If the supermarket doubles the number of brands it carries, that does not mean that people massively increase the size of their repertoires. They can still get through a modern supermarket in 15 minutes. They do that by being exceptionally loyal and looking out for the brands they usually buy.

Loyalty is absolutely natural behavior. So, if consumers were more or less loyal today, it would require some fundamental change in human nature. If anything, the world is getting more complicated, and a natural defense against that is to be loyal.

Rob BonDurant: Patagonia’s customers tend to cycle in and out of accessibility to our brand from a price perspective. They are first introduced by a parent or a grandparent or through Outward Bound outfitting them for their first grand adventure.

They often think of Patagonia gear as sort of a trophy, because it represents that first experience, and then they stay with us. But let’s face it, the lean years are when they are in their late teens or early twenties, when they are living more hand-to-mouth.

While this dormant customer may not be buying, they are definitely watching us. They are engaging in our social media efforts. When they have more disposable income, the cycle starts again and the next generation of loyal Patagoniacs is born. We’ve been around long enough to see them recycle numerous times — first from Boomers to Gen Xers and Ys and now to Millennials.

Ryan Green: I actually do think consumers are less loyal today. It didn’t necessarily start five years ago, but we have certainly seen it in the last three years, with the recession. There’s more “perfect” information out there and it’s more competitive. Consumers are shopping for value and they probably are less brand loyal.

People are gravitating towards brands that provide that value and are transparent in the way in which they go about doing business. That lines up well for Southwest Airlines. We have not seen any degradation in brand loyalty. During the last couple of years we’ve picked up market share because we have a brand that resonates in times like these.

Beth Ann Kaminkow: McKinsey put out a video a year or so ago about the purchase cycle and how people make their selections about products and brands. The dynamic has definitely shifted and consumers are more fickle and selective than in the past.

Fortunately, there is so much more room for engagement between brands and consumers today, and so brands have more opportunities to establish loyalty than before. Brands that have figured out how to create a different platform of engagement with consumers and shoppers can still create loyalty.

The nature of loyalty is changing because of all the ways brands can now reach out to engage and serve customers. Sometimes it’s even deeper loyalty as that brand becomes an extension of the consumer’s own identity in some way. Or, loyalty can be a function of a strong brand benefit or a de-positioning of the competition.

What is the most effective way to build loyalty today and into the future?

Sharp: Marketers don’t understand loyalty. Loyalty is very important for marketers to understand in the same way it’s important for engineers to understand gravity. But engineers don’t talk about changing gravity. Marketers truly believe that they can change loyalty, but they can’t.

What marketers really want to do is to grow their brands. They want to have more people buying more often. If they’re successful, they will get a lot more people buying and those people will be slightly more loyal. Your loyalty metrics go up slightly as you increase in market share. They have to.

This is the Double Jeopardy law, a natural law-like pattern that exists in different countries, product categories, attitudes and behaviors. Double Jeopardy means that loyalty metrics depend upon how many customers a brand has. If you want to grow, or improve your loyalty, then you have to acquire more customers.

That’s the difference between big and small brands. And big brands, obviously, have a bit more loyalty. Small brands naturally have a little bit less. But it doesn’t mean the small brands are weak; it just means they are small.

BonDurant: If you want to build a larger customer base, it’s easy: keep them guessing. Do what no one else is willing to do. Patagonia has always been a bit of a futuristic brand in the sense that we created the performance outdoor apparel category. We practiced radical manufacturing transparency to the nth degree.

If you go to our micro-site, The Footprint Chronicles, you can track every stage of our manufacturing process. We have diverted more than 100 million soda-pop bottles from landfills by turning them into our own fleeces.

Treat your customers like a loyal, respected friend. Stay on the “future” bandwagon, always look forward, practice radical communication and transparency and treat your customer the way you’d want to be treated.

Green: There are two important things that will keep customers coming back. One is a quality product at a price that provides the most value. Those brands are always going to do well.

In addition, whatever it is that you are producing, you need to provide consistent delivery. If a customer can rely on you, and your product or service continues to be of value, that will drive customers back to you.

Kaminkow: If you’re trying to create a sense of loyalty and brand awareness where there hasn’t been any in a long time, you have to focus on content that engages people on the brand dimensions that matter.

You have to start with where your brand is, what its equities and business goals are. Then you need to look at who the shoppers and consumers are, and what their needs are. Somewhere in that space is something unique that answers that loyalty question.

It has to be focused on creating experiences and engagements that go further and deeper than the actual brand, service or product itself.

Have the fundamentals of creating loyalty changed?

Sharp: The fundamentals haven’t changed. For thousands of years, marketers have been in a battle to create mental and physical availability. In the last century, mass media rolled out and we had a movement from mom-and-pop stores to chain stores.

That gave marketers the chance to build mental and physical availability on a global scale. But the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Marketers are still trying to get their brands in front of as many people as possible and make them as easy to buy, and that’s what creates loyalty.

BonDurant: For Patagonia, the fundamentals have not changed. We’ve evolved, but our DNA is now and has always been to build the best product, cause the least harm and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

You can’t just frequent-flyer a brand like Patagonia. We’ve always welcomed anyone around our campfire, but we don’t travel the globe trying to build little campfires. It’s quite the opposite; if you want to join us, we’ll make room around our campfire.

When customers call in to ask us questions about apparel, inevitably they begin to ask questions about the places they are going. Many of our customer-service agents are avid skiers, climbers or surfers. They know where the cheaper hotels are or which restaurants have the best food. That kind of guidance builds fantastic loyalty.

Green: I don’t think the fundamentals have changed. Customers are becoming less brand-loyal because they have greater access to information and are looking for what gives them the most value at the lowest price.

Even though I have responsibility for our frequent-flier program, I can take very little credit for the loyalty that Southwest Airlines enjoys. What keeps customers coming back is the customer service that our front-line folks provide. It’s also the consistent delivery of on-time performance and the fact that your bags make it with you to your destination.

Those are things that consumers expect us to do. But the fact that we actually deliver on them keeps customers coming back. So, that delivery by our front-line employees makes my job relatively easy.

Kaminkow: The fundamentals of loyalty are still the same; they just may need to be rearranged. The change is in the way brands are being used and the way consumers are thinking about them.

When you think about the purchase cycle, and how people make decisions to purchase and then repurchase a brand, along with the role of the influencer community, we can see that consumer behavior is shifting.

It’s shifting in terms of the importance that consumers place on the decision. How you actually create and recreate a sense of loyalty and connection to consumers through that purchase cycle may be different.

Will consumers be less brand-loyal five years from now than they are today?

Sharp: No. Marketers should accept that their brand means little to most consumers. That's okay because they loyally buy the brand occasionally; that's the real-world reality for the most successful brands. It’s not about gaining passionate, committed, tribe members. This isn't how brands compete for market share.

Marketing has a little bit of an attitude problem. If you give marketers a challenge — like if you say, we would like consumers to recycle —marketers will translate that into an attitude problem. They’ll say we’ve got to get people to care about the environment more. No: We need to get them to recycle more.

Marketers translate loyalty into an attitude: I need more loyalty from my consumers. No: The business plan calls for increasing sales, so you need to get people to buy. It’s not an attitudinal issue.

BonDurant: No, not at all. As the world becomes smaller and social issues become global issues, customers will continue to reward companies that take responsibility for their entire manufacturing footprint.

Over the next five years, I think we’ll start to see easy-to-understand social and manufacturing indexes by the biggest companies in the world. That will weed out and expose the offenders, and I think, frankly, those companies will either evolve or cease to exist.

Companies that practice environmental and social transparency and work with customer service in a way that allows the customer to feel like they are actually a human being, are going to win. So, I don’t see customers being less brand-loyal five years from now.

Green: I don’t know. It’s not so much that the internet has made information more accessible; what has changed is the social-media aspect. It’s very easy to get referrals, and generate word-of-mouth marketing. It’s much easier to generate that type of buzz in good ways and bad. It remains to be seen how that will play out in terms of loyalty.

Kaminkow: There is always going to be a place and a role for brand loyalty, especially for brands that are able to work through changes in consumer behavior. Brands have to redefine how they think about themselves to garner a sense of loyalty with their best shoppers and consumers.

Because there are so many more choices, it is so much more incumbent on brands to have an intentional program and strategy around how they deal with it. Then you have to revisit it, because it’s not like what you did last year is necessarily going to be the same thing that will work in the coming year. Consumers sometimes grow weary of a brand from a loyalty standpoint.

Which brands enjoy the most loyalty today and why?

Sharp: The biggest brands have the most loyalty. It’s as simple as that. If you notice, when brand loyalty scores come out, the brands that are heralded as having super loyalty are all the really big ones.

The classic deviation would be the niche brand, because it has a small, but very loyal, customer base. Surprisingly, it’s systematically things like private labels. The reason is that it’s a big brand in the stores that it’s in, but it's not stocked by other retailers. So it has a small customer base but the loyalty scores of a larger brand.

People insist that Apple have these absolute fans, which is true, but every brand has a few people like that. If you look at the data, you would see that their loyalty is not very different from any other brand’s loyalty.

BonDurant: It’s interesting because the companies that enjoy the most loyalty don’t necessarily have loyalty programs per se: Harley, Apple, Southwest and Whole Foods.

These are all brands that practice relentless consistency, coupled with what appears to be fantastic leadership. These are not brands that are built from focus groups or based on marketing math.

Even with negative press, brands that deal with their issues are brands that are going to win. When you combine customer service with the ability to solve people’s problems, and then you brush that with a veneer of beauty, you have a brand DNA that’s built for success.

Green: I sound a little bit like a broken record, but brands that enjoy a tremendous amount of loyalty are those that deliver on the fundamentals, that deliver consistently and offer tremendous value at a good price.

Price is relative to the value that’s provided, but Apple has a tremendous following and a loyal fan base. Starbucks does as well, even though they’ve had a few bumps in the road.

Kaminkow: I know from working with Kimberly-Clark that there are Viva Divas, who are intensely loyal to the quality and feel of Viva paper towels to the point where they even hide it from family members. When I started to study the behaviors of these Viva Divas, I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m doing that same thing!” I am a Viva Diva.

The question is whether it’s the product itself that drives the behavior, or if there’s a barrier in the other brands that it was able to overcome.

It’s interesting when you pull apart and piece together these brand stories in that way. By studying consumer behavior and data, marketers can uncover and unlock the insights to creating loyalty.