I recently wrote a blog for the poor people who employ me, all about the future of loyalty. It got me thinking about the nature of loyalty, something I have not really thought about since my 2015 talk at GWC.
Rather than looking into the future though, my thoughts turned to where do people’s loyalties lie. More specifically, are they loyal to your company or to your loyalty card?
If I look at two loyalty programs, you may see what I am getting at. The two are Nectar and Tesco.
I have been meaning to write about this for a while, but it wasn’t until I answered a question for someone yesterday that I had some words that actually made sense to me!
Old School Loyalty
When we think of loyalty, especially when we consider it in the context of gamification, we tend to think of loyalty cards , air-miles or other point collection systems. You spend £X and we will give you points that can go towards other goods or discounts. When I was a kid, we used a petrol station called Texaco. There were two reasons for this. The first, it was on the way home from church on a Saturday evening and two, it was cheaper than other local options. Something they started to do, was give you stickers based on how much petrol you bought. These stickers were used to fill up cards. These cards could then be traded in against goods – the more cards, the better the goods you could get. Using this method, my Mum and Dad managed to kit out our kitchen with new mugs, new glasses – I even got a Swiss Army Knife out of it!Read More ...
