allaboutadvocacy.com

Loyal to the death!

OK, full disclosure. I probably have seen Zack Snyder’s “300″ approaching 300 times now (including last night when somehow I got my wife to watch). So I’m likely to jump at the chance to use a pic like this in a post no matter how threadbare the tie to advocacy.

But the Gods must have been smiling upon me this morning when I saw this just published article in the Journal of Marketing called “Are Women More Loyal Customers Than Men? Gender Differences in Loyalty to Firms and Individual Service Providers.” Now while that clearly sounds like it has a lot to do with advocacy, it doesn’t exactly scream “Thermopylae,” the ancient battle site where the Greeks, 300 Spartans and their allies, held off masses of invading Persians in 480 BC. Or does it?

What our present authors have seemed to confirm here is something I’m told is called the “male warrior hypothesis,” which states that men are actually more loyal to groups, an orientation shaped by evolution to increase a tribe’s chances of survival. Well, if the suicidal battle of King Leonidas and 300 Spartans against some 800,000 invaders of Xerxes’ armies isn’t the most epic case of ultimate group loyalty I don’t know what is. Especially when it looks so amazingly cool and vibrant thanks to the magic of CG technology. I don’t know about you, but I know lots of guys who would be OK with this kind of loyalty “hypothesis.”

So what about the other half, all those Xenas out there? Are women not the equivalent of a Lucy Lawless warrior princess when it comes to their customer loyalty? Apparently not, according to the authors, because women’s loyalty tends to take a more personal and less tribal form. More specifically, they found that women are more loyal to individuals as opposed to the collective. This is something of a reversal, as the conventional wisdom has held that women are more loyal customers in general than men. And, therefore, better advocates in turn perhaps.

So who do marketers want on their side? A customer phalanx of men or women? Who is more likely to “die for” their favorite brand or company? The answer not surprisingly is that it all depends. It also may matter whether you consider brand loyalty to be more akin to sticking by an entire group vs. by the side of an individual. On this question the authors are silent (for now). But one thing is for sure. The research is yet another example of how if you simply assume the conventional wisdom about loyalty is right you can get it heroically wrong. Herodotus and Hollywood notwithstanding.