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Focus groups have a series of commonly known shortcomings that are generally accepted as a worthwhile trade-off in order to get really detailed qualitative feedback from a user group. But the core challenge is this People don’t say what they’re thinking / feeling. People don’t make purchase decisions using executive function – they feel their way into a buy. People can’t be trusted far, and even if they could be, they wouldn’t be able to explain what they’re feeling or how they’ll act in the future....

Having a brand as a front to the customer has some convoluted benefits rooted in people simply not caring in the slightest about the brand. Regular humans are far too busy with their regular human lives to pay much attention to your brand, and they’re definitely not emotionally invested in it. They may feel a slight warmth or comfort from it, at maybe 2% of their full emotional capacity in that direction....

The most effective way to run a loyalty campaign to generate strong business growth might well be to target communication that’s designed to woo existing customers towards the mass market – acquisition goes smoother when people expect great treatment and experiences as a customer.

If customers are loyal, it’s for mechanical reasons – contractual lock-in, unique features, extreme switching costs. Customers don’t care about brands – they care about their family and friends, maybe their career, and sometimes where the next meal is going to come from – not brands. Build a market share so extreme there’s nowhere else to go, and you’ve got loyalty on lock.

In marketing, it’s difficult to grasp the scale of things, and once you grasp the scale it’s difficult to know where to aim. It’s possible to build a life long business around 1000 true fans as originally outlined by Kevin Kelly – but it’d be completely impossible to build a business with any reasonable economies of scale at that size, and businesses like Coca Cola count their users in the billions – and they’re still aiming for more....