Your customers don’t love your service - they love how your brand makes them feel.

This seems odd - even counterintuitive because many people hate their experience of Ryanair service. However, the brand offers fairness and certainty. Customers of Ryanair are prepared to accept a lower level of customer service than they would expect on other airlines because the airline is honest about the value they offer.

You get what you pay for and there are no surprises. Loyalty is created through trust in the brand - not a love of their service. When Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary started trading personal insults online with Elon Musk because of the cost of the Starlink satellite wi-fi system it just reinforced the reputation of the brand - they don’t hide behind corporate jargon. They tell it as it is.

VW faces challenges today as the auto industry pivots to electric and autonomous vehicles, but the brand has always focused on certainty and fairness. The legacy of vehicles such as the Beetle and the Kombi has created many examples of multi-generational ownership that is hard to identify in other auto brands. It was a global news story when the Kombi was cancelled in 2014.

VW has built a connection with customers that is built on reliability and familiarity. There is a strong sense of fairness and value from the brand that drives repeat purchases over a lifetime.

This is another brand that somehow feels counterintuitive because some shoppers cannot wait to escape from the enormous IKEA stores, but there is a strong argument demonstrating that the SCARF model applies to the Billy bookcase. IKEA products require effort - most require self-assembly - but this creates a reward. The customer builds an emotional investment in their new furniture because they built it themselves. 

There is also a strong sense of certainty - you know exactly what you are getting. IKEA somehow turns greater effort into a greater attachment to a product. It’s reminiscent of the classic story of American cake mixtures only succeeding with consumers once a fresh egg was required - a story that is largely a marketing myth, but has more than a grain of psychological truth.

Just over two decades ago, the Lego Group almost went bankrupt. They had increased debt and extended the brand into clothing and electronic toys. It almost finished the brand, until they got back to basics and focused on why parents and children love Lego. 

Lego encourages creativity. Children feel a sense of their own autonomy as they don’t have a rulebook - they can build anything that is in their imagination. It uses a structured system that always works and therefore reinforces certainty and generates infinite possibilities for play. By focusing on these emotions, Lego has created a multigenerational loyalty. Parents remember Lego and buy it for their own children.

In all these examples, there is a focus on the emotional stickiness of the brand. Customers feel an emotional connection to these brands. It’s easy to argue that customers are not choosing these brands because of efficient customer service processes, but this diminishes the need for a positive customer experience. Customers can easily be lost to alternatives if they have a negative experience with a company - even one they previously loved.

Whether you are already a brand that is loved - or it is your ambition to achieve this status - it remains important to plan for a positive experience when customers interact with your company. You need to plan for personalization, where the human touch remains essential, and how to align your service with the overall impression customers have of your brand. It can be a challenge to create truly emotionally engaged customers, but once you have them, poor customer service design can quickly lose them.