Are women more loyal customers than men?

But what are the underlying factors of loyalty? Significant research has been conducted over the years on this very subject, and at a basic human level we’re often told that in personal relationships ‘women are more loyal than men’. At a psychological level we’re also told that women are more interdependent as people whereas men are considered to be more independent.

Both of these theories would lead us to believe that, generally speaking, women are more loyal than men. There is another theory though, which states that everyone, regardless of gender, has a strong need to belong. But, what they need to belong to is different. Women, we find, are interdependent with individuals, and men with groups.

At first glance this is far removed from the world of business. However, they are linked, inextricably, and what we’ve sought to do is determine what drives customer loyalty in men versus women. The questions we posed were: Are men less loyal generally as customers? Or, if women are more loyal to individuals - for example, to individual sales people and service providers - then are men more loyal to groups and group-like entities such as retail chains?

Apart from providing further understanding of what it is that makes customers tick, the implications revealed by our findings are quite significant for companies, specifically in determining where the balance of power lies in customer relationships.

What we found is that men are loyal to a company – an entity. Take a high street bank, for example. For men, it doesn’t matter all that much who the person is that provides the service: the relationship is with the bank. However, for women the relationship is not with the organisation, but centres instead on individual service providers.

The customer service representative at the bank, a specific hairdresser, doctor, and so on, are to what female customers are loyal. Look at that from the organisation’s point of view and suddenly the power balance of the customer relationship is very firmly in the hands of the individual employee.

So powerful can this relationship be that if the individual service provider leaves your organisation, then your customer may leave as well. For employers, when that individual comes to you and says they would like a pay rise, or tells you that they are leaving to work elsewhere, there’s much more at stake for you than just filling a vacancy, especially if they are in a work environment where they have many women customers.

To expound further: you will rarely come across a menswear shop run by just one or two people. However, it’s very common to find such boutiques for women. Women tend to have close customer relationships with their hairdresser – men typically do not. They might be loyal to a specific establishment, but usually not to the hairdresser.

To reach our conclusions we conducted five experiments of varying complexity. In the simplest scenarios we presented people with options that would test their loyalty. For example: you need to buy a birthday cake for work colleagues. You can buy it from a nearby bakery or cycle 10 minutes, through the rain, to a shop run by an acquaintance from school. Which would you choose? The same scenario was also set, but with three acquaintances at the bakery, not one.