Bill Hanifin
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If you are seeking change, you won’t find it in your comfort zone. Yes, change sometimes “happens to us”, but that type of change can fall into the unwanted category. If you are seeking positive change that can transform your business or personal life, you’ve got to reach out and engage people, things, and places that provide a medium for change.
Seeking change in my business means continuing to engage smart people who share a common interest in building customer engagement and changing consumer behavior for the brands they represent, in turn creating what we’re still content to call customer loyalty.
I found lots of great people and ideas this week as CashStar’s third annual Retailer Roundtable. Sponsored by a “gift card” company, even an innovative one, proud loyalty marketers might have skipped the event thinking they had the gift card category nailed. What I found was a line-up of speakers that included Steve Arthur, Head of Retail Industry, Google, Mark Bonchak, Founder ORBIT, Alex Rampell, CEO TrialPay, and Denee Carrington, Forrester Research. Combined with the leadership of CashStar, they put on a thought provoking show.
The theme of the presentations centered around the idea of Branded Currency, a concept capably outlined by Mark Bonchak and Gene Cornfield, CashStar’s VP Marketing. The two combined to write an article on the subject which has been published by the Harvard Business Review.
Mark shared a vision that offers, gift cards and loyalty points can be combined to create a high-utility currency for consumers that will have a much greater impact than continuing to manage each one in silo-ed fashion. His ideas were entirely compatible with our outline of how loyalty can become “Contextual” as documented in our Loyalty Manifesto 2013.
The presenters shared a progressive vision of the future for shared currency, offer management, digital wallets, and loyalty marketing. The illustrations I was able to share with the group of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts centering their loyalty programs on prepaid cards (really a reloadable gift card) provided evidence of how a branded currency can be successfully presented to a customer base.
We also talked about different models available to brands to create customer loyalty. One step along the way to creating a branded currency is to engage “smart partnering” to allow separate brands to combine resources and deliver an enhanced customer experience. Best Western and Harley Davidson are doing this today via Ride Rewards, and Alex Rampell shared an example of customers being able to shop at Whole Foods Market to earn access to otherwise paid content at the New York Times.
The group of presenters agreed that consumer behavior has undergone generational change. Push marketing strategies will find it increasingly difficult to meet their needs. Creating a branded currency is one very interesting way to shift push to pull and engage the new generation of digitally enabled customers.
