Loyalty Truth

There’s a secret society that I wish to unmask. It’s not as menacing as the Knight’s Templars, but if you are tasked with selling consulting services, marketing technology or loyalty marketing solutions, you will immediately identify society members by their common behaviors.

It’s the “Society of Graduate Buyers“. These are the folks who, in the course of a sales or capabilities presentation, ask the tough questions and take “poker face” to a whole new level. Ask them for a detailed description of next steps at the end of the meeting, and they will immediately defer to the procurement officer sitting at the end of the table or indicate that the decision makers are going on vacation for the next week or two and “we’ll get back to you”.

Seasoned salespeople are used to the process and have developed thick hides, therefore you’ll understand that I’m just having some fun here. In fact, if you don’t get frustrated by the white collar version of a “stiff arm”, you can learn a thing or two.

In a recent meeting, one of the client group threw me a curve ball, asking if I had experience with both “Big L and Little L” loyalty programs. He went on to explain that, by his definition, Big L programs feature an explicit value proposition with a promotional currency (points, miles, stars, credits) while Little L programs score member behavior and use the data to trigger promotions, offers, and communications without full transparency to the consumer.

The answer of course was “yes” as I’ve worked to leverage behavioral and attitudinal data to create value propositions articulated in many forms besides points. I would include viral, word-of-mouth, and social media programs with a data backbone in this group. The client must have been a consultant somewhere in his past as giving something familiar a catchy name is part of the trade (ever hear of the Loyalty Asterisk™?).

The lesson I learned from this encounter was simple:  loyalty marketing is anything but business as usual these days and practioners need to constantly test themselves to stay abreast of how the market perceives our craft. We also need to expand our definition of how customer loyalty can be created, and embrace that we have the tools to achieve multiple goals across the business from acquisition to retention and cross-sell.

I’ve added the “LIttle L” to my loyalty glossary and have pledged to give the next set of Graduate Buyers the benefit of the doubt. Never know what I’ll learn next!