The first tomato harvest! Better a bit late than never!
Farm blog: I never understood brand loyalty. I just bought the cheapest version of whatever every time and thought nothing about it. Until I needed things to last, or be right, or something that relied on me talking to a human about a problem I was having with their product. I discovered that “cheapest” often means absence of said human. You’re on your own, buyer beware, etc. I discovered the value of customer service. I learned that sometimes it’s worth paying a little bit more for the security of knowing I’ll be taken care of if I ever have a problem. I see complaints in many of my market farming forums about how “expensive” Johnny’s seeds is, which is one of my favorite seed companies. But Johnny’s Seeds is the company that discovered through another customer that their pea seeds had been damaged by weevils in the warehouse and reached out to me to credit and replace those seeds before I even opened the package.
We were having trouble with some of our wholesale labels not sticking to the boxes, which wasn’t a problem I had encountered before. I reached out to the label printing company and not only did they, without question, replace the labels, but they also wouldn’t let me pay for the replacement labels!
The Nantahala River is extremely cold. Our first descent down that river left my teeth chattering in the middle of July. So in plenty of time before our next trip down that river, I ordered a dry top. The company sent the wrong item. I contacted the company, who sent a return label, but didn’t mail the replacement correct item until they got shipping notification of the return item. Then there was some hitch in shipping (not the company’s fault) that informed us that the replacement dry top would not arrive in time for our trip. So the company (Outdoor Play if anyone is interested in my brand loyalty), overnighted ANOTHER dry top to ensure it arrived before our trip before the original replacement dry top arrived. Talk about correcting a mistake! (We did return the second dry top when it arrived).
And so, not only am I brand loyal to these and other companies because of customer service, I’ve learned to hold them up as examples in my own business. Because here’s the thing: companies are made up of working humans, and humans make mistakes. And humans have relationships and business is really about relationships. So when humans make a mistake and are given an opportunity to fix that mistake and they REALLY make it right, I feel seen and cared about and I develop loyalty to that relationship. I want those humans who care about me and my satisfaction with their product to be able to keep doing that good work and that is worth paying a little bit more for. Hence, brand loyalty.
