joining these types of digital communities, you can uncover valuable insights into customer motivations, values, and behaviours. All you need to do is sit back and observe what you see and identify the information that will help you figure out the road to, in the words of Keller’s Brand Equity Model, resonance.

There are more benefits to D.I.S.C.O, too:

• Scalable: Monitor thousands of customers at once from all over the globe.
• Cost-effective: Online observations are less costly than in person.
• Speed: Real-time insights that you can monitor over longer periods of time.
• Authenticity: See how people actually behave in a digital context, not just what they say they do.

Turning salience into resonance

By using traditional anthropological methods and D.I.S.C.O. to build my foundation of understanding of customers, the remaining tiers of Keller’s Brand Equity Model became much easier to traverse:

• Meaning: I knew what their values, hopes and desires were, not just on a personal level but also what they expected from the brand, its products and digital offering. It helped me to understand how to relate to them and how the brand could remain relatable.
• Response: A good first impression mattered because people judge in an instant. This is why being relatable is so important. It can help trigger positive emotions that make your brand more memorable. Ensuring that my clients’ “first impression” was impeccable was crucial and interactions after that cultivated strong emotional connections.
• Relationships: People are more likely to want a relationship with you (and remain loyal to it) if you align with their lives. You want to build the sort of relationships that result in meaningful or powerful positive responses (attachment, engagement, community and ultimately, loyalty).

And resonance into loyalty…

There is a twist in this tale, however. Loyalty is a two-headed beast – it’s made up of behavioural loyalty (customers keep buying) and emotional loyalty (they actually care). If you want retention, then you have to nail both of these.

It is only when you understand someone well enough to build a relationship with them are you able to keep them happy and understand how to nurture that relationship so the balance of power between the parties involved remains equal. This is the basis of the theory of relational cohesion.

Put simply, positive emotional experiences from frequent interactions help relationships become stable and long-lasting. This is nothing new; we all know this purely from existing in this world. But somehow, we’ve forgotten its importance when it comes to business.

Retention is a people game, not a numbers game

Some might say that my approach to understanding customers is a bit perfectionist, but my fascination with what makes humans tick, along with a genuine interest in the human condition, has paid dividends in helping my clients to truly understand who their customers are and how to keep them for longer.

The work isn’t complicated, but what it does require is curiosity: to take that step back for a minute and remember what the purpose of your work is. I suspect, nine times out of 10, it’ll involve a human at the other end – so why not try to solve probably the biggest puzzle piece in the box?

Real retention requires real research – observing, listening, and understanding – and the cost of great research is nothing compared to the cost of trying to build relationships that don’t resonate.

Retention is a people game, not a numbers game. When you stop just obsessing over clicks and start understanding the humans behind them, I guarantee that many of the business challenges you’re trying to solve will suddenly have a much clearer solution.