Financial services customers are returning to trusted brands after a recession characterized by money saving and downtrading – but they now expect to be rewarded for their loyalty as a matter of course.

GfK has analyzed the emotional triggers and rational motivations that help drive customer loyalty and identified four core opportunities for brands to maximize this trend in their businesses:

Customers are going back to brands 60 percent of consumers globally will only buy from trusted brands – up 7 percent since 2011 Still some evidence of brand switching, as consumers look for less expensive known brands (75% of South Koreans agree that it is better to buy well-known brands for quality compared to 42% of UK consumers)

The 4 tenets of loyalty to build the best loyalty scheme Tangibility: customers seek highly tangible rewards Value: customers expect rewards to have currency in their everyday life Relevance: consumers expect the rewards that they are offered to be tailored to them Ease of use: a good rewards scheme should require little or no effort on the part of the consumer Use reward and incentives as a brand differentiator Loyalty won through a differentiated experience is significantly more powerful than loyalty which is “bought” through rewards and incentives Understand how your brand can have the “X factor” by evaluate customers’ experiences of your brand by impression and memorability Use big data to personalize, without getting too personal There’s a very fine line between perfectly targeted incentives and rewards, and getting too close and turning customers off forever 90% of respondents would prefer to do business with a company that respects their privacy 69% find it creepy the way companies use information about them Read the full article, “For love or money” for more findings and analysis.