Loyalty Programs and Building Loyalty

One of the biggest challenges that brands face today is to find and cultivate loyal customers. Most brands have some sort of loyalty programs to reward loyalty from their customers. Most of these loyalty programs that I am a part of, totally miss the point of loyalty itself. In general, the expectation from enterprise customers or consumers have significantly increased and they now expect brands to not just deliver great products and services but also acknowledge them as individuals and engage, excite and/or woo them to become loyal customers. Add to this, the fact that we are today also living […]

Lessons In Customer Loyalty

The Offer: I got a message from Raymond indicating that they missed me as I had not shopped with them for some time and that they would love to have me back to their shop. And that they would like to give me a  gift of INR 500.   It clearly says that the discount code is not valid for a certain items and end the message with T&C, with no further information. I did feel good about this and decided to take them up on their offer. I visited their showroom and was in for a surprise. The first […]

Why Marketing Should Own Customer Loyalty

  When I ask a room full of marketing professionals, What is the role of marketing? the typical responses are some variation of “Getting customers into the sales funnel”. When I then ask them What role do they play in keeping these customers happy and loyal? Most of the marketers indicate that it is not part of their role. When I then ask them – Whose role is it? I get varied responses – Its the role of customer service or account management, sales  and not marketing. What marketing teams don’t understand is that keeping customers happy and loyal should not […]

PBTO23: Building Fiercely Loyal Communities – @SarahRobinson

In today’s episode, we host Sarah Robinson. She is an author, keynote speaker, entrepreneur and a consultant. In my opinion, she has great ideas about how to create fiercely loyal communities. In this free wheeling conversation, we talk about the importance of building a fiercely loyal community, what defines a fiercely loyal community and how can brands go about building this kind of fiercely loyal communities. Most important learnings from the conversation: In a world where consumers and customers can share their experiences with each other, the relevance and importance of advertising and marketing messages is constantly shrinking. People today […]

Do You Really Know Your Customers?

Google trends shows that since mid 2007, there has been a consistent level of interest in customer advocacy as a topic. With the advent of social media and the amplification of the voice of the consumer, brands who want to put customer engagement at the center of their strategy, are getting more and more serious about nurturing these advocates (like Telstra announced in Feb). They start and run advocacy programs. Unfortunately, most of these programs are nothing but “old wine in new bottle”. What people do not understand is that you can not start an advocacy program and build/nurture customer advocates. […]