Are you at the top of your customers’ minds when they need something? Learn why earning a share of their heart, their love and trust, is a crucial step toward growth
Share of Heart is not a score, it’s a status. It’s a goal that brands follow to focus on people, as opposed to focusing solely on ROI or the bottom line. It’s about recognizing that people have intrinsic value that goes beyond just sales numbers and building a business and brand strategy that treats them accordingly.
Considerations about customer trust and loyalty are more important than ever. According to an Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, 81% of consumers say they must be able to trust a brand to do what is right when considering whether or not to make a purchase. And while not new, the concept of brand love has been documented and popularized by leading business sources such as Harvard Business Review.
The ExperienceBuilt Group believes that Share of Heart is a crucial concept in order for brands to build trust, create loyalty and reach their long-term business goals. Here’s what you need to know to start focusing on Share of Heart.
Share of Heart: ExperienceBuilt™ brands redefine loyalty
The ExperienceBuilt Group believes that brands need to become ExperienceBuilt to increase brand value and create more loyal customer relationships. ExperienceBuilt brands focus on creating Share of Heart with their customers, which requires an emphasis on long-term affinity rather than short-term sales.
Our Key Experience Indicators™ (KEIs) help brands humanize their approach to research, allowing them to capture emotional reactions to experiences as feedback data. Unfortunately, traditional performance indicators like Net Promoter Score (NPS) don’t provide this level of emotional nuance and actionable information for brands.
The leading KEI to focus on is Share of Heart. This is monitored by assessing brand perceptions with a broad range of customers. The ExperienceBuilt Group takes a brand’s “heartbeat” based on our LIVE 8 experience design principles and uses the results to help organizations become ExperienceBuilt brands that stand out from competitors.
Achieving the Share of Heart status is no small feat, but it’s vital for building customer relationships in today’s overwhelming media landscape.
Why Share of Heart is important
So why does the Share of Heart concept work for brands? Because people today are inundated with many kinds of marketing from brands competing for their attention.
Share of Heart is a mental shortcut. It allows brands to cut through that onslaught of choice and consumers to go with who we trust first — often without even giving it a second thought.
How do you measure that? For a start, earning Share of Heart means not just focusing on sales dollars. Share of Wallet just isn’t enough because, believe it or not, dollars aren’t an accurate indicator of loyalty. What is? Repeated attention and actually loving a brand.
Think of brands like people. Who do we want to spend our time with? Which relationships do we prioritize? We are attracted to authentic individuals who make us feel comfortable and who we know we can trust to do the right thing. We choose to spend our time with those people and with those brands.
There’s science behind earning Share of Heart. As humans, we can only have so many meaningful relationships. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, came up with the Dunbar Number concept, which follows that we only have the capacity to maintain approximately 150 meaningful relationships at a time and still be comfortable.
Not every brand relationship is going to be meaningful. As a brand, winning Share of Heart status means that you have won over that meaningful status with a customer. And this doesn’t just apply to brands — you’re also competing for Share of Heart with people’s personal relationships and possessions. This requires building a high level of trust.
Share of Heart isn’t a score you earn by attracting and keeping customers. Share of Heart is a status. Brands who have it are the go-to brands for a customer. We have their app on our phones, their sticker on our laptop or car, we proudly wear their gimme caps or carry their branded coffee tumblers.
These are “always” brands that people turn to automatically every time, whereas “maybe” brands must put more effort into enticing customers to choose them — they aren’t their first go-to. And of course, “never” brands haven’t mastered Share of Heart, and customers don’t think of them when they need a solution to a problem.
Your goal is to be an “always” brand. You want to create stellar customer experiences so you’re always the go-to solution for those customers.
You do that by being part of your customers’ brand inventory, the internal list they reference first when they have a need. Awareness isn’t enough — you need to be part of their toolkit when they’re looking for a solution.
Brand inventories go beyond the sales funnel concept. Instead of thinking as a customer’s purchase as a journey or a loop, focus on the real individual human relationships you can build with your people.
You can’t hurry love — it takes time and consistency
Earning Share of Heart can’t be forced. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking person-to-person or person-to-brand. Love and trusting relationships can’t be forced. We tend to look for brands that believe what we believe. You can easily identify brands that you admire, those who can be proud to support. But can you always say why you have those feelings? Probably not.
Just like falling in love, you can’t always pinpoint the moment or the reason that it happens in the first place. The same is true for Share of Heart — you’ll know it once it happens, but you don’t always see or understand the process.
Earning Share of Heart calls for brands to gain and keep the attention of customers. Share of Heart means people actually love and care about your brand. They’re not just spending money on your services — your brand actually causes emotional reactions within them. Because they’re driven by emotion, they care about these experiences even more than they care about cost. That’s what is meant when we refer to the “experience economy” brands are now dealing with.
It takes a group effort across an organization to obtain and maintain Share of Heart. Remember that every single detail matters — everything communicates. Everything your brand does should align with your values and efforts toward earning Share of Heart.
These meaningful brand relationships are few and far between for the modern consumer. That’s why mastering the Share of Heart concept will help you create more loyalty and brand trust. Your brand will be a refreshing departure for your audience when faced with so many companies who only care about their wallets.
People will consider what they love when they’re looking to support a brand or make a purchase. When they love a brand, people are triggered to purchase from that brand when they need something. You want your brand to be in that love space, that share of their heart.
The LIVE 8 principles from The ExperienceBuilt Group will help you focus on earning Share of Heart from your customers. Become an ExperienceBuilt™ brand by redesigning your customer experiences to build greater trust, loyalty and satisfaction.
Remember that your customers are more than just sales numbers. Foster real human connections with better brand experiences, and you’ll earn a place among the brands they consider a part of their lives, their families and their futures. That’s the real benefit when you have a Share of Heart.