By: Sue Poulsen
Building on Erika’s observations regarding Loyalty Expo from last week, I should preface this conversation with a little personal history. I have attended 3 of the 4 Loyalty Expos (I missed last year) as an exhibitor, and was involved in one presentation.
My first observation is more of a reflection of our economy in general. I felt that the people who were interested in our product were generally truly interested. In other words, they were shopping. The other two years I attended, there was more polite interest, but I don’t believe companies were as serious about spending capital. As an American, this warms my heart and gives me hope…even though these are all emotional responses not driven on any specific data.
The session given by Robert Passikoff PhD and Amy Shea from Brand Keys Inc. How to Create Loyalty (and the Brands That Are Doing it Best) was my personal favorite. I relish analyzing data, and was particularly struck by what certain brands project versus the reading of the data. So for example, Brand Keys shows NBC as having the most engaged customers for their evening news with Fox showing up as a paltry number 5, but Fox always says they are the most watched “cable” news program. I quickly used Google to answer the question, and mediabistro.com in their TVNewser section did confirm that right now Fox seems to be the top dog in cable news. So how can we use this information? Fox has more viewers, but they are not as engaged? Or consumers like to watch individual programs, but the Brand Fox is perceived poorly? I can’t wait to receive Brand Keys DVD from the session to give me more in depth information. The beauty of data is stepping back and seeing the overall flows and the fun is projecting where it is going to go. Loyalty programs that are run correctly help marketers by collecting that data, but the real key to analyzing it is to really know your customer.
The other 2 main threads I saw throughout Loyalty Expo seemed to be mobile marketing and social networking. The technology advances in the mobile arena were everywhere – and anyone not sporting a QR code (we had one of course thanks to Erika!) was instantly outdated! Social networking from a loyalty program perspective was rightfully focused on how much and the value of the effort. Bill Hanifin specifically talked about the higher potential value of a prospective customer if they were referred by an engaged customer. The old Facebook LIKE button. I guess that makes my teenager with his thousands of friends potentially very valuable. If only I could translate those potential points into college tuition dollars.