Customer bonding vs customer loyalty - marketing

Södertjej

Södertjej

Senior Member
Junto al Mediterráneo
Spanish ES/Swedish (utlandssvensk)
I wonder if both expressions mean the same in marketing jargon, meaning ensuring your customer doesn't go to your competitors, or if there's some difference in meaning/usage.

These are some examples I found on the net:

Bonding describes a mechanism to both attract and retain customers.

The goal is to promote customer bonding by leveraging "collateral" assets that customers cannot easily walk away from.

Measuring Customer Loyalty and Customer Satisfaction

Each year New York-based marketing consultancy Brand Keys publishes its Customer Loyalty Engagement Index

It seems customer loyalty is more commonly used (if Google is to be believed) but since I found bonding in highly specialised sites I'd like to confirm if there are differences etc.

Thanks a lot.
 
    • Hi Södertjej,

    Bonding     describes a mechanism to both attract and retain customers.

    The goal is to promote customer bonding by leveraging "collateral" assets that customers cannot easily walk away from.
    Click to expand...
    I worked in and around industrial marketing and product development for a few decades, and never came across "customer bonding". From that experience, I would guess that it's either new jargon, or something specific to the product or service of those who use the term.

    Customer loyalty and customer retention are common terms that have been in use for decades, along with "repeat customers", "customer base" and "existing customers/accounts".

    Do they mean the same thing? I can't say for sure. When we created "value packages", combinations of hardware and software products, support services, financing, training, etc., we did so in order to "rope customers in", make them loyal, repeat purchasers. If bonding is used in that sense, I suppose it may be a synonym to 'creating customer loyalty".
     
    I've found this:

    'The bottom line is that loyalty results from customer bonding and does not automatically follow from successive customer interactions without a plan to build the customer bond.'

    It seems to me the terms do not mean the same thing.
     
    Thanks, Packard, but I'm not so sure, as I get a lot of google hits for customer bonding even in Spanish sites. Or if that author invented it, he was very successful with that name.
     
    Södertjej said:
    Thanks, Packard, but I'm not so sure, as I get a lot of google hits for customer bonding even in Spanish sites. Or if that author invented it, he was very successful with that name.
    Click to expand...

    "A lot of" is non-specific. Google returns 2,500 "hits" for "customer bonding" (be sure to use the quote marks) as opposed to 2,500,000 "hits" for customer loyalty.

    As a matter of fact, Google, when left to its own devices, considers the two synonymous, as do I, especially given the proclivity of marketing people to create catch phrases.
     
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