Customer Loyalty??

Doing a recent CRM class I started thinking as to whether customer loyalty really does exist or it just one of those jargon that marketeers are so fond of using. Theoretically customer loyalty has been defined as the tendency of a customer to stick to one's brand and not go for another one, even when your favored brand ain't available. However, in today's times when price has become a deciding factor in a lot of product categories and the customer is exposed to a host of choices, the definition seems to be inflexible to define customer loyalty.

I am of the view that customer loyalty exists in the two extremes of customer segments;the lower & upper alone. An example of the lower strata would be the lower middle class in cities as well as rural India & a good chunk of the middling middle class in rural India who bear strong brand loyalty to the convenient store that operates in their village, the brand of soap, toothpaste, oil they use, etc. E.g., during my occasional visits to my hometown in the country side I have seen my relatives insisting on buying their day to day needs from "Kanan's shop" and not "Ramu's shop" which may be just across to the prior one. They are picky about using only Surf for school uniforms and Colgate is regarded as a drug which is the only one of its kind as a cure for bad teeth. Their lack of exposure to a variety of products & their insistence on not opening up to a new range, even when new brands penetrate these hinterlands is what I would safely assume to be a depiction of brand loyalty. However, some marketing gurus have demarcated such behavior as Brand Stickiness.

Coming to the other strata that I mentioned of; the upper crust. I have often noticed that with increasing disposable income, people become more ambitious, more brand conscious & more choosy. A behavior which can be seen to manifest itself in practices as a Mr Mehra going only for Lacoste T-shirts for his Saturday outings or a Mrs Ahuja buying Kurtis only from Meena Bazaar. In fact, ma dad always stuck to Sony when he wanted to purchase a music system (we have gone for a repurchase).

I can't even remain loyal to my girlfriend, where does the question of Brand Loyalty come?!?

The scenario looks quite favorable in India at least where a good part of the population is drifting towards the upper crust where disposable incomes are on a hike despite the current financial turbulence. However, as technological & educational advances take place, most customers would come to a common platform as the existing customer segments would reduce. however, there is a quite a lot of time left for a phenomenon as such when most products would get commoditized & a uniformity would set in as one might have seen in some of those science fiction movies as Equilibrium........etc.