May 2021

After 32 fantastic years spent across the world on Loyalty, Marketing, Retail and driving from scratch Data centricity and Loyalty strategies, I decided to invest time in becoming a Data and Loyalty « evangelist » for other companies to help them accelerate their journeys, avoid pitfalls and invest in the right things.

Loyalty is a too serious matter to be left (only) to Loyalty Specialists !!!

Loyalty will be featuring at Retailers strategic committees.

Adapting “slightly” the famous 1887 Clemenceau statement, this blog is not a belated realisation that I have missed the point over the course of my last 30 “Loyalty” years or an attempt to become the most hated (by his peers) Loyalty specialist.

So before throwing tomatoes at this blog, let me clarify my point . My assertion is that, in years to come, Loyalty will, on top of everything it does, become a critical enabler for retailer presence on high streets and their overall development strategy.

Loyalty is an enabler for retailers to fight, post Covid, against Commoditisation and Disintermediation

So yes, it will still reward high value consumers, extract more value out of them and drive personalised offers, increased efficiency.

All this good stuff, though, is becoming minimum viable product, hygiene and on the face of it, may get various loyalty teams even further in the “optimisation hamster wheel”, trying to reduce cost, while extracting unbalanced value (vs benefits) from consumers.

As the brand cycle have moved away from funnel marketing, Retailers have seen similar trends in their brand and offer development cycle. In few words, the Digital ecosystem, with its own rules, needs to be coordinated with the “brick and mortar” world eg coordinating a segment based approach (the retail concepts/format dev missions & expectations) with the required Segment of One consumer experience arising from daily digital routine.

Digital represents on one side high risk for high street presence, but it also cannot fully beat consumers expectations for social interaction (as we can all live in past months), new experiences (alone or in groups) where senses are put to work (freshness, taste, colours, etc ….). This obviously does not apply for all retail, but a significant share can benefit of those « real life » needs.

For those retailers, that is where Loyalty comes in play, as a strategic enabler, to fight against commoditisation / disintermediation and support the development concept / models evolutions, transformations.

Loyalty as the connection between Digital journey and on site experience

In my books, Loyalty is more than the marketing program. It is rather the behaviour you intend to trigger from your target consumers.

So yes, Loyalty will always have to deal with our appetite for Value for money, rewarding our repeat purchases in an ever-more personalised way. But even more importantly, it becomes the (digital) entry key into retailers eco systems, connecting how consumers are forming views-about, expectations-from and aspirations-of, on one side and what the same consumers do or do not do in real life on the other one. Measuring, understanding and using the gap between these 2, is where Loyalty & related data analytics will play a significant role in the years to come.  

Applying Loyalty Know how & the associated consumer data analytics to all parts of the business (Offer dev, Marketing, Margin/Cost optimisation, Opex and personalised consumer interaction) is the solution for quite some challenges. This is where brands should invest time and efforts in the years to come in support of Retail.