Loyalty Truth

Terrapinn is a company that has taken a big stake in customer loyalty. They currently organize “Loyalty World” conferences in most of the world’s developed markets. They are also heavily promoting their Total Customer blog.

That said, it’s interesting they chose to run a story last week titled “Infographic” The problem with customer loyalty”. I’ve been taking inventory of opinion articles about loyalty marketing of late, with my primary intent to separate fact from fiction, truth from web-traffic-seeking-hype.

Distilling the message in the article and infographic, I sense an overreaching desire to stir up controversy for the sake of controversy itself. After reading the article a few times, I concluded I had just found one more example cautioning for discernment of what you read online.

Building an effective data-driven customer marketing strategy is highly complex. In our own work, we’ve been borrowing from multiple areas of inspiration when helping clients create winning loyalty strategies that meet the needs of the Millennial generation and the broader set of digitally enabled customers.

There is no silver bullet that defines an optimal strategy for every company. There is however wisdom in blending the learning and experience of working with clients for two decades with awareness of changes in consumer behavior to create strategies that deliver profitable results.

I’m not upset with Terrapinn, just a little disappointed at the shift in focus from the positive to loyalty bashing. It seems a popular trend these days and most jumping on the bandwagon have their own agenda to advance in the process. After reading this article, I couldn’t help but reflect that “Infographics” are named for a reason, because they are certainly not all qualified to be labeled as “Factographics”.