This Lecture Got Me Thinking, Which Brand Would I Defend?
The concept of brand loyalty has always intrigued me.
How does Apple manage to retain such a high customer retention rate despite not making any life-changing modifications to their products? How did Elon Musk build Tesla without traditional advertising? Why do customers willingly declare their allegiance to a brand?
I explored these questions and more during my three-week Leadership in the Business World program on the Wharton School’s campus in summer 2024. Each week the LBW students joined forces with a few other on-campus high school programs to attend the Wharton Global Youth cross-program lecture series. These hour-long lectures by Wharton School professors introduced us to totally new areas of business and research from what we were studying in our own programs – everything from the economics behind immigration to how pharmaceutical companies make decisions about flu vaccine production.
Americus Reed, a Wharton marketing professor (pictured above), was one of the most energetic lecturers in this series, engaging us with questions and presenting his research and insights with incredible passion.
Dr. Reed’s lesson left me with much more nuance to my understanding of brand loyalty. Here are three takeaways I learned from his talk:
Identity and loyalty. What’s the difference between good branding and great branding? While good branding may offer businesses a competitive edge in terms of connecting to customers, great branding focuses on a customer’s internalization of the brand, suggested Dr. Reed. Successful branding isn’t only measured in repeat purchases, as this can be driven by different factors. Instead, successful branding creates something that customers can derive value from. For example, when you can express your interests and beliefs through a brand, you build a more powerful brand connection. This process of internalization and value creation, Professor Reed argued, drives loyalty and helps people make the connection between their own identity and the brand. The concept of identity loyalty is when customers perceive a brand as an integral part of their identity.
Deep psychological connection. How do companies get customers to internalize a brand? Ted Talk speaker Simon Sinek once said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” The way Professor Reed explained this is that customers are inherently irrational when it comes to brand loyalty. If a company works intentionally to represent the customer through its brand messaging, the customer will psychologically buy into the idea that they are a representation of the brand. At this point, customers choose to align themselves with brands that affirm their beliefs and reflect their lifestyles. For example, the Gatorade brand’s emphasis on athleticism and health appeals to athletes who strive for fitness and have a competitive spirit.
Alignment pays dividends. According to Professor Reed, this essential alignment between brands and customer values results in three distinct behaviors:
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- Customers voluntarily become brand ambassadors and seek ways to represent the brand.
- Customers are willing to and do pay more for products and services despite the availability of more affordable options.
- Customers vehemently defend the brand. When customers truly believe that they are a representation of the brand and the brand is a representation of their identity, they feel the intrinsic need to protect the brand image.
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Professor Reed’s lesson got me thinking about the examples of brand loyalty that exist in my everyday life. I applied what I had learned to my dad’s relationship to Patagonia, a retail company dedicated to outdoor clothing and equipment.
As a passionate advocate for environmental sustainability, my dad strongly aligns with Patagonia’s mission to protect the planet through its business model. Whether it is investing in the Worn Wear program (exchanging your own worn clothing for credit to buy other used Patagonia products) or supporting the company’s donations to the natural environment, he feels deeply represented and engaged in the cause as a customer. The sense of contentment he derives from Patagonia’s values and practices drives his loyalty to their products, even at the expense of lower-priced alternatives.
My dad’s long-time relationship with Patagonia shows how customers express loyalty to brands that foster a personal bond with them. I see more clearly how our values subconsciously influence our behavior as consumers. And from the business side, how it is crucial for companies to position themselves well in the eyes of their customers. And in fact, even Dr. Reed has highlighted Patagonia as a masterclass in how a brand’s identity can inspire loyalty and advocacy when it is built on authenticity, purpose, and shared values. I wouldn’t call myself an ambassador for any one brand just yet…but after my time at Wharton, I am much more of an informed consumer.
You can listen to Dr. Reed’s full Wharton Global Youth lecture on our YouTube channel.
Sophia W., 17, is a high school senior at Shanghai American School in China. She attended Wharton Global Youth’s Leadership in the Business World program in the summer of 2024.
Hero photo image was shot by Melissa Kelly.
Conversation Starters
Sophia’s dad is loyal to Patagonia. Considering what you’ve learned from Professor Reed’s lecture, for which brand are you an ambassador? Share your story in the comment section of this article.
Using the link provided in the article, listen to and watch Dr. Reed’s full lecture on brand identity and loyalty. What are four important observations you take away from his talk — related to business, higher education, a professor’s teaching style, or anything!
What ideas, if any, would you challenge from this lecture? Share your thoughts and explain your push-back.
Brand loyalty isn’t just about products. It’s about identity. Apple and Tesla don’t sell products; they sell a lifestyle people want to attach themselves to, even if the product barely changes. You see it with Apple vs. Samsung. Apple users are notoriously defensive, almost like their phone choice says something about who they are.
Sophia’s dad connects with Patagonia because it lines up with what he values. For me, it’s Old Navy. It’s affordable, consistent, and it works with my style. Professor Reed was spot on. Loyalty works because brands tap into how we see ourselves. That’s powerful, but also a reason to stay sharp. Are you a customer or a billboard?
Hey sophia!,
I can definitely relate and confirm with you a dads love for patagonia. My dad has been rocking the same black-grey colorway patagonia fleece that my older sister has gifted him from four Christmases ago. He claims it’s the only thing he needs to survive the New York winter, a classic case of brand loyalty.
Jokes aside, while reading your article I couldn’t help but continue to think of situations where Dr.Reed’s lessons don’t seem to apply. Bold, I know, but hear me out. I agree that a brand’s success can stem from expressing their interests and beliefs but that’s not always the case.
Take Kanye West, for example, a headline for controversy, who continues to be the pioneer of the $3 billion brand, Yeezy. Despite being constantly surrounded by controversy, he built a “successful” brand.
Back in February of this year, Kanye’s X account was deactivated after he posted a thread of anti semitic posts that drew major public backlash. Just a day later, his website, Yeezy.com, listed a T-Shirt featuring a swastika, ultimately leading the site to be shut down for violating Shopify’s terms of service. His offensive designs and statements coinciding with admiration for Adolf Hitler have also caused major brand collaborations to collapse, most notably Adidas. So if we were to apply what Professor Reed suggested as the formula to “great branding,” it raises a question: Are Kanye’s beliefs what drives the strong connections with his loyal buyers, or is it the perceived value of the product itself that continues to sustain Yeezy’s popularity?
Yeezy’s products continue to sell out and dominate the resale market with “SOLD OUT” banners in capital letters that spread across the Yeezy website, suggesting that Yeezy remains culturally and fashionably relevant. Kanye’s case, though complicated and uncomfortable, is one that is significant to consider for challenging the traditional ideas of branding and consumer behavior that Dr. Reed teaches.
Sophia, you also include Simon Sinek’s beliefs that customers align themselves with brands that affirm their beliefs but I’d argue that this thinking is overly idealized and often comes from a privileged perspective that fails to account for the countless other economic factors that affect decision making especially for brands that make basic necessities like clothes. Shein and Zara are just two very successful brands that continue to thrive despite the criticism they receive for exploitative production models. While customers might want to align their beliefs with the brands they buy from in practice, affordability often outweighs ideology. So it’s not because people align with fast fashion practices but because this is the most accessible form of clothing for many low-income families. For them fast fashion isn’t a political choice but a financial constraint. The reality of our world complicates Sinek’s narrow view on branding for the wide segment of consumers where functionality and price override beliefs.
Most people go to Starbucks for coffee. I go for the Strawberry Açaí.
Every morning, my dad stops at Starbucks to pick up my mom’s cappuccino, and he brings back my refresher too. And while it might surprise you to learn that Açaí has caffeine, my allegiance to Starbucks isn’t really about the caffeine. It’s about sitting at the kitchen table with something sweet and cold in hand, the sunlight coming in, the house still waking up. As we cradle our cups, the simple act of sipping our favorite drinks invites us to a place where the world fades, and we are able to pause, savoring the present.
Sophia W.’s article about Dr. Americus Reed’s lecture helped me understand why Starbucks means more to me than just a drink. Dr. Reed explains that brand loyalty forms when we internalize a brand’s identity—when it reflects who we are or how we want to feel. More than an integral part of my daily routine, Starbucks represents solace in the shared experience, familial bonding, warmth (ironic, given my cold drink) and connection.
I’ve had friends tease me when I express my love of Starbucks: “That’s not even coffee.” But I’d defend my pink drink any day—not because of what’s in it, but because of what it stands for. For me, Starbucks is about how my family cares for each other. It’s how I’ve come to care for myself. And in that small, everyday way, it’s how Starbucks lives its mission—to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighborhood (in this case, kitchen table) at a time.
All branding and advertisement in the world are attempts to hold customers in and to create this special relationship to this one product and brand, even though they might not be so special. One of the biggest examples of this, and what most people fell towards are apple products. Apple products align themselves with the vision of the future, marketing and branding their products to be what the future holds, even though their hardware, and sometimes software is still leagues behind some other phone companies. For example, apple’s flagship phone, the iphone 16, having a worse screen (at 60hz, which was the standard monitor and device screen refresh rate since the 90’s) and wifi speed and connection than the budget pixel phone pixel 9a, and refuses to bump up the specs. Yet, hordes of people continue to buy apple phones simply because of how much people use them. Apple is notorious for having other apple users convince their friends and family to use apple phones as well, having apple only group chats, allowing to have apple pay only for apple users, facetime compatibility, find my, almost discriminating against other phone companies just to keep brand loyalty.
Other brands that I am loyal to are from sports. Yonex has been the dominating badminton equipment supplier since the 70’s, revolutionizing badminton since its arrival. But, this past decade, many other brands, especially Victor, has caught up to Yonex in terms of quality and the performance of the rackets, and sometimes outperforms them; yet Yonex still dominates in every tournament that I attend. This is because Yonex sponsors all the badminton world champions these past decade, and also top clubs in America and Asia as well, being able to market themselves as the “winning racket”. Just like how even though the way of wade shoes are not the best shoes for volleyball, they are worn with the message that they are the “cool shoes”, being stylish and somewhat decent at playing volleyball, compared to Mizuno, a brand with a shoe line dedicated entirely to volleyball.
Brands are present in every aspect of our lives, with our own identities being shaped, both consciously and unconsciously, by how we choose to brand ourselves to others. Dr. Reed points out how successful brand loyalty is created through tying a brand’s identity to the consumer’s identity psychologically. In other words, brand loyalty involves how well a brand can tie itself with their customer’s brand. For example, brands like Pink Palm Puff and Sol de Janeiro have formed themselves around a distinct beachy and preppy aesthetic that has completely exploded in popularity in the past few years. It seems that nearly every teen or tween girl wants to attach themselves to this identity, and a link is formed between that identity which is found in the brands that intentionally embody it and the consumers who want to be apart of it. Soon, the two merge – the brand becomes apart of the consumer’s identity. Sticking with the example above, owning a bottle of Sol de Janeiro body mist or a Pink Palm Puff hoodie makes you preppy. The association causes a subconscious attachment to the brand that creates the powerful brand loyalty that this article explores. The brand becomes apart of you, and a hit to the brand basically seems like a hit to who you are as a person. It’s become almost scary how strongly attached we are to different brands.
Another example can be seen through a specific dark green Gatorade water bottle all elementary and middle school boys seem to have that squirts liquid into your mouth (and more often than not, at other people as well). This is largely because, as mentioned in the article, Gatorade has tied its brand to athleticism and fitness, which, especially in this day and age, many young boys want to embody in their own identities. I once saw a boy in the aisles of Dick’s Sporting Goods begging their mom for this very water bottle, so much so that it resulted in raised voices and an argument. This shows how we have developed a need for a product in order to create an identity for ourselves. In my perspective, this has contributed to the rise of such a strong consumer culture in our society, as at this point, our identities are largely dependent on materialistic items to create an image for ourselves. If these brands didn’t have such a tight link to us and our identities, would we see such a strong need to purchase the myriad of items that we see as a need in order to build our own brand in a certain way? Brand loyalty has evolved into more than a business concept – it’s now more or less become a part of our culture as human beings and intensely affects our everyday lives and purchases.
As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about this from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Sophia, you mention that customers are often “irrational” when it comes to brand loyalty, but I would argue that their behavior actually makes perfect sense when you consider how our brains have evolved over time.
Thousands of years ago, when humans lived as cavemen, survival depended on conformity. If someone in the tribe discovered a safe spot for food or a hunting technique that worked, others quickly followed, not because it was trendy, but because following what worked was a matter of life or death. Conformity was deeply intertwined with safety/survival, and that instinct is still hardwired into our brains today.
Fast forward to today: we don’t need to copy other peoples hunting techniques anymore, thankfully. However, our brains are still wired to seek safety in what feels familiar and socially accepted. This is where branding comes in. Big name brands have completely mastered the ability to embed themselves into our everyday lives. I like to think as though brands are our modern day tribes.
This aligns closely with what Dr. Reed describes as the difference between good branding and great branding. Good branding helps a business connect with customers on the surface, but great branding goes deeper, it leads customers to completely internalize the brand.
Still, I feel as though this article could have gone even deeper by asking why this internalization works so well in the first place. The answer lies in our evolutionary psychology. Connecting with a brand activates the same systems that once helped us survive. In that sense, brand loyalty isn’t irrational at all; it’s our human nature.
Sophia, your take on Professor Reed’s lecture gives us all much needed analysis on how brand loyalty extends beyond mere repeating purchasing, but truly forming that deep personal connection, and building that relationship to strengthen each customer’s CLV, or customer lifetime value, leading to this idea that is similar to what you defined as identity loyalty. This is no doubt how brands create an extension of themselves into who their customers are, weaving them into the very fabric of who they are selling to. This insight of yours, Sophia, aligns quite closely to my research on luxury branding, where I explored how brands build something I like to call “narrative equity,” which is quite identical to your “identity loyalty,” a story and values that customers internalize about a brand.
However, something I would challenge is based on a recent survey that I conducted with 30 members of Gen Z, 70% of respondents shared that they do not consider themselves a loyal customer of any brand. So apparently, loyalty for brands is rarer than gas prices below three dollars. The data that I collected essentially suggests that for younger consumers, loyalty to brands relies upon conditions, and is fragmented, something that is fluid and ever changing as Gen Z’s priorities change.
A point that I touched on in my research paper was the idea that since Gen Z has grown up alongside technology, they have adapted to the innovative technology of today that allows them to personalize their purchases, to find a perfect fit to whatever they wish to buy. In this case, one brand might not always be the answer, depending on how they’re feeling that day. Since they are exposed to this ever-changing technology, they have opportunities to buy from different brands for their different needs, which each brand can specialize in. Another key point from my research, a common response to the question why they aren’t committed to a brand, is because nowadays, they buy for the product, rather than the brand.
So essentially what I’m trying to ask is, how can brands, even the most customer-centric, genuinely cultivate the elusive “identity loyalty” in your words, or what I call “narrative equity”? This lecture highlights that true impactful branding is about creating deep, psychological connections, but my research dives into the roots of this, the roots that are contorting as the skeptical Gen Z, as proven in my research, has an attention span shorter than an Instagram reel.
Gen Z’s loyalty is quite conditional, and often also transactional. They want brands to earn their allegiance, and this raises the question, can a brand preserve its original identity while becoming customer-centric, while adapting to the new, rapidly changing customer values effectively? After all, if a brand changes too much, chasing trends, chasing fads, it could dilute the true narrative equity of the brand, but if it changes too little, it could become irrelevant.
Your example of your dad’s allegiance to Patagonia really nails down to the core how a brand’s authenticity and transparency can create that relationship between brand and consumer. Their transparency and environmental activtism surely attracts cusomers, but essentially creates ambassadors who tie the brand to their moral compass, how it makes them feel. This raises other brands to a new standard which they must meet, standing for something and delivering on their promises.
Professor Reed’s lecture, your analysis and statements, and my research ultimately agree on an invaluable point: brand loyalty is evolving from a one-dimensional concept to a dynamic, ever-changing, and co-created narrative. In order for both to thrive, they must create a dialogue where identity, values, and experiences align, forming a relationship. In this new era of feelings, brands that succeed will be the ones that listen and reflect, who can make consumers feel their brands in this time of necessity for experiential branding, becoming part of a story, rather than just buying a product, precisely how your dad feels about Patagonia.
So truly, this article really opened my eyes to your aspects on brand loyalty, which overall helped me learn that winning loyalty in this era requires something new of brands, for them to listen, adapt, and co-create a story alongside their logos, their mottos, and their trademarks. Because at the end of the day, loyalty won’t come from a free drink, or even that loyalty program I signed up for, but from the moment I truly feel like I’m not buying a product, I’m buying a purpose.