Breaking News: You Can Be and Do More Than One Thing at a Time

We need to talk about something, online world. For as long as I have been online in a meaningful way, I have noticed that there is a strong tendency to develop false dichotomies, especially in articles and blog posts. You can track ROI or you can be creative. You can do social media marketing or you can do traditional marketing. These dichotomous statements also often include the words, “Is dead.”

The latest iteration of this kind of post appeared in Forbes last week. The post was titled, “Customer Loyalty is Dead. Long Live Engagement!” (Yes, really).

The general idea of the post is that engagement is a behavior while loyalty is just a sentiment. Because of that differentiation, customer engagement is more valuable than customer loyalty. An “engaging” customer is one who will actively advocate for you. They will bring you referrals and are likely to increase their purchases with you over time. This is differentiated from a loyal customer who, according to the article, simply remains loyal to you but does not act out of that loyalty very often.

At the risk of sounding like a revolutionary, I would argue that loyalty and engagement on the part of a customer are rather difficult to separate. I don’t see them as being mutually exclusive. Indeed, a customer who sends you referrals and purchases from you often is probably also loyal.

And that is the point I really want to make, online world. We spend an awful lot of time setting up dichotomies that are not really dichotomies. Certainly loyalty is not synonymous with engagement, but neither needs to “die” in order for the other one to exist. Our dedication to establishing points for argument, it seems to me, is trumping the desire to offer companies advice that would legitimately help them grow. For example, instead of suggesting that customer loyalty is unimportant in the wake of customer engagement in order to get more comments, why not write a post offering tips to companies on how they can increase *both* loyalty and engagement?

Ultimately, creating false dichotomies only results in two things. You get (potentially) comments for each side of the issue, and then you also end up looking a little bit less credible than you should because you are creating an illusion of diametrically opposed concepts that are not really diametrically opposed. A customer can be loyal AND engaged. Indeed, it seems to me that that is what companies would hope for. Companies can engage in social media marketing AND traditional marketing.

The best kind of advice companies can get is how to maximize everything they are doing. Writing blog posts based on the “this or that” model does no service to companies unless there really is a benefit to ignoring one concept in favor of another. In my experience, it seldom is beneficial to toss out any idea or tactic. There is almost always value in combining efforts and approaches.

Let’s stop with the link bait/comment bait posts proclaiming that things are dead and because they are dead you should try other things. Let’s move to a blogging model that offers real advice. Dare I say it? The “is dead” model of blogging should be dead.

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