Loyalty Truth

You’ve probably heard it said that people have three principle assets to contribute to an organization or cause, their “time, talent, and treasure”. When hearing this spoken, my attention has usually gravitated to “treasure” and the phrase was typically heard spoken in the context of an appeal from someone seeking my support for their cause. To take it a step further, I’ve concluded they were really just seeking the synonym for treasure – my money.

Listening to a speaker I respect last week sparked a new understanding of this familiar word trilogy. The speaker made the point to say that each of the three components constituted real treasure and that the treasure of highest order was our time.

Our treasure is our time. What could this mean for Loyalty Marketing?

If you agree with me that marketers often overlook that our customers are in fact human beings, the vision for time as treasure comes into focus quickly. Each time marketers describe their customers as a “target audience”, a “portfolio”, “segment” or “cell”, they de-sensitize management (and themselves) to the reality of customers as actual human beings. With the proliferation of loyalty programs, really data driven marketing as a broad discipline, it is increasingly complex to find the value proposition that will impact the largest number of customers as well as understand how to customize that value proposition to meet the needs of specific groups of people.

Given the time starved and highly distracted nature of our digital world, the challenge is even greater to know what will motivate a person to change behavior, whether purchase behavior or a non-financial interaction behavior like logging into a web account.

The most obvious time – savers that have been offered by loyalty programs for its premium members for some time includes:

• Allow me to board your airplane before others
• Let me check out of your hotel later than others
• Offer me free shipping for my online purchase
• Get me into a shorter hold Q when I’m calling the contact center

In building a social loyalty strategy that is truly Contextual in nature, we’ve got to remember the importance of intrinsic motivations as well as the extrinsic. At the outset of 2013, we outlined a framework in our Loyalty Manifesto and in that document defined Contextual loyalty as reaching customers through the channel they prefer and in near proximity to the point of purchase or interaction with a motivating offer of value.

There are many studies that support the idea that discounts and price reductions offer only fleeting satisfaction for consumers. One of my favorites is the article “If money doesn’t make you happy, then you probably aren’t spending it right”. The article illustrates that spending money on experiences creates the greatest long term impact for people.

Frame this idea in a loyalty marketing context and you see that rewards that stimulate better customer experiences, make people feel recognized and special and deliver time savings are the highest value you can offer. Here are few ideas for you and I’ve bet you have a bunch more. Share them with us when you have a moment and don’t be afraid to tweet this post to get more conversation going.

• If you’re a wireless provider, recognize that I’ve been with your company for over 5 years, have paid a consistent amount on time each month, and reflect that in your service level in the store
• If you’re an airline, send me a promotional code based on my recent flight patterns or tier and allow me quick and easy access to in-flight wireless service
• If you’re Apple, stop asking me if I am a business account if you don’t plan on offering me a specific set of services to help me out. That failure actually wastes my time and erodes my loyalty
• If you’re an online retailer, don’t be afraid to copy the best ideas of your competitors. One-click shopping saves me time and makes my shopping experience better