People often ask us what exactly creates emotional loyalty. It’s not a cut-and-dry answer, as there are many facets to evolved relationship building. But there are effective tools we call on to help amplify our efforts, especially in terms of loyalty and gamification, and one of them is moments mapping.
What are moments? It’s a concept that can be best understood by thinking about your own past experiences. Envision the most impactful vacation from your childhood. You probably remember it as a series of snapshots, a mix of highs and lows that are frozen in time in your mind. Those snapshots are moments.
By leveraging core behavioral and psychologic pathways that are vital in how memories are formed, moments flip the script by allowing you to architect an experience that is built for long-lasting impact. Here are a few key reasons why moments can be so impactful in your loyalty, gamification, and promotions strategy.
Moments put the customer first
Every person is the star of their own individual story, but marketers continually struggle to adopt a true ‘customer first’ mindset. To create moments, you need to overcome that barrier and put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What makes them tick? What are their hopes and dreams? What are the different types of moments they experience with your brand, and how can you identify which of those moments should be amplified to have as much impact as possible?
Moments spark emotion
When you think back to the most memorable moments in your life, they probably share some things in common. Maybe it’s a milestone or important achievement or a time when you were surprised and pleased by an outcome you didn’t expect. Or maybe it’s the opposite — a time where something negative happened and wasn’t corrected — and that soured your perspective of an entire experience. Moments are saturated with peaks of emotion and that’s what makes them memorable, and highly effective, when used correctly in building loyalty long term.
Moments create momentum
Moments/Momentum — the duality in these words exists for a reason, as we gauge the passing of time on the moments we experience along the way. It’s one of the reasons why so many people are experiencing a feeling of ‘Groundhog Day’ during the pandemic… without those impactful, memorable transitional milestones — the birthday parties, the holiday celebrations, the fun get-togethers with friends — it seems like every day is the same, and it gets harder and harder to chart progress. Moments can help customers celebrate their path forward with your brand by giving them something to mark the occasion, and that can be an essential key in building true connection.
At their core, moments and mapping offer a highly scalable framework to both create and evolve emotional loyalty and help to spark new connections and strengthen or re-engage existing ones. They’re also a powerful tool in the expanding arsenal of ways that brands can transform their customer experience using both behavioral science and storytelling.