Reigniting shoppers’ love affair with loyalty programs

Successful loyalty programs are all about building deeper relationships with customers.

While many retailers have loads of data on their customers, few are mining and using this data to deliver a more relevant and rewarding customer experience.

My boss, Dr. Matthew Green from emnos USA, recently authored an article outlining 5 steps to achieving greater personal relevance with customers. In summary:

1. Focus on the data that really counts. The obsession with #BigData can distract you from your real goal - giving customers more of what they want. Target your analysis to stay on track.
2. Retain your team. Analyzing and acting on #BigData requires transformation and change management.
3. Set clear objectives. Without a strong focus interpreting results can lead to lots of debate. So establish clear goals to help everyone understand the customer behavior you're trying to change. 
4. Inform customer interactions. Apply the data you have on customer buying behavior to ensure your messaging and offers are relevant and meaningful. 
5. Get support to overcome barriers. Don't let the challenges of cultural resistance to doing new things, inadequate infrastructure or capabilities, or implementation complexity stop you.

Loyal customers are often 10x more valuable than acquiring new ones. Don't make the mistake of investing all your money chasing the customers you don't have. 

When approached in a disciplined, pragmatic and integrated manner brands that invest in building relationships with loyal customer are sure to realize greater growth in sales and profits.

Why marketers should stop selling and start storytelling

Legendary adman John Wannamaker once said: “people buy things for two reasons, the right reason and the real reason.” The right reason is always rational and logical, while the real reason is always emotional.

If you’re a marketer looking to make a bigger impact, you need to stop thinking about creating advertising and start focusing on storytelling. Great storytelling establishes strong emotional connections. It transforms ideas and information into memorable experiences. And all great advertising is memorable for how it makes people feel.

The reason why so many ads are so bad is that most marketers develop advertising from a product-centric perspective. And since product-centric advertising promotes features and benefits, it usually leads to campaign messages that are overly rational and void of emotion.

Here are three simple steps that can help you shift your advertising focus from product-centric thinking to storytelling.

1. Identify the primary emotion driving consumer behavior in your product or service category. Is your audience driven to feel safe? Happy? Loved? Sexy? Energized? Etc.
2. Find your authentic1 voice. Examine the consumer purchase path and the actions that your brand takes to serve customers at each step of the decision making process. Your actions, along with the tone and manner in which they’re provided, define your authentic and true voice. This represents your brand’s emotional DNA.
3. Build your story one chapter at a time. Break down the ideas and messages you’re trying to communicate into singular topics. Create a “storytelling messaging map”2 to illustrate how your brand will emotionally communicate all key messaging points.   Then define the tactics across paid, earned and owned media which will work most effectively to convey the desired emotion and build content narratives to guide the story.

Great brand building isn’t about advertising, it’s about storytelling and creating an emotional experience that consumers enjoy, talk about, remember and act on.

To read more about the how emotions influence what we buy,check out this interesting article from Psychology Today.

1Be careful to avoid using aspirational language and words to define your brand voice that aren’t an accurate reflection of how people feel based on their actual experience with your products and services. There’s no room for disconnect when you’re trying to be authentic.

2A storytelling messaging map works very similar to a curriculum.  It spells out specific messages (lessons) that will help your audience emotionally connect and learn. It is different than a storyboard.  The messaging map defines the requirements and priorities for effective communication. A storyboard, or content narrative, represents the tactical approach to conveying a particular emotion and message point.

A great brand story needs a strong title

So you’re a marketer, and it’s your job to promote your brand. Not only to get people interested in your products and services, but to convert that interest into sales.

You compete in a highly competitive category, filled with tough competition and saturated with advertising, publicity and sales messaging.

Compounding the challenge is a media landscape that’s incredibly fragmented. Your audience is spread across traditional media like TV, cable, radio and print. Digital media such as search, social and mobile are making things even harder.

Budgets are limited. Expectations for brand and sales growth are high. And it feels increasingly difficult to get results that show ROI to your management.

With these concerns pressing in from all sides, it’s to fall into what  I call the “logical messaging” pit.

It’s the place where you focus on building campaigns and marketing materials that try to convey and explain all the features and benefits of your products and service.

You hold tight to a strategy rooted in rational decision making and strict brand and communication guidelines that need to be followed—all while expecting original thinking and creative ideas that drive growth.

The “logical messaging” pit is a very hard to escape once you’re in it. For most brands it’s a dead end that kills creativity and strips emotion out of brand marketing.

Let me explain why the “logical messaging” trap is one you need to avoid.

Imagine that your brand is a book. It sits on a shelf in a bookstore surrounded by dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of other books that all cover the same category and topic.

Prospective buyers face an overwhelming number of choices. While the content inside each book likely covers the same subject matter – i.e. your brand and competitors address the same need  – whether someone chooses to buy your book (or not) depends mainly on one thing:

The Title of Your Book

To explain my point, let’s consider an example from the financial services industry. That category is saturated with competition and a staggering amount of advertising and marketing.

If you were looking for information and help on investing, a quick scan of companies and their websites might leave lay out the choices and descriptions in the following ways:

1. Challenge the status quo, investing made easy
2. Helping you achieve financial success
3. Take control of your investments
4. Investment guidance you can trust
5. Wealth management advice and strategies to reach your goals

Do any of these titles speak to you? Do they inspire you to engage with the company and brand?

Sadly, these are the real messages, taken from leading firms in the investment industry, whose names I’m leaving out.

All of them are deeply trapped in the “logical messaging” pit. Their websites speak to “award-winning tools”, “advice and relationships you can trust,” and a “personalized approach.”

Not a single one of these leading brands tells their story in an emotionally compelling way. There’s nothing inspiring to make prospective investors engage with the brand.

I’m not saying logic and reason aren’t important to making smart investment choices. Rather that these benefits are assumed, and they don’t differentiate one brand from another.

Imagine instead if in your search for investment advice you came across a book titled: “The Intelligent Investor.” Would feeling smart about money motivate you to engage? Would it give you confidence?

Developing a clear, succinct and emotionally meaningful title for what your brand story is all about is one of the best ways you can set your business apart and inspire consumers to engage.

Brand storytelling is not about ad slogans and taglines. It’s about avoiding or getting out of the “logical messaging” trap and tapping into the emotion that motivates consumer behavior.