Do you imagine a new Loyalty future?

By Hilton Barbour

Last week we polled our colleagues, clients and social followers to tell us which industries or categories were best positioned, or had the biggest appetite or incentive, to reimagine loyalty.

If you didn’t weigh in and vote (tut, tut) or hadn’t seen the results we posted Friday on LinkedIn, here they are again.

Do those results and rankings surprise you?

Do those reflect the industries you might’ve suggested or are keenly watching in 2022?

Truthfully these results did spur a number of heated internal discussions here at Kognitiv. One which came up repeatedly - did the folks who voted misinterpret the key word “reimagine” as a statement of intent or a question of (business) survival?

And there’s a critical difference if you see reimagining as a purposeful, deliberate, and intentional business move. Or if you consider reimagining as a matter of survival and something you’ve little choice in addressing.

For our money, those who are reimagining loyalty in a purposeful, deliberate and intentional way are inherently going to build something more meaningful and more imaginative (sorry, couldn’t resist) than their peers in survival mode.

And there’s a lot about loyalty that needs to be reimagined if its going to deliver the business results that an investment of this type requires.

Are you reimagining the partners, allies and alliances you need to form and create? Granted having a credit card and a “frequency” partner makes solid sense but are you tapping into niche sectors or growing consumer trends to find the next place your customers are at? What organizations are gaining popularity in our work-from-home world? What DTC businesses are taking share away from the grocery and retail giants you may formerly have partnered with? How can you align your program to new versus old stalwarts? Are you reimagining the economics of your program? Do your traditional funding models - and all those points sitting on your beleaguered balance sheet - still pass the scrutiny of your CFO and CEO? Particularly if you're in an industry that has been battered by the Covid roller coaster and the softening of consumer demand. Do collaborative funding models now make more sense than a historic go-it-alone stance that might have fit a former, rosier, more stable business environment?

Are you reimagining what’s required to start a program from scratch rather than tinker at the edges of what you’re currently doing in loyalty? New entrants certainly have the advantage of picking from new technologies, new business models and new vendors that weren’t on the market two or three years ago but there are foundational elements about how you craft a loyalty program that require deep experience. We’re watching an explosion of loyalty programs from sectors and organizations we’d never have dreamed about (hat’s off because they inspired last week’s poll) but we are holding our breath to see which one’s survive the fickle tastes of Joe Consumer, and which have the depth to actually earn genuine loyalty quarter by quarter overtime.

Over the years hundreds of people have said inspiring things about imagining – one of the Beatles even wrote a famous song about it – but it’s our favorite Austrian physicist, and part-time hair stylist, Albert Einstein who said it best:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited whereas imagination embraces the whole world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

 Imagination – Progress – Evolution.

 Just imagine that.

ray.chelstowski@kognitiv.com

hilton.barbour@kognitiv.com