Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout from Truth, and today I have the pleasure of talking with Marc St. Pierre. Marc is the Director of Strategy at Globant. But today we’re talking about AB InBev and a B2B transformation story.
AB InBev is the largest brewery in the world, and in 2019, it relied on sales reps to take orders. But through a business transformation process to improve customer experience and putting the customer at the center of everything they do. They created a 40 billion sales platform and ultimately Club B.
Club B recognizes purchases, offers challenges and rewards non transactional activities. It started in South America, but is now seen across the world in its global rollout with different nuances per market, a global B2B platform, but local execution.
So today I have the pleasure of chatting with Marc St. Pierre. Marc is the Director of Strategy at Globant, but our conversation today is going to be very heavily focused around, around some amazing work Marc has done at Anheuser Busch InBev, so AB InBev. Marc, welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Marc: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Amanda: So there’s a real interesting story we’re going to unwrap for the listeners of Let’s Talk Loyalty. But as you know, there is a favorite question on Let’s Talk Loyalty. And that favorite question is, what is your favorite loyalty program to kick us off?
Marc: Yeah, of course. So it’s not original, but as a consumer who travels a lot for work and with family, I’m extremely loyal to Delta because it makes travel, which can be amazing or can be really difficult.
Delta makes it easier as a professional, a program that I really look to for inspiration and innovation. It’s actually a boring business. It’s called 7 Eleven. They’re a convenience store here in the US and I’m pretty sure globally. I have a friend who works on the program there and I’m always impressed for someone who sells snacks and drinks, how they bring loyalty to their, I’m sorry, bring loyalty to their customers with innovative program. So it has simple, clear progress. There’s a wallet for payment. There’s ability to lock in gas prices and you can even scan in store items and pay just with your phone. So I’d say 7 Eleven.
Amanda: Yeah, fabulous. Well, you ticked all the boxes there. It’s simple and so on so, and it gives customers what they want at the end of the day on everyday purchases.
So, but Delta, that’s a great one. It’s when we counted up the Most Favorite Loyalty Programs of Loyalty Professionals in Chapter 100 of Blind Loyalty, Delta was within the top 10. So you’re not alone in choosing Delta. So great choice.
Okay. So you personally have a strange, I say strange, but with the utmost respect, strange route to loyalty per se. You’ve done an awful lot of great and interesting roles, which haven’t necessarily been purely in loyalty. So I was really interested in this because I always think loyalty is much more of a general practice rather than a very niche marketing environment, so to speak. So Marc, talk us through that a little bit, because I think your words to me stumbled into loyalty.
Marc: Yeah, I think that’s fair. And as you mentioned, I’m a generalist. I’m what David Epstein would say as a person with a range. I studied finance and entrepreneurship at Babson college. I then went on to do finance and marketing at Unilever. Where I really learned about like the general management of a CPG Business. And then I was looking for more of a global experience, and that’s what took me to Anheuser Busch InBev where I was in the global sales strategy and trade marketing team. And that perspective really helped me to understand doing business in other countries.
And then in 2019, as you mentioned, I kind of fell in love with loyalty. I had the opportunity to be a part of a project that is now called bees.com and they asked me to build a loyalty program from scratch. That loyalty program now reaches 3,000,000 B2B small and medium sized retailers, predominantly in South America. And I would say the breadth of finance, marketing, sales, CPP, BeVal, really gave me the ability to empathize with consumers, customers, and business problems and help me to build a loyalty program that’s been in function to deliver, you know, results for the company in the consumers.
Amanda: Yeah. And you’ve touched on, you said three things there. That’s about bees.com. So obviously your background and the generalist and the ability to take all of that and then falling in love. What a great expression in 2019. I fell in love with loyalty. That’s beautiful.
But the three things I just want to highlight there that I think a lot of practitioners in loyalty around the world and the listeners of Let’s Talk Loyalty would be super proud of 3 million, big number. B2B, also an area that I don’t think we talk enough about. I’m super passionate about B2B loyalty. And then SMEs. I don’t think, I may be wrong and Paula must correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I haven’t heard a many podcasts around SME loyalty. So that’s why I was so interested in what we can talk about today. Cause I think you’re touching on all the right discussion points. So thank you for falling in love with loyalty. So you can share this wonderful story with us.
So, as we said, your today’s story is about the work you did it you know, AB InBev and the bees.com or Club B program. So I think I didn’t appreciate this until we did the research for today’s discussion. It’s actually the largest brewer in the world. So I think a nice starting point for this discussion to share these insights is, how did bees.com start?
Marc: Sure made a good point and I should take a step back because I’ve been living it for so long that I forget maybe some of the context.
So as you mentioned, Anheuser-Busch InBev or AB InBev is the largest brewer in the world. They do about 60 billion annually in revenue. People would probably know them for their brands like Budweiser, Stella Artois, Corona, Michelob Ultra, or I guess in your neck of the woods, Castle Lager. At the time in 2019, even though they were a massive sophisticated business, they still relied in many markets where we have direct distribution on sales reps to take orders from customers.
So we sell beer and other products to as I mentioned, small and medium size, you know, businesses, bodegas, tenders, comatose. And in 2019, we were still doing that with a sales rep who visit every Tuesday of the week and they would interrupt the customer in their daily routine and ask them for their order. We used to joke that what made a good sales rep was really long legs because they could visit many customers. But with some changes in leadership and Ricardo Tadeu coming to lead as Chief Sales Officer, he realized an opportunity for us to really transform our business. And the heart of that transformation was an improvement in customer experience, really putting the customer at the center as a business.
We were known as really strong operators who are exceptional at managing costs and growing through acquisition. And the whole premise of these was how do we change our mindset, transform our business by putting the customer at the center and reimagining the order taking process from a sales rep to an e-commerce experience.
So we started that project in 2019. I was on a team of, I think there’s just eight of us at the time, and we decided to start in the Dominican Republic, a relatively small market, close proximity to our headquarters in New York. The only problem about starting a loyalty program in the Dominican Republic is our market share is above 90.
So I remember flying down to meet the, you know, person in charge of the business at the time and explain to him all the benefits of loyalty. And he said, Marc, you know, loyalty is not the problem that we have. So, it was funny because it took us some time to realize how we could use a points based loyalty program to not necessarily only drive loyalty, but in the beginning, it was really about driving customer adoption of a new way of placing their orders and then eventually taking that adoption, you know, fostering kind of engagement and then translating that engagement to growth. So that’s how be started in 2019. It was just a pilot project in the second half of 2019.
And then I distinctly remember in April of 2020, when, you know, the world had shut down we started getting calls from all the other countries who could no longer send their sales reps to go visit their customers. And they said that project you guys did, how’s it going? Did it work? And very quickly between 2020 and today these is now in, I want to say over 25 markets. They do about 40 billion dollars, US dollars of gross merchandise volume on the platform. They sell not only Anheuser Busch products, but other predominantly CPG products. So think of like soft drinks, snacks, et cetera, the things that these customers need.
Amanda: It’s incredible how such a story has come out as of a non loyalty almost problem to solve, right? It was a customer experience business transformation project. And then the, what the customer adoption process allow, it sort of was encouraged through the loyalty platform or the loyalty program.
But at the end of the day, if you are, if you have the normal distribution of customers, we call it the long tail, that’s what you and I were referring to as well. So, are you trying to, through this process, trying to solve the business challenge for the majority of the SME customers, or are you finding it concentrated on that long tail, or is it concentrated more on your top end customers?
Marc: One of the interesting things we find about B2B that’s different than B2C is the size differences in customers. You might have very sophisticated operators that buy millions of dollars from you, but you also might have your small mom and pops. I think historically as a business, we were challenged to focus, you know, fewer and fewer resources on the 20 percent of customers that represent 80 percent of the business.
But I think what was beautiful about Bees and Club B is it really created a connection with and kind of democratize the business for all of those, like you said, long tail of small to medium sized customers that maybe we haven’t been focused on connecting with or caring for prior to this digital transformation.
So for many customers, those mom and pops, they wouldn’t receive any incentive support or investment from the organization until we had Club B. And it wasn’t much, it was just, you know, one to 2 percent of their sales. But for the first time they were earning points, redeeming points. And we saw that in the NPS numbers and the, you know, the verbatim feedbacks that we heard from our customers.
So I would say to answer your question more concisely, like these was for all of our customers, but it was important that we also support those smaller ones and we found really interesting in granular growth in those small customers that we were unexpected by.
Amanda: That’s what I love about this actually, you know, is exactly that this, if we look at the B2C environment, we tend to talk more around just letting the long tail almost not churn, but tick over, like, let’s just keep with brand messaging and as much marketing effort as we can afford, but we just took it over. Whereas it feels like this has really ignited that long tail for your business. Because previous prior to this, they, as you said, they didn’t have any interaction, any mechanism in which to get closer to the organization. It was more just a reliance on any promos or and even maybe they weren’t getting that. So it’s really fascinating how it’s how the transformation has managed to reach this enormous quantum of customers. And as you say, the volume of revenue going through the platform at 40 billion is just amazing. Amazing.
So, so Marc, talk us through, that’s the broader context to bees and how it came about and who you’re targeting, but actually the loyalty elements of that. I think this is a really interesting piece for obviously the listeners of Let’s Talk Loyalty, given the focus on loyalty. How does the actual program Club B work?
Marc: Ah, yeah, great question. So Club B is a points based program. And in the beginning when we were designing the program it was extremely important for us to keep it simple.
We had done some customer research and found that there was a wide range of experience and knowledge as it came to e-commerce and specifically loyalty programs. We wanted to make sure that the program was simple by design in order to drive adoption and engagement. So, the way it works is customers earn points for every purchase that they make on these. They can then earn extra points for completing these personalized points based offers. Depending on the country, they might be called desafios or challenges.
I was really inspired by Sephora at the time they had these points based offers that I thought were brilliant because they were over multiple purchases. It wasn’t just like one transaction. It was over the course of weeks or months, or you know, you can clearly see the progress and keep someone engaged. So you earn extra points for completing these.
And for the business, these points based offers were really tied to the objectives of the business. So we’d ask customers to buy a specific assortment over the course of a week or a month. We’d have asked them to have the right in store execution. So having a cooler fully stocked in the front of your store on a Friday and we would validate that with image recognition technology. We’d give them extra points for that.
And then if they purchased the minimum volume or a certain combination of items over multiple orders, as I mentioned, then they’d earn extra points and they can save all these points and redeem them for initially free product. But over time, we expanded and evolved the redemption catalog to include prizes, items for their business, tables and chairs, experiences, and some markets even cash back.
Amanda: Wonderful. If I mean, you’re just sticking all the boxes, you know, you club beers rewarding for the transactional spend on purchases. It’s rewarding for specific points based offers that you’re trying to drive either category or volume or multiple category purchases. And then lastly, as you say, the non transactional activities like merchandise principles or how well stocked is the fridge, how beautifully stocked is the fridge, where is the fridge, where is the point of sale merchandise and so on.
So yeah it’s, I find it really interesting that it’s ticking all the boxes and some of these elements that are not always fulfilled in the B2C programs that we see. So it really is something that’s obviously driving the right behavior for your business, but via your SME and B2B customers. So I love it. I really do. I think it’s absolutely fascinating what you’ve achieved.
So as you say, you’ve got a dominance in South America, but we’ve had a few podcast discussions on Let’s Talk Loyalty, where there’s a global brand, as obviously, Anheuser Busch is an enormous global brand, but you’re in specific markets. And we all know markets can be very different depending on what the market conditions are. So how did you roll that out globally across the globe, but by being market specific?
Marc: Yeah, so by design, the global organization at Anheuser Busch InBev is very lean. It’s part of the culture that, you know, we empower the markets.
And the role of global really is to build capabilities that enable the countries. So our approach was to build all of the technology centrally that could work in every market. So we needed to take feedback and input and requirements from each of the markets, but we were committed to building you know, one tech stack. It wasn’t multiple iterations of product. It’s just not how you do it.
Once we had built the technology, we established global guidelines around the governance of the program, the accounting of the program, and we built this internal community with a little bit of kind of like gamification or you know, competitions to establish and share best practices.
But then once that was in place, we really step back and empower the markets to own and operate their own programs. Because as you mentioned, there are serious and, you know, meaningful differences between markets. I don’t think you’d be successful if you tried to do a one size fits all. The differences in realities that customers face for, say, currency and inflation and markets like Argentina versus South Africa are completely different, and the program needs the flexibility to meet those customers needs and those business needs where they are. So I think freedom within a framework was really are kind of mantra.
Amanda: So talk us through, if you can, Marc, the like, you mentioned high inflation. So how did you overcome that to satisfy your customers in Argentina? What was the mechanism you used to make sure it was more market specific for Argentina?
Marc: Yeah, what we notice in Argentina is because of the rapid inflation, customers weren’t really saving their points to redeem. They were burning points and redeeming them as soon as possible. So what we needed to do because we had various size customers is make some of the redemption items at a lower value to redeem. So they didn’t have to wait two weeks, a month to redeem. We were giving them, let’s say affordable or low priced items that they could redeem on every order.
Another thing we would do is often have like these redemption events where imagine an item like tables and chairs is offered for 100 points. We would have limited time offers to get that same table and chair set for, say, 75 points. So this created some sense of urgency, but acknowledged the fact that customers in Argentina probably don’t want to save up their points for a vacation. It’s just not the reality that they live in. So the local team had to account for that.
As a contrast in South Africa, when we started, I think you’ll know this. Well, there’s like the formal trade with, you know, licensed distributors of alcohol. And there was a large informal trade in South Africa. But what that means is in South Africa, we have fewer customers, those formal ones that we sell to, but they’re much larger.
And from the very beginning, because we had more sophisticated programs in the past, they wanted to have cash back right away. So the program started off very transactional. But over time, what we added to the program was additional redemption items of things that they needed for their business.
But because it was procured by SAB Miller or you know, our business, we could offer them at a discount. So the things that I was talking about, coolers, tables, chairs, every tavern needs and even things like, I know there’s power outages, I forget what they’re called. I think it’s called load shedding, right? Load shedding in South Africa. So we’ve offered generators to solve that problem of, I’m running a tavern, load shedding is happening in my neighborhood, we’ve lost power, how do I keep my customer is happy. And we offer those items and prizes for their business for redemption.
Amanda: That’s fantastic. That’s definitely freedom within a framework. So I don’t know many other countries that would be faced with such dreadful, like operational challenges, like load shedding, i.e. power outages, planned power cuts, but that’s amazing. Just two countries like Argentina and South Africa. I mean, unless you understand the nuances within those countries, you wouldn’t think about the real differences you highlighted there, which was fascinating. It’s pretty obvious. I think you’d need maybe customization on the redemption catalog, but I’ve really enjoyed that, that insight about just two examples you’ve given us of South America and South Africa and Argentina.
Okay. So, so obviously as you’ve right, you know, rightly pointed out, this is very much B2B, but you’ve also touched on how B2B and B2C is different. So give me a bit more of your views on that. Like, what are the major differences between creating a loyalty program for B2B environments versus B2C?
Marc: Yeah, honestly, I think there’s tons of opportunity in B2B loyalty and B2B business transformation, because frankly speaking, B2B is often more complex in terms of you have multiple users tied to one account.
The pricing is different by every customer. The payment terms could be different. So I think B2B is a little bit behind because of the complexity of that, that relationship.
And I think when we’re thinking about loyalty programs and rewards, it’s important to be focused on business outcomes. It’s not, you know, you know, it’s not just a simple program. You have to help them to grow. Frankly speaking, you have to help your customers to grow. And what that means is we’re offering things like services, tiered pricing or even education about how to grow your business. We talked a lot about those, point offers where we’re asking customers to execute the right merchandise and then take a picture of it.
And part of that process was educating them on why having the cooler in the front of your store fully stocked on a Friday not only helps us, but actually helps them to sell more to their consumers on when you have these long term B2B relationships, I think it’s even more important that the program offers not just the transactional benefits of one percent cashback, but also expertise, support and ongoing value.
Amanda: Yes. And obviously talk to us how you overcome the complexity and B2B around the multiple stakeholders. You know, in the B2C, you’ve got the member, it’s one member, one recipient, but in B2B it’s partly different, right? Is it the same in the SME, B2B obviously, the big corporates, we expect that. But have you found that to be the same challenge?
Marc: So having multiple stakeholders and it depends on the account. Like I said, you have some really sophisticated, large accounts that still have a personal relationship with a key account manager. They may buy on these and participate in our, you know, Club B rewards program. But we still, we haven’t replaced those relationships. It’s not like putting these in place means your sales rep never visits you anymore, and your key account manager will never call you. So we still have that in place.
On the other end of the spectrum where we have those small to medium size kind of retailers. What we find is usually the owner is also the manager is also the order taker. So it’s much more akin to B2C, where there is usually one user assigned with one account.
And because we’re B2B, it’s important that not only the rewards program and, you know, the e-commerce experience speaks to their needs, but also all the other touch points. So if a customer calls in to complain about a delivery that wasn’t made, or there was some damaged product, we need to make sure that all the touch points that they have with these and, AB InBev you know, whether that’s logistics and delivery, whether that’s customer service because a cooler is broken, whether that’s outages on the application or they redeemed an item and they didn’t, you know, receive the item and they didn’t get their points back all of those touch points on the full customer experience need to be coordinated.
And we use technology to do this to understand each customer and their needs on how we can better serve them. And we’ve seen a massive increase in our net promoter score in all markets. And it’s often a lot of those touch points like logistics, delivery, you know, product availability that are the most powerful things.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s really great, Marc. Thank you for sharing such details and such practical details as well. Like I think it’s super interesting and really practical. Like we can roll up our sleeves and listen to this and understand it. And it is so different from B2C. So it’s just great. You’ve clearly earned your B2B loyalty stripes.
So Marc, you mentioned, and this was really great to hear this. You mentioned Sephora as a loyalty inspiration. So I can’t think of two different type of industry verticals than the beauty industry and within which Sephora exists versus B2B. Obviously B2B alcohol or other beverages as well, but tell us what else, like it’s a great example how the challenges that Sephora has created, how that can be trans, you know, transported into your program and it still works and gets great results. But where else do you get your loyalty inspiration from, particularly given you haven’t grown up in a loyalty career?
Marc: Yeah, honestly, I’m as a person, very curious and enjoy kind of learning new things. And as I mentioned in 2019 at the start of this, I had never built a loyalty program. I kind of fell into it, but very quickly saw the opportunity and the way customers were responding to it. And that inspired me to kind of fall into love and loyalty.
Since then, I think the sources of inspiration are obviously there’s a lot out there written. I loved your book. I read your book early on, I think two years ago, but also I’ve been following this podcast and I follow basically, anyone who speaks on the podcast, I then go follow on LinkedIn. And in LinkedIn, seeing people post about either programs that they like, programs that they’ve built or even just, you know, critiquing changes to programs. It’s been really fun and inspiring. But I also, as an individual will download apps, even if I don’t purchase a lot of items from, you know, that particular provider just to explore and learn and see what’s new.
Amanda: Yeah, that’s great, Marc. And I love that. I think that’s a great tip for all of us. You know, you listen to one, let’s say you’re an avid follower of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, and you’ve got two to three, professionals a week to listen to just follow them on LinkedIn. And it is incredible how your LinkedIn feed fills up so beautifully with fantastic content about loyalty. I find it sometimes a little bit overwhelming. I can’t get through it all, but I think that’s a great tip. So thank you again for sharing that.
Marc, I could chat to you forever about this because I’m particularly passionate about B2B and thank you for your kind words about Blind Loyalty. I do B2B an absolute injustice in the book because it only has one tiny little chapter of two pages and it could have a whole book of its own right, I think. So, so you’ve started that discussion in such a wonderful way. So, before we close, are there any other comments you want to share with the Let’s Talk Loyalty global audience?
Marc: Well, first and foremost, thank you for having me. I’m a huge fan of the show and this has been a real pleasure. Secondly, I’ve heard people say it on the pod in the past, but I really believe it. Loyalty is an outcome. It’s not just a discipline within marketing. And I think my experience across different functions has helped me in my loyalty career.
And I feel like if you’re listening to this podcast and you really want to take your loyalty program and your career kind of to the next level, I would share this podcast with your CFO, your CSO, your CEO and show them how like, you know, these programs aren’t just about points and rewards. They’re really about relationships with customers, improving that experience. And if it’s done right, it can really drive growth for the business.
Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’ve said some real nuggets of wisdom today that I will certainly be sharing with some of our clients. So absolutely. It’s a great, again, another nice recommendation. Share and use the right, right soundbites.
Great Marc. So I know as you are very active on LinkedIn, you said to encourage anyone who wants to connect with you to reach out on LinkedIn. So we’ll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And I just want to say thank you very much for your generosity of insights. You’ve really shared so much with us and it’s been a pleasure to chat about this. I love a loyalty story that’s different from the mainstream and this certainly is. And it’s incredible what you’ve achieved. So thank you very, very much.
Marc: Thank you.
Paula: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty. If you’d like us to send you the latest shows each week, simply sign up for the Let’s Talk Loyalty newsletter on letstalkloyalty.com and we’ll send our best episodes straight to your inbox. And don’t forget that you can follow Let’s Talk Loyalty on any of your favorite podcast platforms. And of course, we’d love for you to share your feedback and reviews. Thanks again for supporting the show.
