Bill Hanifin
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Publishing Loyalty Truth since 2005, I’ve been attentive to maintaining the blog as a truly unique industry source of independent and unbiased insights on customer strategy and loyalty marketing. That positioning can occasionally come under challenge and only careful stewardship and clear communication has kept us on track.
Over the next few weeks, we will share announcements with you that may cause you to re-examine this independence. If you’ve noticed the re-launched Loyalty Truth blog site, you will see our sponsorship relationship with Aimia and, in this post, we highlight that Bill Hanifin (that would be me) has been named to a newly formed Board of Advisors for Badgeville, the acknowledged leader in Gamification and behavior modification platforms.
We’ve been entertaining advertisement and sponsorship opportunities for some time and have deferred on a number of them based on the nature of the relationship or timing. Accepting the sponsorship of Aimia is all about good timing and thought leadership alignment. Aimia is the Canadian based global leader in loyalty management, having its roots in the Air Canada frequent flyer program that was spun off as part of the airline’s financial restructuring several years ago. Today, Aimia owns and operates Aeroplan, Canada’s premier coalition loyalty program and Nectar, the United Kingdom’s largest coalition loyalty program. In addition, Aimia has majority equity positions in Air Miles Middle East and Nectar Italia as well as a minority position in Club Premier, Mexico’s leading coalition loyalty program and Cardlytics, a US-based private company operating in merchant-funded transaction-driven marketing for electronic banking.
We’ll have more to say about our relationship with Aimia shortly, but for now, let’s just acknowledge that we are thrilled to have formed this business relationship.
The Badgeville Board of Advisors will provide a forum for thought leadership and creative application of Badgeville products to benefit existing and prospective users. Joining me on the board is a set of acknowledged industry leaders from a variety of marketing disciplines. Badgeville will be announcing the other members through separate releases. Being part of this group also provides an unequalled platform from which we can implement elements of Social Loyalty strategy that Hanifin Loyalty has been developing over the past 7 years.
We’ve dedicated significant resource to understanding how legacy customer loyalty models should evolve to meet the needs of today’s digital consumer. Building on our study of Generation Y (Millennials) in 2005, we’ve broadened our work to encompass the population group known as “Consumer 2.0”. Estimated to represent approximately 50% of the US population or 150 Million persons, Consumer 2.0 is composed of those highly networked, mobile and “always-on” consumers who have taken brand conversations outside of traditional channels and are redefining how brands understand purchase behavior.
In the new era of Social Loyalty, brands need to get “ahead of the transaction” to be successful, and Gamification is the best engine to drive customer engagement, a predecessor of longer term brand loyalty. In our opinion, we believe Badgeville has the right technology, resources, and vision to change the shape of customer loyalty over the near term and make social loyalty a reality.
As a little background, Badgeville is known as The Behaviour Platform, and enables more than 150 of the world’s most innovative businesses to measure and influence user behaviour. The growing client list includes Deloitte, Samsung, EMC, CA, NBC, The Active Network, Appirio, Recyclebank, and many more. Founded in 2010 to revolutionize the analytics industry and bring modern engagement experiences to every web and mobile property, Badgeville draws on proven techniques from social gaming, traditional loyalty programs and social networking in its acclaimed suite of Behaviour Lifecycle Management solutions.
The team at Badgeville has extensive experience in game design, loyalty, enterprise software, and analytics, drawing on executives and team leaders from Zynga, Omniture, Playdom, American Express, Electronic Arts, Lithium, WebEx, Amazon, and Salesforce.com.
Over the summer, I’ll be participating with other members of the Advisory Board in a series of City Tour events in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York. I’ll also be part of the Badgeville User Summit in San Francisco, scheduled for August 8-9, 2012.
Industry pundits as far away as Bahrain are speculating that 2012 will be the year that Loyalty Marketing makes great strides into the future. We agree, and through these relationships we will maintain our objectivity and continue to share the “truth” about Loyalty Marketing as you have come to expect. Badgeville, and you, wouldn’t have it any other way.
