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Can Loyalty Save The World

 


 By: Ray Chelstowski / Hilton Barbour

Last week at the 2021 Loyalty Summit in Washington DC, CBS Travel Editor Peter Greenberg asked a panel of experts the following question; 

“Have anyone of you considered offering bonus points if your members received the Covid 19 vaccination?”

No one had.

Kinda surprising given that we know all loyalty efforts are fundamentally about driving customer behavior.

Incent behaviors to get customers to trial a new product or service. Reward behaviours as a means of reinforcing participation with our businesses. Peter’s question, while provocative, was ground in a fundamental belief that sits inside all the programs we build and all the reward and recognition efforts we fund.

What was even more surprising was that many of last week’s attendees were from the travel and
hospitality sector. There are few sectors who would benefit more from a high universal level of vaccinations than those travel and hospitality.  

We’re very aware of how politicized the vaccine topic has become but we’re also not being flippant about using loyalty programs to have both business and societal impact.

The idea is not new. US airline JetBlue continues to encourage their loyalty members to donate unused miles to charity. Through their “JetBlue For Good Month”, the airline donates two million TrueBlue points to longstanding partners like Make-A-Wish, Miles4Migrants, and The DREAM Project and the charities use the points to book trips that help advance their mission.

Retailers, such as Sephora and Crabtree & Evelyn, allow customers to turn their rewards points into donations, donate their own rounded-up change and even choose which charity the company donates to on their behalf. This type of co-created or shared impact can be enormously resonate with certain customer segments or demographics. Not to mention advancing the legitimacy of the organization’s own ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) agenda.  “We reach the Gen-Z population a lot, and they tend to be a values- and purpose-driven consumer,” said Elyse Cohen, Rare Beauty VP of social impact and inclusion. “As we’re seeing shifts in the way business is done in the private sector and leaning more into [positive] impact and social issues, we believe it’s important to do well by doing good.”

So why aren’t more companies engaging in this activity?

There certainly can be added complexity if you add a donation or charity component to your program. However, at a time when hyper-personalization and the ability to highly customize my brand experience is becoming table-stakes, the larger question is perhaps why aren’t you? As loyalty marketers and brand builders we agonize over developing programs that have an emotional engagement, not just a transactional one, and this type of reward or incentive certainly ticks that box too.

While loyalty programs may not be able to end Covid, or the host of other challenges we face, there is no doubt we can incent and impact behaviors which bring a little more light, sunshine and happiness into the world right now.

Perhaps the real question to answer is the one famously posed by Steve Jobs.

“What dent do you want to make in the universe?”


ray.chelstowski@kognitiv.com

hitlon.barbour@kognitiv.com

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