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The implicit Quid Pro Quo of Loyalty or “Why I reflexively flinched at PaneraBread”

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The implicit Quid Pro Quo of Loyalty or “Why I reflexively flinched at PaneraBread”
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“Would you like to join our rewards program, Sir?”  That’s how it started.  In fact, that pretty much how it always starts.  My instinct was to say no because, like most of us, I know that there’s always some sort of stick behind that carrot.  I’m sure it somehow goes back to our primeval instinct for self-preservation or maybe I’ve just spent too many hours in marketing meetings where the end goal – the ROI – was the dominant topic.

I guess what I’m getting at is that every single modern, western consumer knows implicitly that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Somehow, somewhere the company offering you the carrot is getting something very worthwhile for their effort.

So although I work within the loyalty space and have signed up for way too many rewards programs over the years, I still know (as I suspect most of us do) that if the cute girl behind the counter at Panera is trying to get me to sign up for their rewards program, they are probably getting something much more valuable from me in the transaction.  I just don’t know what it is.

And that’s why the reflexive flinching.

If I know and you know, and by extension pretty much every consumer knows they are biting into a lure with a hook in it, then wouldn’t it make sense for us marketers to try and think around or through engagement strategies that were based on things like affinity, loyalty (the actual word – not the business term), transparency, friendship and maybe even honor?

What if instead of being asked if I would like to join the rewards program (which induces the afore-mentioned pavlovian reflex), we instead used some of the mind-boggling data & technology we now have to pre-read a customer’s status, transaction history, product biases, etc. and simply mentioned to them that they were about to qualify for an X?  What if we just handed them a digital punch card with three holes already punched and said “Thanks – you’re pretty awesome.”  What if we spent 10% of the resources we now allocate to fraud prevention and allocated it to really thinking through the customer’s emotional experience, before, during and after the transaction?

What if this wasn’t just another Jerry Maguire-y soapboxing and some savvy companies actually started to put the customer – and their expectations – first?

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