MediaLift

  By: Ray Chelstowski / Hilton Barbour Routines. We all have ‘em. Whether it’s the daily routine of going to the gym, grabbing a Starbucks, and reading the newspaper headlines on your mobile while you wait. Or the little one’s like the order of milk, sweetener, and counterclockwise stir…or was that sweetener, milk and clockwise? Importantly for those of us in the loyalty game, which of these behaviors are habits, routines, or genuine loyalty? Are you really that fond of Starbuck’s unique flavor or is it that there is a location 5 minutes walk from your home and in the lobby of your office tower? Or that you’ve accumulated enough stars on the Starbucks app to get a venti, double-pump, triple shot macchiato before that 1 st Zoom call? In a world where some organizations remain comfortable assuming that transaction frequency automatically equates to consumer loyalty, asking how you define loyalty – or separate it from habit or routine – is a critical question. Equally for...

  By: Hilton Barbour Maybe it was all the excitement and hoopla around Elon and Twitter last week, but when this tweet came across our newsfeed, it did cause a momentary pause and a few hours of internal backwards and forwards around the merits of this type of loyalty reward. This isn’t a particularly new idea and folks like Bumped are probably the most active leaders in this space. But there is certainly a very logical case to be made for giving your most loyal and active consumers a genuine stake in the very company that they seem so enamored with. After all, as any super engaged loyalty member will tell you, there is only so many points they can accumulate, so many free flights they can take and so many room or rental car upgrades they can use each year. As we’ve opined often in this newsletter, one thing about playing in this game, your loyalty program rewards have to be genuinely, errr, rewarding. Outside of Benjamin Franklin’s classic line about death and taxes, we can te...

  In North America Spring is (finally!!) rearing its head and with it the annual “spring cleaning” adventure is front and center in the minds of many.  While we’d love to wax lyrical about putting bulky winter coats away until November and the joy of late-night BBQ’s in the backyard, the Spring Cleaning metaphor is as apt for your business and loyalty program as it is for your front hall closet.  Even more so as the COVID roller-coaster appears to have abated in many regions. Let’s be honest, COVID was a wild, unpredictable ride that no business owner is keen to repeat. In many cases the dust hasn’t completely settled but the impacts – and the associated changes – have reverberated across many operational aspects of your business. Now is the perfect time to take stock and do a little spring cleaning of your loyalty program too. Here are some critical questions and associated tactics we’re encouraging all business and loyalty leaders to consider. Particularly as we’r...

By: Ray Chelstowski / Hilton Barbour The traditional construct of loyalty programs had customers earning points, miles, or some other manner of token and when they hit a particular threshold, a panacea of rewards would be unlocked for them to choose from. While many businesses have retained that type of transactional relationship inside their loyalty programs, true loyalty between a brand and a consumer isn’t gained when those who actively participate feel that the rewards are ho-hum, generic and cookie-cutter. We can hardly be surprised that 50% of members are inactive in most loyalty programs. Do all that work, shop frequently at a particular business, explicitly (or implicitly) give them tons and tons of personal and transactional data. For what? Generic, uninspired and unexciting rewards. As my Mom likes to say, “the juice ain’t worth the squeeze” What’s missing in many of these programs – and we hear this frequently when we talk to participants, particularly lapsed or inacti...