Speaker, author, researcher James Kane gave an inspiring and extremely interesting presentation on the psychology and neuroscience behind loyalty. His presentation was entertaining and his recommendation to generate customer and employee loyalty was three-fold: create a sense of trust, create a sense of belonging and create a sense of purpose.

James talked about our human nature to be social beings, with much of our attitudes and outlooks on life driven in the context of our relationships with others. This was an extremely interesting point, which he drove home with the following observations:

• Our brains look for patterns, for things that we can trust/understand.
• Loyalty isn’t subservience or satisfaction and people aren’t loyal to a brand. Instead, people are loyal to the people or the product/service that represents the brand.
• Loyal vs. Satisfied: Dogs are loyal, cats are satisfied. Most of your customers are cats.
• Satisfaction is a mood, where loyalty is a behavior. Satisfaction is about the past, loyalty is about the future. Satisfaction is what you do for them, loyalty is what they do for you.
• People become loyal if a product or service makes their lives safer, easier or better.
• We don’t judge experiences by outcome, we judge by process.

Outside of loyalty, James categorized people (customers, employees) into three categories: hostile, transactional and predisposed. Here is how he qualified them:

• Hostile people tend to be the loudest because they want others to sympathize or validate their experiences.
• Transactional simply pay for a product or service and get what they paid for and move on.
• Predisposed people are those who have a set of expectations and will be happy until the relationship changes.