Loyalty marketing is a near-universal. It has two components, recognition (elite benefits) and rewards (rebates). Different elements move the needle more for different customers, different businesses can authentically utilize each in varying proportions, and some products can truly replace traditional awareness advertising with loyalty marketing while others need to first generate broad attention.
When a business develops a relationship with a customer it doesn’t always realize it. A program is a great way to formalize that, to ensure that recognition occurs. When a business owner fails to take that step, sometimes customers will cry out loudly for it such as at one cafe where a man declared himself customer of the month. (HT: Marginal Revolution)
The cafe near work doesn’t have a loyalty program so I made one for them pic.twitter.com/ozP961hFpi
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 19, 2019
Since the loyalty relationship wasn’t just one-to-one between the brand and a single customer, and other customers felt like they were just as important if not more so, things escalated to “involve[..] a projector, bespoke loyalty cards, custom uniforms – and after new developments late on Friday afternoon, a permanent tattoo.”
First another customer declares themselves to be the most valuable.
I go back in and am confronted by this horseshit. Another customer has tried to one up me. They’ve just made a very unpowerful enemy. pic.twitter.com/WZ2Xkw377M
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 19, 2019
Then the first customer gave themselves an even higher elite status.
I’ve just presented them with a much, much larger certificate pic.twitter.com/kWFdl88ZLZ
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 19, 2019
The battle rages on.
The cafe has asked to organise a complimentary breakfast together. See, being petty does pay off.
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 19, 2019
This guerrilla attempt to generate a loyalty program even resulted in makeshift membership cards and t-shirts.
Great news! The new staff uniforms have arrived! pic.twitter.com/mqrD881nTs
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 22, 2019
And a tattoo.
I may have just lost. She’s upped the game. pic.twitter.com/tdZBsgrYKM
— Toast of the WWWeb (@CondimentWords) August 23, 2019
This is truly something special. Customers who are so loyal and so identify with the brand that they’re clamoring for a recognition program and go so far as to create it themselves. Listen to your customers.
By the way one place where airlines went wrong is when they started discouraging mileage runs. These were customers so motivated by a loyalty program they bought extra product and spent extra time just to be more attached to a brand.
They may not have been the highest margin customers (although buying cheap fares presumably these were seats an airline didn’t expect to sell — so they may have been close to 100% margin) but they’re customer evangelists — something airlines certainly have too few of these days.
Funny stuff. Thanks for the laughs.
I agree with you Gary, I certainly wasn’t AA’s best ExPlat customer but I sure encouraged others to fly AA. Today, I tell my friends to choose on price.
My most recent AA flight to Europe I earned more AA points from a car rental than from my AA loyalty card.
I agree. My wife and I are travel addicts. We mastered the WackyWeekend(TM). We were for a number of years BOTH diamond on DL and executive platinum on AA. The new minimum spend will dramatically change our travel in 2020. We both work full time and flew approximately 300k miles/yr.
I get why UA and AA have raised the qualification requirements and give fewer benefits to FFs, and cut the quality of onboard product to the bone – when every flight is pretty full, you will sell that seat anyway, so why spend the money. However, I think that may well be short-sighted, as it ensures that your competitors that also have full seats and better service can charge a premium and make more money. And if there comes a time when demand decreases, having a bad brand will come back to hurt them.