Loyalty and Choice

When are you loyal to a brand?
When you have enough alternatives to choose from and you still stick to it!

Such a basic idea - lets see whether it holds good in some other spheres:
1) You are loyal to your company when you have enough choices to leave - but you still remain
2) You are loyal to your country, when you have enough choices and still you remain

So what drives the brand loyalty?

Brand Loyalty Defined

”You learn that creating customer loyalty is neither strategic nor tactic;
rather, it is the ultimate objective and meaning of brand equity. Brand loyalty is brand equity.” Daryl Travis, Emotional Branding
So, what constitutes brand loyalty? According to Bloemer and Kasper, brand loyalty implies that consumers bind themselves to products or services as a result of a deep-seated commitment.
To exemplify this point, they rendered a distinction between repeat purchases and actual brand loyalty. In their published research, they assert that a repeat purchase behavior "is the actual re-buying of a brand” whereas loyalty includes "antecedents” or a reason/fact occurring before the behavior. Bloemer and Kasper further delineate brand loyalty into "spurious” and "true” loyalty. Spurious loyalty exhibits the following attributes:

Biased ; Behavioral response; Expressed over time; By some decision-making unit, with respect to one or more alternate brands; A function of inertia .

True brand loyalty includes the above, but replaces inertia with a psychological process resulting in brand commitment (Ref: Journal of Economic Psychology, Volume 16, Issue 2, July 1995).

So are you loyal to your company/country?

Mob: Is anonymity the pillar for it?

Mob, why is it so dangerous?
Is it because it brings the dark side out of the otherwise pleasant human beings.
But how come the beings with a hidden dark side manage to be pleasant outside the mob?
The very person with whom you had a meaningful conversation over a tea at your own home - does not think twice before breaking your bones once in a mob.

What gives mob this enormous team power? Why is an innocent bystander lynched, a woman molested, a thief killed by the mob? What clouds the individual rational behaviour? Why at work our teams don't have the single mindedness of a mob?

I think what gives mob its power is Anonymity!!
Take a deep breath - and now think:
What are the top three things you will do if you woke up from sleep and found yourself invisible? What are your darkest desires?

Once there is anonymity, there is no more social policing left. You are left with just you - no other social obligations to worry for. Have you ever logged into the web under a pseudonym? What keeps you in check is just you, your discipline and values.

Mob is like logging into this world with an anonymous account - and it brings out for all to see what we are deep inside.

So how to control this mob? Is there a way to break the anonymity? Is there a way to break the trance and make an individual think? Lets try it out the next time - by NOT addressing the mob, but the individuals inside it! Lets see it we are able to break the trance - and get the people back to rational state.

Haven't heard the birds of late

Wow, It has been a month since I'm at XLRI !!
The learning curve has been quite steep, the topics have been new, the discussions exciting.

I still remember the initial days - how I loved the greenery, the view of the distant hills, the tall trees with intricate arrangement of leaves. I had the patience to take snaps, to soak in the atmosphere, enjoy the tea, seek out company. It wasn't so long way back in past that birds had called out, a robin darted about, there was a hill myna up in the tree, and was there a snake up there as well?

Now, I don't hear the birds anymore.
They must be still there, its just that I'm preoccupied with my lessons. Learning is the REASON why I'm here, but I guess I will give the birds a chance to be heard as well.