Unraveling Loyalty

Loyalty is of great importance in any enduring personal and social relationship. It is also equally important in businesses, and that includes hotel business too, though loyalty in business differs in nature and practice than the loyalty exercised in personal and social relationships. But for some special types of service sectors like the hotel industry, an element of personalised touch to professionalism always gives an edge. Therefore the issue of loyalty should be viewed holistically for the hotel industry at large, if it wants to thrive despite its numerous bottlenecks and impediments.

Can we define loyalty? Or can we describe loyalty? The views become quite scattered, as we move from conventional to modern thinking. As individuals, family, society or nation, are we loyalists? Can we put that on a metric and say "thou is more loyal than thee?" Is there a plastic card or something else that implies loyalty exists? Nobody is comfortable seeking answers to such questions, though collectively we believe there is something abstract that binds most of us together. Probably, we can pass that off as loyalty.

However, that is about loyalty in personal or social relationship. Loyalty in business has a vastly different connotation than loyalty in personal and social relationships. "What's in it for me" is the basis on which the business relationships are anchored and therefore both, the brand and the customer, exhibit tendencies to extract most out of each other. The brand wants more spend (wallet share), while the customer wants more conveniences in the form of discounts, redemptions, etc.

In business lexicon, loyalty means doing more business with your customers. It means to induce customers to buy more, as often as you feel they need to. The more the customer purchases, the more loyalty the customer reflects towards your brand or service is the universal understanding in the corporate world. The question is how mutual loyalty can be established in any business transaction, which not only benefits the individual parties, but also the business in general.

Some Relevant Examples

Take the example of a housekeeper at home who gets her quota of milk daily at her doorstep. There are three distinct parts to the activity time of delivery, cost of the product, and quality of the product. As a buyer, she may habitually comment on the quality of the product to the delivery boy, but that is only an indication of her being in control of the relationship.