I am an infidel in many ways. So’s my damn dog. And so are your customers. Today’s way has to do with loyalty. To be disloyal is to be an infidel, according to Webster’s Dictionary. And as consumers that makes us all guilty. There is no loyal consumer.

Loyalty requires an unswerving allegiance. But for a price or better service or higher speeds, we all throw loyalty out the window. We confuse loyalty with something else. I don’t know what. Contentment, maybe? Complacency? It’s often some other attribute we can’t put our finger on that we describe as loyalty.

Take my dog. Take your dog, doesn’t matter. As long as we are the ones who set down the food bowl, as long as we’re the ones who open the back door and scratch their ears, they’re loyal. If we go on vacation and drop the dog off at Grandma’s house, guess what? The dog is still loyal, but not to us.

Take Tony Soprano and the whole tough guy crowd. They live and die by some sick code of ethics they call loyalty – and most of them wind up dead.

Kim Jong-il’s foot soldiers are loyal, but set one of them outside the border of North Korea and see how fast that uniform comes off.

So let us call loyalty what it is: insufficient motivation to make a change.

Don’t give a customer a reason to leave and they probably won’t. Give them reasons to stay and they probably will. Sometimes it takes a dispassionate third party to tell us when we’re being, oh, I don’t know, too loyal to our own ideas – like putting too much stock in the term “customer loyalty.“ And who is more dispassionate than a good researcher? It’s not in this week’s article on Qwest’s study of EBPP, but Kirk Gripsenstraw, vice president of advanced analytics for Aspen Marketing Services, is one such researcher. And he gave an honest assessment of loyalty this week.

He said, “We define loyalty as when a customer doesn’t voluntarily leave.” That’s not as heavy as the weight we typically assign to loyalty, but it’s real. And as Gripsenstraw said, “Hey, loyalty is loyalty.”

Come ‘ere, boy!

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.