Loyalty Is a Side Effect

The debate surfaces every budget cycle. Owners’ days, community events, anniversary dinners — line items on the marketing P&L that nobody questions because questioning them sounds like you don’t care about your customers. The proposal lands on the table: we should invest more in our community. The room nods. Who could disagree?

I could, apparently.

Not with the premise. Community matters. The relationships we have with the people who own our yachts are among the most valuable things the company has. They refer friends. They come back for their second and third boat. They are, in the truest sense, our advocates. I’ve seen what a strong owners’ community does for a brand — it creates a gravitational pull that no advertising campaign can replicate.

The disagreement is narrower: whose budget should fund it? The question sounds administrative. It isn’t. Where you put the budget reveals what you believe the function is for. And if loyalty sits on the marketing P&L, you’re making a claim — whether you intend to or not — that marketing produces loyalty. I don’t think it does. I think loyalty is a side effect of everything else the organization does right, and marketing’s job is something different entirely.

The Sharp thesis

The argument has a patron saint, and his name is Byron Sharp.

Sharp’s How Brands Grow, published in 2010, is one of those books that divides a room.¹ Marketers who’ve read it either treat it as scripture or resist it with the energy of someone whose entire career is being questioned. The reason is that Sharp, working from decades of panel data at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, makes a claim that cuts against most of what marketing departments believe about themselves: brands grow primarily through penetration — acquiring new buyers — not through deepening relationships with existing ones.

The data behind this is extensive, drawn mostly from FMCG categories but replicated across dozens of markets. Sharp documents what he calls the double jeopardy law: smaller brands have fewer buyers and those buyers are slightly less loyal. Larger brands have more buyers and those buyers are slightly more loyal. Loyalty, in other words, is largely a statistical artefact of market share. You don’t get big by making people more loyal. You get more loyalty by getting big.

The mechanism Sharp proposes is mental availability — the probability that a buyer will think of your brand in a buying situation.² Marketing’s job, in this framework, is to build and refresh memory structures that make the brand come to mind. Not to nurture relationships. Not to reward repeat behaviour. Not to build community. To be noticed, by as many potential buyers as possible, as often as possible. The unglamorous work of reach and salience.

Jenni Romaniuk, Sharp’s colleague at Ehrenberg-Bass, extended this into a practical framework in Building Distinctive Brand Assets.³ The argument: brands need distinctive visual and verbal cues — logos, colours, shapes, sounds — that trigger recognition without requiring attention. The work is about building mental infrastructure, not emotional bonds.

The Dutch research body SWOCC, of which I am a patron, tested Sharp’s framework against the local market in two consecutive publications. The conclusion was unambiguous: “De kern van de marketingactiviteiten moet zijn dat het merk (weer) top-of-mind wordt” — the core of marketing activity should be making the brand top-of-mind again.⁴ Marketing’s role in loyalty, the researchers found, is not to manage relationships but to build salience — especially among light buyers, who despite buying infrequently are so numerous that they account for roughly half of a brand’s total sales. I was one of the nineteen marketing directors interviewed for that research, representing Spyker Cars. Even then, the tension between the Sharp thesis and the instinct to invest in existing customers was palpable in the room.

If you take Sharp seriously — and I do, with caveats I’ll get to — the implication is uncomfortable. Not because it reduces marketing to a spreadsheet exercise, but because it asks a question that luxury marketers would rather not hear: is the energy you’re putting into the people who already love you coming at the expense of being found by the people who don’t yet know you exist? Sharp’s answer is yes. Growth comes from widening the pool of buyers, not from deepening the bond with the ones you have.

The objection

Sharp’s critics are numerous and not stupid. The most common objections are worth taking seriously, because I hear versions of them in every internal discussion.

“His data is FMCG.” True. Sharp’s empirical base is overwhelmingly fast-moving consumer goods — categories where purchase frequency is high, switching costs are low, and brand relationships are shallow by nature. Toothpaste and laundry detergent are not yachts. The question is whether the principles transfer even when the context doesn’t. I think some do and some don’t, and the distinction matters.

“Loyalty is real — I’ve seen it.” Also true. I’ve seen it too. I’ve watched a customer take delivery of their third Wajer, more excited than they were for the first. I’ve seen owners fly across Europe for an event they weren’t obligated to attend, because they wanted to be around other people who share their enthusiasm. And the data confirms it: SWOCC’s follow-up study found that roughly a third of Dutch consumers can be considered loyal even to everyday supermarket brands — not Apple fans or Ferrari owners, but ordinary people buying coffee and detergent.⁵ Loyalty-as-feeling is real, powerful, and commercially valuable.

But loyalty-as-feeling is not the same as loyalty-as-programme. The first is an emotion produced by experience. The second is a marketing infrastructure designed to measure and incentivise that emotion. The conflation of the two is where the trouble starts.

“Community creates advocacy.” It does. But the question is whether the advocacy comes from the event or from everything that preceded it. An owners’ day is a gathering of people who already love the brand. They leave feeling good because they spent a day around like-minded people on beautiful yachts. They tell friends. This is valuable. But the loyalty was already there before they arrived. The event didn’t create it — it revealed it. And the thing that created it was the yacht working perfectly, the service team calling back within the hour, the experience of ownership being worth what they paid for it.

Fred Reichheld, who invented the Net Promoter Score, understood something the industry has since forgotten: NPS was designed to measure a symptom, not to be an objective.⁶ The score tells you whether your customers would recommend you. It doesn’t tell you why, and it certainly doesn’t improve by being optimised directly. Jones and Sasser made a related point about the satisfaction-loyalty link: satisfied customers defect all the time, and dissatisfied customers sometimes stay.⁷ The relationship between what people feel and what they do is not the clean causal chain that CRM dashboards assume. Measuring loyalty is useful. Managing it as a marketing output is a category error.

The CRM-ification of luxury

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, luxury imported the loyalty infrastructure of mass-market retail. Not the language — luxury doesn’t call them “loyalty programmes” because that sounds cheap. But the architecture: client segmentation, lifetime value models, retention dashboards, personalised outreach triggers, anniversary gifts calibrated to purchase history. CRM, the enterprise version of remembering someone’s name.

The logic is seductive. If loyalty can be measured, it can be optimised. If it can be optimised, it belongs to the team that does the optimising. And if that team is marketing, then marketing should own the budget, the tools, and the credit.

The vocabulary gives the game away. Clients are “at risk of churning” — a phrase borrowed from telecoms that should make anyone in luxury wince. The dashboard flags a declining visit frequency, generates an action — personalised invitation, exclusive preview, scheduled touchpoint — and when the client returns, the system marks it as a save. But the question nobody asks is whether the client would have come back anyway, or whether they were drifting because the product or service had disappointed them and a well-timed email just delayed the departure.

The deeper problem is that the measurement layer becomes a substitute for the thing it claims to measure. The dashboard shows repeat purchases. It doesn’t show why they happened. When I worked with Kapferer’s framework on the anti-laws, one of the principles that held unconditionally was that luxury should not pander to customers’ wishes — the creative vision leads. CRM logic inverts this. It says: listen to the data, respond to the signal, personalise the touchpoint. It turns the brand into a reactive system optimising for a metric, when the brand’s job is to lead with conviction and let the metric follow.

This isn’t an argument against knowing your customers. It’s an argument against confusing the map with the territory. The dashboard is a map. Loyalty is the territory. And the territory is shaped by forces that marketing doesn’t control.

What actually produces loyalty

If loyalty isn’t a marketing deliverable, where does it come from?

In luxury — and particularly in the kind of high-consideration, high-involvement luxury I’ve spent my career in — loyalty is produced by three things, none of which sit in the marketing department.

Product. The yacht works. Not just adequately — flawlessly. The systems integrate. The finish is immaculate. The design still feels right three years in. In a category where a product failure means your summer is ruined and your half-million-euro investment is in a service dock, “it works” is the foundation of everything. No amount of community building compensates for a boat that leaks.

At Spyker, I watched this in both directions. When the cars were right — when the C8 ran as it should, when the engineering lived up to the design — owners became evangelists. They didn’t need an owners’ club to be loyal. They were loyal because the car was extraordinary. When the cars had issues — and they did, because Spyker was always under-resourced — no event, no gift, no personal letter from management restored what was lost. Loyalty tracked product quality with almost perfect correlation.

Service. The call back within the hour. The service team that remembers your specs without being asked. The problem that gets solved before you knew it existed. In luxury, service is not a department. It’s the texture of the entire relationship. Every interaction either deposits into or withdraws from the loyalty account, and marketing controls almost none of these interactions.

I’ve seen a single service failure undo years of careful brand building. I’ve also seen a single exceptional service moment — the right person doing the right thing at the right time without being asked — create a loyalty that no programme could manufacture. These moments are produced by hiring, training, culture, and empowerment. They are organisational capabilities, not marketing activities.

Experience. The delivery ceremony. The first sea trial. The moment the owner sees the yacht in the water for the first time. These are experiences that the company designs and delivers, and they create memories that bond the customer to the brand in ways that transcend any rational assessment of value. In theory, these are produced by operations — the yard team, the people who build and deliver the product. In practice, when those moments aren’t standardised or simply aren’t happening, marketing often steps in to design them. We did exactly that. But the fact that marketing had to take ownership doesn’t mean it should stay there permanently. It means the organisation hadn’t yet built the capability where it belongs.

An owners’ day is a celebration of loyalty that already exists — and celebrations matter. But they don’t generate what isn’t there. The event is downstream of everything else: the product quality, the service responsiveness, the accumulated experience of ownership. Those are the foundations. Marketing can amplify them, commemorate them, even help design the moments that make them tangible. The question is simply whether that’s the best use of a function that is also uniquely positioned to do something no other department can: make the brand visible to the next buyer.

Where marketing should spend

If not on loyalty, then on what?

Sharp’s answer is visibility. Mental availability. Being the brand that comes to mind when someone starts thinking about a yacht. This sounds simple and is brutally hard to execute, because it requires consistency, patience, and the willingness to invest in reach over engagement.

In practical terms, for a brand like Wajer, this means:

Being present where purchase decisions begin. Not where they end — not at the boat show where someone is already shopping — but upstream, where someone is first forming the idea that they might want a yacht. This is brand advertising in the right media, editorial coverage that reaches beyond the yachting bubble, a digital presence that surfaces when curiosity starts. The SWOCC research found something telling about brand experiences: the ones that build salience most effectively are open to everyone, not gated for existing customers.⁴ A brand event that only owners can attend builds community. A brand experience that anyone can encounter builds mental availability. Both have value. The smartest version is probably what we try to do: invite select prospects alongside owners — people who are already some way down the funnel and for whom the experience might tip consideration into intent. That’s the event doing double duty, and it’s where the community argument and the marketing argument genuinely converge.

Building distinctive brand assets. The visual language, the design signature, the tone of voice that makes the brand recognisable at a glance.³ In a category where most brands look and sound alike — blue water, white hulls, interchangeable lifestyle imagery — distinctiveness is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. This is where we’ve invested heavily: a new website built to be the closest thing to being on one of our yachts, and the everyday lifestyle content we’ve become known for — real footage, real light, real moments on the water. I wrote about the effort in the image elsewhere; the point here is that every impression that reinforces these distinctive assets is an investment in future mental availability. That is marketing’s job.

Generating qualified leads. Kapferer would raise an eyebrow here. Anti-law nine says luxury advertising exists to build the dream, not to drive conversion. Anti-law ten says you should communicate to people who will never buy, because their admiration sustains the brand’s social value for those who do. Both are right — and neither contradicts lead generation when it’s done properly. The dream is the filter. Someone who comes to you because they already understand what the brand stands for is a qualified lead by definition. The work of building the dream and the work of filling the pipeline are the same work, seen from different ends.

This is the core of my budget argument. Not that leads matter more than community — but that generating them is something only marketing can do. Nobody else in the organisation builds mental availability. Nobody else drives awareness upstream of the purchase decision. But everyone in the organisation contributes to loyalty — every product decision, every service interaction, every operational choice either builds or erodes it. Marketing should focus where it’s irreplaceable.

Bringing in the right buyers. This is the bridge between Sharp’s framework and the loyalty question. The best thing marketing can do for long-term loyalty is to attract buyers who are right for the brand. A well-matched buyer — someone who genuinely values what the brand stands for, who will use the product as it’s intended, who fits the community naturally — is far more likely to become a loyal customer than someone who arrived through a broker or a boat show encounter that skipped the brand entirely and went straight to specs and price. Kapferer warned about this in the anti-laws: luxury should not make it easy to buy. The friction is a filter, and the filter is what produces a customer base worth being loyal to.

The budget line question

I’ve framed this as a marketing argument because that’s where the budget debate lives. But the deeper point is organisational.

When loyalty sits on marketing’s P&L, a subtle thing happens: the rest of the organisation outsources it. Product can ship something imperfect because marketing will smooth it over with relationship management. Service can be slow because the CRM will trigger a recovery touchpoint. Operations can cut corners because the owners’ day will remind people why they love the brand. The loyalty budget becomes a shock absorber for failures elsewhere in the system.

This is backwards. Loyalty should be an organisational KPI, not a departmental one. Every function should own its contribution: product owns quality, service owns responsiveness, operations owns delivery experience, and yes, marketing owns the events and communications that celebrate these things. But the celebrations are not the cause. They’re the effect.

Reichheld understood this when he designed NPS. The score was meant to be a board-level metric — a signal of overall organisational health, not a target for the marketing team to optimise.⁶ When NPS becomes a marketing KPI, the temptation is to game it: survey at the right moment, cherry-pick respondents, focus on promoters. The score goes up. The underlying experience doesn’t change. The metric becomes theatre.

Sharp would put it more bluntly: stop trying to manage loyalty and start trying to reach more people. The loyalty will follow if the product and service deserve it. If they don’t, no amount of CRM sophistication will save you.

I don’t fully agree with Sharp on every count. His framework underweights the role of experience design in high-involvement categories. In FMCG, the “experience” of buying toothpaste is trivial — mental availability is nearly the whole game. In luxury yachting, the experience of ownership is multi-year, deeply personal, and shapes loyalty in ways that panel data can’t capture. But his core claim — that loyalty is an output, not an input — holds even in categories he didn’t study. The mechanism is different. The principle is the same.

Loyalty is real. It’s just not yours.

The budget debate will come around again. It always does. And I’ll make the same argument I always make: move the owners’ day off the marketing P&L. Not because it doesn’t matter — it matters enormously. But because putting it on marketing’s budget tells a story about where loyalty comes from that isn’t true.

Loyalty comes from the boat working on the first trip. From the phone call returned in thirty minutes. From the craftsman in Heeg who got the teak join right. From the engineer who caught the problem before the owner noticed. From a hundred small decisions, made by people who will never attend a marketing meeting, that add up to an experience worth being loyal to.

Marketing’s job is different, and it’s important enough to deserve its full budget. Make the brand visible. Make it distinctive. Make it available — mentally and physically — to the next person who starts thinking about a yacht. Bring in buyers who belong. And then let the rest of the organisation earn their loyalty, the way it’s always been earned: by being worth it.

Sharp is right. Loyalty is a side effect. The debate was never about whether to value it. It was about which part of the organisation gets to claim it — and what happens to a brand when the department that measures loyalty starts believing it produces loyalty. The measurement is useful. The belief is dangerous. And the budget, small as it seems, is where the belief lives.