Convergence Conversation

In the last couple of months, two new massive loyalty initiatives have been launched - and nobody really noticed.

Together they cover over 16 billion purchases and almost 1 billion people. They come from two of the largest brands in the world, one of which is rated number 8 in the top 100 Best Brands for 2011.

It's probably no real guess that these two brands are Facebook and Apple. However, what might be harder to pinpoint is the loyalty initiatives that they have launched.

Loyalty doesn't always have to mean points = prizes. Instead, loyalty can be defined as

Any activity or treatment that gets customers to make ongoing choices in your favour, all things being equal

Using this definition, I think you can define Facebook Timeline and Apple iTunes Match as loyalty initiaitves and here's why. More...

If they say a picture is worth a thousand words then the following graph is no exception.

Using Tesco market share data from TNS/Kantar Worldpanel, there seems to be an interesting correlation between changes in their market share and changes in the reward value of Tesco Clubcard.

With declining market share in 2007-2008, Tesco implemented the Double Points Promotion which gave customers a huge lift in loyalty value and in response, Tesco didn't just stem the decline in market share, they lifted it 5.5% from 2008 levels.

In 2010 the double points promotion was changed to make it less generous, reducing reward deals from 4x value to 3x. More...

At this time of year, thoughts tend to be about you and yours. This however may be a continuing theme going into 2012 as I think loyalty marketing is going to become a lot more interested in "you".

This is more than just mass personalisation or segmented communications. I believe 2012 will be about individual engagement and empowerment as consumers provide more and more data, expecting increased control over it and better experiences being delivered because it.

You (and your data)

Back in 2006, Time Magazine named the Person of the Year as "You". Pointing out the cultural shift that social media had begun to bring, they recognised that it was democratising communications, with people sharing with each other and big institutions and governments beginning to lose control. More...

I'm a loser.  I've been a loser lots of times.

When I play poker, I very rarely win big and tend to be happy if I break even.  When I was young and we'd play games like pass the parcel, I'd lose more times than I won.  Losing is part of life and it's what makes winning feel that much more special.

When my kids play games like pass the parcel now, every wrapper has a gift in it.  Everyone's a winner.  Yay!  Strangely enough they don't really play it that often.

If everyone is a winner then essentially no one is a winner.  All it does is dilute the whole process to the point where taking part ceases to have value. More...

Being a little impatient I found myself slightly annoyed on the London Underground this week by a closed station. It wasn't that the station in question was my stop, it was simply that the train went on a go-slow when it approached and went past the station to maintain the schedule for the train but without actually stopping. Overall the journey time wasn't changed, but this didn't stop the slightly irrational feeling that I was being held up.

Whether it's a traffic jam, the delay of a plane or crowded streets, no one seems to like a loss of momentum.

Interestingly, momentum and the need to maintain it is one of the main aims for Controlled Motorways which use techniques like Variable Speed Limits. More...

Payments cards are a legacy of the last century.

Their design was necessitated by a need to be able to communicate the identity of the holder and the provider/guarantor of the funds. This resulted in a physical card format, originally paper, more recently plastic which has since proliferated in our wallets as both payment choices and payment providers have ballooned.

Originally used in the 1920's, the first payment cards were issued by merchants with customers having a different card for each merchant. Seeing an opportunity to simplify payments for customers and possibly to create competitive advantage, several companies in the late 1930's started to accept each others cards. More...

Well if you have any association with loyalty marketing, you can't fail to have noticed the new brand on the block, Aimia.

Whilst exciting news (full disclosure - I work for Aimia), it was also great to see some new research released at the same time which we've just carried out on the loyalty market. Part of an ongoing strategy for loyalty thought-leadership, the new research entitled "Born this way - the US Millennial Loyalty Survey" focused on the growing importance of the Millennial generation. Numbering over 1.7bn globally, this generation is bigger than the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Generation X - they are also coming of age and so will be increasingly important to brands who want to connect with them. More...

Halifax Bank announced this week that it is intending to run a lottery style monthly promotion called Halifax Savers Prize Draw. The scheme will reward savers with deposits of £5,000 or more (and who opt-in) with the chance to win one of three top prizes of £100k a month or smaller prizes of £1,000 or £100 - paying out a total of £6m in the course of the year.

While this is undoubtedly a promotion to attract new customers, it also has an interesting loyalty angle to it.

If Halifax attempted to create a "full" loyalty programme for savers this just wouldn't be rewarding enough to make it motivating. More...

A recent PayPal blog by Scott Thompson, President of PayPal gives a strong overview of their future direction - and in a word it's convergence.

• The convegence of offline and online retail
• The convergence of social and retail
• The convergence of EPOS and payments
• The convergence of offers and payments
• The convergence of payments and loyalty
• The convergence of the purchase and the purchase decision

That last point is the most powerful - previously banks and payment providers like PayPal moved money.  It was all about the transaction with little regard for the person making it or the reason behind it. More...

Loyalty is making headlines again.  With Airmiles announcing that it's to rebrand to Avios, there has been a media feeding frenzy discussing everything from the u-turn on taxes and potential devaluation through to the re-branding and how long it might last.
Overall the publicity seems to have been negative but then this is to be expected; Airmiles is a well loved brand but has become a little like Woolworths before it's demise - everybody of a certain age knows about it and many remember it fondly, however actual usage has declined over time from it's height in the late 80's and early 90's with only 2m active members now out of the 8m total. More...