Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals.
Paula: I’m your host, Paula Thomas, and if you work in loyalty marketing, join me every week to learn the latest ideas from loyalty specialists around the world.
Paula: So, welcome to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Paula: And now, as many of you listeners will know, we are into our second year of the show.
Paula: And to mark, I suppose, the second year of the show, I’m taking a slightly different approach, certainly with these first few episodes.
Paula: And rather than necessarily talking to loyalty program managers or directors directly, I’m really keen to explore some of the really big themes that I believe loyalty and marketing managers need to be thinking about from a strategic perspective, which then obviously informs the loyalty program overall.
Paula: So to kick this off today with me, I have Dr.
Paula: Chris Arnold, who has a fascinating background and describes himself as a strategist, creative and consumer marketing specialist at a number of companies, which include Creative Orchestra, Connect2, and The Garage.
Paula: Now, Dr. Arnold is also the author of a book called Ethical Marketing.
Paula: He has been the creative director and a board director with Saatchi & Saatchi.
Paula: And most fascinating, in fact, when I read his LinkedIn profile, he describes himself also as a champion of dyslexic talent.
Paula: So, Dr. Chris Arnold, a man on a mission and several missions. Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Dr Chris: Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Ashley.
Dr Chris: Yes, I do cover a few different bases, don’t I?
Paula: Yes, you certainly do.
Paula: So, a fascinating career, and I know you’ve done so much work across all sectors.
Paula: So, as we said, nothing specifically loyalty program related.
Paula: But in order to get into this overall topic, I will first of all, I suppose, tell listeners, I saw you speaking on the topic of community on a previous podcast, Chris, and I really, it landed with me in a way that very few things do.
Paula: So, first and foremost, tell me about your, I suppose, overall experience of loyalty living and working in the UK.
Dr Chris: I think the key thing is that for me, loyalty is very much part of the integrated marketing mix.
Dr Chris: And I think what frustrates me sometimes is the way that people can fall back on more traditional methodologies of thinking rather than looking at how things work with other people.
Dr Chris: And the key for me with any client is coming back to the core, which is the customer first, not the thought of theories that so often come around it.
Dr Chris: And I’ve always been a very consumer-centric person.
Dr Chris: So for me, when I’m working with clients, it is starting from the consumer and working outwards.
Dr Chris: And loyalty is really key.
Dr Chris: I mean, it’s the essence of all marketing, and let’s say marketing and sales, actually, because I think we often think of them as different, yet they are very linked up.
Dr Chris: And keeping somebody loyal to your brand is really key.
Dr Chris: I used to work for quite a lot of card companies, and loyalty has always been an important part of their strategy.
Dr Chris: But I’ve always felt that the way most people do is very old-fashioned hazard.
Dr Chris: And even now, some of the modern thinking is still based on old thinking.
Dr Chris: I’ve always said to a client, it’s much easier to keep a customer loyal and keep them coming back than it is to keep winning new clients all the time.
Dr Chris: So it’s always been part of my integrated mix of marketing techniques.
Dr Chris: But I’ve never been one of these fans of just taking silo marketing positionings.
Dr Chris: And I always believe that you do need to keep a variation.
Dr Chris: For me, it’s like eating.
Dr Chris: You wouldn’t eat the same thing every day.
Paula: Yeah, absolutely.
Paula: And there’s loads of fascinating ideas on your website as well, Chris.
Paula: So we’ll talk through the various different organizations you’re involved in.
Paula: And again, just for listeners, I see a couple of amazing client logos.
Paula: So you’ve advised companies like Diageo, like Visa and like Tesco.
Paula: So incredible.
Paula: And tell me, I suppose, where did the idea of community come from?
Paula: Is that something that is evolving in your more recent thought process?
Paula: Or is it something that goes back further into your career from a loyalty perspective?
Dr Chris: I think that the truth of community is that it started actually when I was very young.
Dr Chris: Even when I was at college studying, I was heavily involved in local community, I always have been.
Dr Chris: And I’ve always sort of seen that there’s this one side, which is my sort of personal interest in community and helping others.
Dr Chris: And I think that’s just part of my psychology, really.
Dr Chris: I’ve always been one who’s always liked to help others in community.
Dr Chris: And I’ve always involved a lot in arts and community.
Dr Chris: I also run one of the UK’s biggest community arts festivals, which is not on my LinkedIn.
Dr Chris: And I do a lot of work in my local community.
Dr Chris: So I’ve then sort of had marketing one side, community on the other side, and said, well, bring these two together.
Dr Chris: I suddenly realized that because I had a massive amount of insight, community experience, I was listening to people talking even at high levels on brands, thinking, you don’t really understand community.
Dr Chris: You don’t really understand how people think and behave and how they work.
Dr Chris: And as our recent survey showed, that 97% of people see themselves linked to their community, especially the local community.
Dr Chris: And community is very, very big.
Dr Chris: And we’ve seen from a lot of research that community is a massive element in people’s lives.
Dr Chris: People mistakenly think we’re just talking about social media, but in fact, this is beyond social media.
Dr Chris: So it’s actually come really key.
Dr Chris: So I said, what if we can bring these things together and stop talking about consumers as sort of numbers on a data sheet and think about their real lives and tap into their real lives, their real emotions, their feelings and that, and see how that works.
Paula: And what I found fascinating, you said on your website, you have about 24 different definitions of community.
Paula: So it’s not just the area we live, for example.
Paula: So maybe give us a couple of examples, Chris, on that.
Dr Chris: Well, one of the most common ones is relevant, especially retail.
Dr Chris: It’s a geographical location.
Dr Chris: And that’s quite important because local communities, we’ve seen this with the COVID-19 pandemic, is that people have been very concentrated in their own community.
Dr Chris: They’ve been very bringing together and supporting local business, for example.
Dr Chris: And 41% of people in research believe that local brands should be supporting local businesses and local communities.
Dr Chris: What we’ve seen is there’s also other communities, for example, communities around education, you know, Lumay.
Dr Chris: Also, we’ve seen around faith, for example, big communities around faith, family communities, common interests, you know.
Dr Chris: My dad used to run car clubs, and he had thousands and thousands of people, always some fascination with tinkering with sports cars at weekends.
Dr Chris: If you look at some of the hobbies people have, for example, fishing is one of the biggest hobbies on the side, and that has amazing amounts of community around that.
Paula: And I suppose what I’m hearing coming through is the impact of word of mouth, but almost scaling that up, am I right?
Dr Chris: Yes, word of mouth is a really, really key factor.
Dr Chris: I mean, it’s quite interesting.
Dr Chris: If you go back to about the turn of this millennial, word of mouth was really starting to take off as an interest area.
Dr Chris: People were really getting into it, and suddenly, digital and social media seemed to have pushed it aside, and this idea that somehow social media did the job.
Dr Chris: We know that word of mouth is far, far more powerful than social media is in many ways because it’s highly influential.
Dr Chris: And the distrust in social media now, and especially the distrust in influences on social media, is just growing, and people are more suspicious.
Dr Chris: But what we have seen is that word of mouth is very powerful.
Dr Chris: Within communities, it’s enormously powerful.
Dr Chris: We had a look a while ago at, for example, mothers.
Dr Chris: I’ve got a four-year-old.
Dr Chris: So I started playing my marketing brain and started talking to all the mothers at the groups and talking about what they were on, what social media they were on, and how they were moving more to dark social.
Dr Chris: And the key thing was, whatever platform they’re on, it’s about the word of mouth, what they’re telling each other in the groups when they meet, they’re sharing.
Dr Chris: And many, many years ago, we did some research at Saatchi’s on Pampers.
Dr Chris: We looked at Pampers and said, what is the key influences in people choosing Pampers?
Dr Chris: Was it advertising, for example, or any other marketing strategy?
Dr Chris: Was it PR?
Dr Chris: And the simply most important thing was word of mouth.
Dr Chris: I mean, without doubt, it topped the scale.
Dr Chris: One mom recommending it to another mom, even with parents, for example.
Dr Chris: A mother recommending certain products to her growing daughter becomes very key to their loyalty to brands.
Dr Chris: So word of mouth is very, very powerful, but it’s something we’ve kind of forgotten because we think social media does it, and it’s not the same at all.
Dr Chris: So I think brands need to start re-looking at word of mouth and communities where that happens.
Paula: And how, I guess?
Paula: I mean, at the risk of asking an impossible question, Chris, the reason I think that brands don’t look at word of mouth is that they feel they can’t influence it or they can’t certainly control it.
Paula: Obviously, that’s the whole point.
Paula: So how do we go about helping to support word of mouth marketing when the whole point is that it is an independent view?
Dr Chris: I think one of the key problems, actually, is that they can’t measure it.
Dr Chris: And where there’s a Guardian came out many years ago with a term called the age of measure, really, the numeric society.
Dr Chris: And they said politicians were trying to turn everything into being measured and give it a number.
Dr Chris: And marketers have done exactly the same.
Dr Chris: Everything has a measure.
Dr Chris: Digital has been hugely successful in the ability to measure things and give you a number.
Dr Chris: Direct marketing has been very successful in giving a number.
Dr Chris: Traditional brand advertising, especially TV, has been very poor at that.
Dr Chris: One of the things that they were struggling with back at the turn of the millennial with word of mouth was trying to find methodologies to measure it.
Dr Chris: And actually, you could do a lot of research afterwards and see how it was having an effect.
Dr Chris: But it didn’t have an instant measurability.
Dr Chris: And that’s why brands have tended to steer away from it.
Dr Chris: I think brands need to take a new thought here.
Dr Chris: One level, you can have your measurability.
Dr Chris: But remember that measure the important, don’t make the measurable important.
Dr Chris: And so often we see a number becoming important when it’s not important.
Dr Chris: For example, followers and likes on social media.
Dr Chris: We also know that social media is unfortunately blighted by a lot of fraudulent numbers.
Dr Chris: And I wrote an article for Campaign showing how easy it was to turn, to buy views on your ad or buy likes.
Dr Chris: But the key is to actually say, well, okay, let’s have a combination of measurable and that which is not measurable, especially long tail.
Dr Chris: And bring them together because you can’t necessarily measure a word or mouth.
Dr Chris: It’s much harder to influence and control it.
Dr Chris: But once it starts, it has a very, very powerful cyclic sort of phenomena.
Dr Chris: It’s sort of like a, you know, a cyclone.
Dr Chris: It starts to get faster and faster and it goes around.
Dr Chris: So we always say that with communities, if you do something very good at the heart of a community, the community talks about it, the word spreads, the good faith spreads, and very quickly the whole community feels good about you.
Dr Chris: And for example, when Tesco has launched Computer for Schools, which is a very old campaign now, but as a loyalty campaign, it was hugely successful in bringing in parents who then brought other parents in, and the schools got involved, and suddenly everybody in the community was shopping at Tesco to get these vouchers.
Dr Chris: And people felt it did a lot of good, and the goodwill towards Tesco was amazing.
Dr Chris: And it was the power of the word of mouth, great idea that stimulated that, that really made it powerful.
Dr Chris: So word of mouth is something that’s hard to measure, but don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t have a nice pretty number at the end.
Dr Chris: You’ve got to have some marketing that doesn’t have numbers.
Dr Chris: If you can live your life as an accountant, you’re not going to be a great marketeer.
Dr Chris: I mean, take any salesman.
Dr Chris: Salesmen don’t work necessarily on numbers.
Dr Chris: I’ll tell you, I can’t put a number on it, but I know how to sell this car to this guy, or how to sell this product to a woman.
Dr Chris: And good salespeople will tell you, and I think one of the things we need to do is to bring marketing and sales more closely back together in their thinking.
Dr Chris: Sales can be quite intuitive.
Dr Chris: My dad was a salesman.
Paula: Yeah, it’s an amazing skill and actually benefits all areas of life.
Paula: I consider myself a bit of a saleswoman from time to time, so it certainly can be very useful to be able to convince people of a different view.
Paula: But do you think, for example, you do mention Chris the computers for schools, and I remember that, so certainly Tesco in Ireland did run that, I suppose, loyalty campaign.
Paula: And for listeners who may not be familiar with it, it really was quite simple.
Paula: It was a token, I think, where based on your spend, you literally got a token to give.
Paula: And I do remember people standing in queues, and if the person at the till wasn’t taking that token, then everyone behind them was.
Dr Chris: I’ll have it.
Dr Chris: I think what was also good about that campaign was it tapped into, I mean, we talk a lot about sustainability these days, unless so then, it tapped into sustainability.
Dr Chris: The broad sustainability is about people and planet, not just about planet.
Dr Chris: There’s a lot of marketing, make the mistake of thinking sustainability is just about planet.
Dr Chris: It’s not.
Dr Chris: It’s 50% about each.
Dr Chris: And we promote a thing called the triple top line against the triple bottom line.
Dr Chris: And the triple top line is about having core purpose, and then that is what you’re in business for.
Dr Chris: It’s the why do you do what you do, not because we make money.
Dr Chris: We make money as a consequence of doing what we do, doing it well.
Dr Chris: If you have the old triple bottom line, which is, you know, profit to people, planet, then it all becomes like an accountant going, well, how can I use people and planet to make money?
Dr Chris: If you start with the triple top line, it’s about starting with purpose, then saying, how does that extend into people and planet?
Dr Chris: With people, that takes you to society.
Dr Chris: So Tesco has made a lot of money, not because they started to make profit.
Dr Chris: They started with someone who said, there is a crisis in our schools.
Dr Chris: Our kids aren’t getting the computers they need because the government isn’t funding it.
Dr Chris: Let us step in where the government is failing and take over.
Dr Chris: Now, it’s a very bold move for Tesco to do at the time.
Dr Chris: And this is what brands are doing more and more now.
Dr Chris: They’re seeing that consumers are looking towards them to solve some of our social issues, some of our social challenges.
Dr Chris: And actually, that is much more about winning hearts and minds than protecting rainforest, I hate to say.
Dr Chris: Yeah, people think it’s important to save the rainforest and do environmental things and plastics in the ocean.
Dr Chris: But research shows a lot of consumers also blame the brands for that in the first place.
Dr Chris: I mean, that plastic wouldn’t be in the oceans if it wasn’t the fact that the top 10 brands are chucking out plastic.
Dr Chris: What they want to see is stuff that integrates with community, how they’re actually doing things that really work.
Dr Chris: And the computer for schools is a brilliant example of sustainability marketing in the community.
Dr Chris: It is one of the best still to this day.
Dr Chris: Most of what people are doing nowadays tends to feel like PR spin.
Dr Chris: Some of the feedback we’ve got even about some of the campaigns being done, people like Co-op and Waitrose.
Dr Chris: The Waitrose green coin campaign has lost its edge.
Dr Chris: The people don’t really care too much about it.
Dr Chris: Also, we see that people are saying Co-op is great, but it’s 1% to community and half the time it’s not that local.
Dr Chris: And they’re not seeing half what’s done.
Dr Chris: There are people like TSP doing great stuff, but nobody knows what they’re doing because they don’t communicate it very well.
Dr Chris: And for the rest of them, they think, well, are the brands really doing much?
Dr Chris: Banks, for example, are very heavily criticized in our research for failing to really do much at a level of community.
Dr Chris: And in certain parts of the states, they have a thing, they kind of call it community tax, it’s a name where the church goes in and says, if you want people to continue supporting you, then you need to actually give us something back because we’re giving you millions, you should give us something back.
Dr Chris: It’s like a mafioso mentality.
Dr Chris: And they effectively collect the community tax.
Dr Chris: Wow, wow.
Dr Chris: I think, as an example of brands, do need to get down to local level, especially retailers, they need to engage the local community much, much more.
Dr Chris: And building loyalty on a different level is about being loyal to your community, which is a different way of thinking.
Dr Chris: I’ve got a shell card, and every time I put petrol in, I get a few points.
Dr Chris: And I think, how old fashioned is that?
Dr Chris: And I collect all these points up.
Dr Chris: And I’ll probably be the first to be throwing them towards charities, because I think last time we spoke, we were talking about Four Good Causes, which I think is a brilliant initiative.
Paula: We love it.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: Yeah, we’re a big fan of that.
Paula: And I think the reason that the community message that you evangelize, would I dare say, Chris, the reason it landed so well for me is because I still feel very new in the world of podcasting.
Paula: And I know that if I do want to invest in equipment or if I need a solution to something, that’s where I go, is into that community.
Paula: Like I’d much rather ask a fellow podcaster, and again, it’s not rocket science, but I’d much rather go where I know there’s no vested interest, rather than go into a retailer and say, what’s the best microphone, for example, or best headset.
Paula: So I think that’s where I kind of went, do you know what, nobody is talking about loyalty and building it from the community, either up or down.
Paula: I don’t know what’s the best terminology to use, but I think we all talk about one-to-one, and I think there’s an immense amount of value in that.
Paula: But how do we start to think about it from a community perspective?
Paula: What are kind of principles that we need to be thinking of, Chris?
Dr Chris: Well, I think you touched on something I want to start on first.
Dr Chris: You talk about one-to-one.
Dr Chris: The obsession of marketing has become one-to-one targeting.
Dr Chris: We saw this initially from direct marketing back in the turn of the millennial, where direct marketing was all about targeting the individual.
Dr Chris: We can find more individuals.
Dr Chris: Interestingly enough, after many years of a philosophy of becoming more one-to-one, direct marketing was delivering no better results than it had been when it was just doing mass mailings.
Dr Chris: In many ways, with all marketing philosophies, like the long tail and eat big fish, we’re seeing a flip around where people are saying, well, actually, what if we look at the other way around?
Dr Chris: Instead of talking one-to-one, why don’t we talk to one-to-many?
Dr Chris: And the one-to-many is a growing philosophy among, I think, more cutting-edge marketeers.
Dr Chris: Looking at it, and myself, I’m a big fan of this thinking, which is to say, if we talk to the masses, I, communities, we let them do the rest of the work.
Dr Chris: It’s not about trying to be, you know, to find, talk to John Smith here and Mary Smith there and John Jones here and Paul Davis here.
Dr Chris: And then doing, you know, the really bad targeting or even using algorithms on the internet to say, oh, I know exactly what you’re going to buy next, because I’ve been targeting you.
Dr Chris: And I’ve got all this data on you.
Dr Chris: And I always say to that, because I work for one of the big companies that does a lot of that.
Dr Chris: And even they were honest that it wasn’t that accurate.
Dr Chris: And it’s so easily thrown off.
Dr Chris: I mean, all this one to one data illusion that somehow you’ve got some data funnel on you.
Dr Chris: And I can sit here as a mathematician and work out what you’re going to buy next.
Dr Chris: I can’t tell you what to buy my wife for Christmas.
Dr Chris: And I’ve been married to her for many years.
Dr Chris: So if a data can do that, I welcome it.
Dr Chris: Of course, when I’m buying, I’m not just buying for me.
Dr Chris: I’m buying for the office.
Dr Chris: I’m sometimes buying for a friend.
Dr Chris: My daughter also uses my Amazon account.
Dr Chris: So that throws it completely.
Dr Chris: And so I get lots of messages coming up.
Dr Chris: And I would say that 90% of messages pumped at me are irrelevant because they’ve got the data wrong.
Dr Chris: However, when you go into community, you throw away this obsession with using data as a crutch rather than as illumination.
Dr Chris: It’s the old one.
Dr Chris: You can use a lamppost to lean on or you can use a lamppost to enlighten you.
Dr Chris: Data has gone the same way with algorithms and all that.
Dr Chris: If we look at the community and say, let us try and influence the community and share with that community and bond with that community, the community will do most of the rest of the work for you.
Dr Chris: And we talk to the community, not to the individual.
Dr Chris: You will find the community becomes very powerful.
Dr Chris: I mean, if you take any community we’re in, then if I see something very good, I will share it with those within my community.
Dr Chris: You share with me about the headphones I’m wearing.
Dr Chris: And I looked into them and thought, great.
Dr Chris: And because you’d influence me, I was more inclined to go with that decision than with any so-called experts out there who look like they’ve been paid or even with a recommendation on Amazon.
Dr Chris: So I think that it’s very key that if you tap into the bigger picture, not the smaller picture.
Dr Chris: So I say to a lot of marketing people now, it’s okay to have your targeted approach, but it’s a north expensive way of trying to sell to people, not often succeed.
Dr Chris: Talk to communities yourself, and the example I use most is parents.
Dr Chris: If you talk to the parents or community, you’re more likely to succeed than you will try to talk to individuals.
Dr Chris: Because the parents influence each other, and it’s true on so many different communities.
Dr Chris: Faith is another one, for example.
Dr Chris: I’m involved in my local church, and that faith community is incredibly powerful in how it influences its members.
Dr Chris: So I think there’s, you know, I say think the bigger picture, not the smaller picture, and combine the two.
Dr Chris: You don’t have to throw one away for the other, but marketers need to get into developing a slightly more diverse mentality.
Dr Chris: As I said, look at the stuff that has the numbers, look at the stuff that doesn’t, that might have a longer tail.
Dr Chris: Look at the targeting, yes, but also look at what you’re doing on a broader communication strategy.
Dr Chris: And I think you’ll be more successful if you start playing the two.
Paula: And do you think the community is welcome that approach, Chris?
Paula: I mean, I’m thinking about, as you said, we talked about headsets before we recorded today, so you’ve now bought the same headset that I’m using, which, for anyone who’s interested, happens to be a Sennheiser.
Paula: But how would the, let’s say, my podcast community respond, let’s say I’m Sennheiser, and I’m keen to talk to them.
Paula: Do you tend to see that the community is welcome connecting with brands?
Dr Chris: They do, actually.
Dr Chris: Our research has shown that 77% of people are quite happy for brands to engage meaningfully.
Dr Chris: Right.
Dr Chris: And there’s a big important thing, meaningfully, to be authentic, meaningful, not to be exploitative.
Dr Chris: There is nothing worse than a brand feeling like a cheap salesman.
Dr Chris: And I’m going to be really blunt here.
Dr Chris: Most brands end up sounding like cheap salesmen.
Dr Chris: That’s because they employ cheap salesmen, unfortunately.
Dr Chris: So you have to actually be authentic.
Dr Chris: You have to be more meaningful.
Dr Chris: The key thing is not to go in and sell.
Dr Chris: The key thing is to identify the need and to say, you know, for example, there’s a very virtue money doing a very, very clever campaign at the moment.
Dr Chris: They have said to people, we have loads and loads of financial advisors online, ring them, by the way, you don’t have to be a member of our bank.
Dr Chris: You don’t have to sign any forms.
Dr Chris: You don’t have to sign up for a trial.
Dr Chris: We’re not even going to sell to you.
Dr Chris: We won’t even put you on a database.
Dr Chris: We’re here to help people in this crisis with financial issues over repayments, mortgages, debts, you know, when people are furloughed, when people aren’t being able to afford things.
Dr Chris: We’re here to help.
Dr Chris: That is a really clever move, because what’s happening is people feel like, I’ll give them a call.
Dr Chris: And it feels like you’re not selling to me.
Dr Chris: I think it’s really key is, can you sell without selling?
Dr Chris: And that’s something that again, marketing has fallen into the trap of being a bad salesman.
Dr Chris: It tries to force the sale too much.
Dr Chris: Good salesmen know that it’s a waiting game.
Dr Chris: They know it’s about seduction.
Dr Chris: When I was at college and I wanted to go into marketing, my dad, who had grown up through sales and marketing, said, I’m going to give you the best education in marketing ever.
Dr Chris: And he signed me up to a double glazing company to sell double glazing products.
Dr Chris: Most people are saying, your father, really.
Dr Chris: Anyway, I did it for six weeks.
Dr Chris: And he said, you’ll learn more from this.
Dr Chris: You’ll learn from your college.
Dr Chris: And it was true.
Dr Chris: I knocked on the door.
Dr Chris: And the first thing that happened is I said, hi, I’m from AeroHeat, double glazing.
Dr Chris: Would you like to buy a double glazing?
Dr Chris: And I got the door slammed in my face.
Dr Chris: And they let you do that on the first day.
Dr Chris: And you come back on the first day and say, this doesn’t work.
Dr Chris: And that guy training me said, no, it doesn’t work because people don’t want to buy double glazing from you.
Dr Chris: Go in and knock on the door and tell people how wonderful the gardens are.
Paula: Wow.
Dr Chris: Let’s see what happens.
Dr Chris: So next day, I go in and knock on the door and go, wow, your gardens are amazing.
Dr Chris: What is that flower there?
Dr Chris: You start a conversation.
Dr Chris: And then you say, now, then I identify what their needs are.
Dr Chris: Don’t ever mention the word double glazing.
Dr Chris: What’s your heat, your electricity bill like?
Dr Chris: What’s your heating bill like?
Dr Chris: Wow, you need to sort this problem out.
Dr Chris: Then, only when you’ve got to the problem, do you then say, well, actually, I might have a solution.
Dr Chris: Then people listen.
Dr Chris: Marketing, what is amazing is my dad having taught me principles of sales, and I still now go and watch the old video on techniques of sales.
Dr Chris: Do you realize that marketing has lost the connection to sales, which is what it’s an extension of?
Dr Chris: I mean, marketing originally was about preparing an environment for selling, and it’s gone in its own little bubble, and it needs to come back to that core, and that is about, and sales is all about understanding people.
Dr Chris: Think about sales, I’ll tell you, whatever video you watch from whatever great guru, it’s about understanding people, and that’s the real key thing, and that means, for me, people and communities.
Dr Chris: I’m almost kind of moving more back to sales and to some, I think, of the marketing techniques, which I think have become lost in a kind of fictional world of their own making.
Paula: But even actually, I was reading this.
Paula: I know, I know, but I was laughing at so much of the things that you’ve written, Chris, because you said, for example, there’s an increased focus on neuroscience, but in fact, we’re really just primitive pack animals.
Paula: So I think we’re totally like over, you know, confusing, I think, the whole, the whole industry.
Paula: And it feels like it needs to be simplified.
Paula: Is that true in your view?
Dr Chris: I did upset somebody because I was at a dinner and this guy was yacking on about putting electrodes on people’s heads and how they could test ideas.
Dr Chris: I said, I’m really sorry, I’m going to say this.
Dr Chris: What a load of utter bollocks.
Dr Chris: And the guy stopped.
Dr Chris: I said, I’m sorry, I’ve been in marketing a decade and I can tell you that is absolutely a load of crap.
Dr Chris: And he said, yes, but I’m getting big brands signing up to me.
Dr Chris: And I go, of course you will, because some of the people signing up are stupid, you know, plainly stupid.
Dr Chris: They’re looking for the next gimmick, you know.
Dr Chris: I think this is what I talk about, the virtual world of marketing and this sort of fictional idea that somehow that’s going to…
Dr Chris: We’re all like looking for the enigma or that magic thing that’s going to keep you young forever or give you eternal life.
Dr Chris: It’s like a fairy tale.
Dr Chris: Monitors live in this fairy tale world thinking somehow there’s something out that’s going to give you the magic next thing that’s going to solve the problem.
Dr Chris: Though ironically, most of them aren’t that interested in how much they sell.
Dr Chris: They’re just looking for that kind of number game.
Dr Chris: And someone comes along and says neuroscience will do it.
Dr Chris: So you put some clips on my head and you show me some images and somehow from that, you’re going to know what I’m going to buy.
Dr Chris: Rubbish.
Dr Chris: I’ve been very strong.
Dr Chris: I don’t mind using stuff for insights.
Dr Chris: And I’m a great believer in research and insight research and good research, not bad.
Dr Chris: Unfortunately, again, we do a lot of very bad online research in our industry and lazy research.
Dr Chris: But I think, and I read one the other day, actually, we had one on the marketing press rang me up and said, could you have a look at this data because it’s saying that in recession, people are buying upcoming less ethical.
Dr Chris: Because ethics is also one of my big areas of speciality.
Dr Chris: I said, well, look at the data.
Dr Chris: So I looked at the data.
Dr Chris: I said, well, this has been misinterpreted.
Dr Chris: I found out that what happened was that some young kid who had been barely out of trousers was working for the data company, had collected this information, had made an assumption at the end or conclusion based on assumptions they didn’t understand.
Dr Chris: They didn’t understand an example, the complex dynamics of why people buy organic products.
Dr Chris: What they actually were seeing was in recession that the shallow middle classes who are seen to be green were actually buying less organic, less fair trade.
Dr Chris: But in fact, the true conscientious consumer was actually buying more.
Dr Chris: So in fact, recession wasn’t reducing ethics.
Dr Chris: It was just filling out the shallow seems to be green.
Dr Chris: I think so often we fall into that trap of not interpreting insights well.
Dr Chris: But I think if you get good insights, then that’s great.
Dr Chris: But I don’t think you’re going to find it by sticking electrode on Mrs.
Dr Chris: Jones and thinking that’s going to give you the secret to how to sell soap, seriously.
Paula: Okay, no electrodes.
Paula: I got it.
Dr Chris: Ask the shopkeeper.
Dr Chris: I go into shops.
Dr Chris: When I was working on a beer account, I went into a local offline license run by two fantastic Asian guys.
Dr Chris: And those guys, what I love about Asians is that they really do take their time to understand their customers much more so than any other group of people.
Dr Chris: And Asians are brilliant, brilliant merchandisers, brilliant, brilliant salesmen, and they’re really, really good at running their stores.
Dr Chris: And one of the things they do very well is to win loyalty from the customers.
Dr Chris: They go back to basics.
Dr Chris: You walk in, they’re friendly to you.
Dr Chris: They get to know your name.
Dr Chris: If you think of a really good local shop, they tend to show a personal interest to you, yes, but they tend to keep you loyal by always being helpful.
Dr Chris: And whenever I went in there, they go, Oh, have you tried this beer?
Dr Chris: Have you tried this?
Dr Chris: And they’re always very helpful.
Dr Chris: But I used to use them for market insights.
Dr Chris: I’d say to them, what do you think of this new product?
Dr Chris: What do you think of that?
Dr Chris: That way to sell, that way.
Dr Chris: And there’s another guy called Ali.
Dr Chris: He’s Turkish, actually.
Dr Chris: And he’s equally as brilliant.
Dr Chris: And he runs a small supermarket.
Dr Chris: And he just outdoes everybody else in the area.
Dr Chris: Again, he wins a lot of his customers by understanding people.
Dr Chris: So I think, let’s get back to people.
Dr Chris: We seem to forget they exist.
Dr Chris: They’re not numbers on a spreadsheet.
Dr Chris: They’re not numbers on a data board.
Dr Chris: They’re real people.
Dr Chris: And the more we understand and get back, and I think most marketers should go and spend at least a week, for example, behind the counter.
Paula: Yeah, totally.
Paula: Yeah, brilliant.
Paula: And then I did ask you to think about who is doing it well, Chris, in terms of from a loyalty program perspective, to make sure that everybody listening knows how this connects to our industry.
Paula: So tell us about your favorite loyalty program.
Dr Chris: You know what?
Dr Chris: This is a real big challenge because I went out there and said, could I find something I thought was really great, really progressive, and really fantastic?
Dr Chris: And I honestly didn’t.
Dr Chris: I was very disappointed.
Dr Chris: I looked at all the loyalty systems I’m on, and most of them come back to, you know, yes, the classic, you know, click the points, get the rewards and all that.
Dr Chris: I didn’t feel any of them were really getting much beyond that.
Dr Chris: I felt very much that they weren’t really cultivating much, much more.
Dr Chris: I think you asked me in a previous chat about a loyalty scheme.
Dr Chris: I’ve been involved in.
Dr Chris: I mentioned Action Aid.
Dr Chris: I said we’d use loyalty as part of a marketing campaign to change the situation with supermarkets at the time were abusing the supply chain, and they were discounting things like bananas and apples and fruit and veg.
Dr Chris: And that discount was being passed on down the line, down the supply chain, eventually where the worker in the field picking the apples was getting paid less money because of the discounts.
Dr Chris: So what we did is we created this fake loyalty card in a way.
Dr Chris: I mean, it was a loyalty card, but it wasn’t like a supermarket, but it looked like a supermarket one, and we asked people to join it in this kind of campaign.
Dr Chris: We signed up 42,000 people in a week to try and take on the supermarkets and ask a simple question, who is paying for this discount?
Dr Chris: And despite going through a lot of different strategies, we finally came up with the one which, for me, was the simple answer.
Dr Chris: It took a lot of selling to persuade them this was the right answer.
Dr Chris: Just simply ask the supermarket, who is paying for the bill?
Dr Chris: Who is paying for this discount?
Dr Chris: And as a consequence, we forced all the major supermarkets into a U-turn and we saved the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of people in the supply chain who were just being exploited.
Dr Chris: And that was using loyalty in a very different kind of way.
Dr Chris: It was using loyalty to a cause and using the loyalty scheme in a way that was very different, but it was hugely powerful.
Dr Chris: Coming back to the original question, I feel there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of loyalty schemes out there, but looking around for really innovative ones, I was very disappointed because what I was looking for was not the latest technique or the latest, yeah, oh, we’ve added technology in here and we’ve got this.
Dr Chris: And a lot of it seems to be falling into, look, I’ve got a good app.
Dr Chris: Shell has this app, and it’s awful because every time you get into the show, you have to wait for it to upload, wait for it to update, and finally you stick it in front of the guy and he scans it.
Dr Chris: By which time, five people behind you are getting in a bad mood.
Dr Chris: So a lot of it has gone down the technology route.
Dr Chris: What I’m not seeing is a loyalty that says, let’s look at loyalty the other direction, which is how we can use that community of people who have signed up to our scheme and use them and create a community around it.
Dr Chris: And I’m a great believer, and one of the things we do with brands is to help them turn that collective, be it a database, be it people like Saatchi Loyalty Court, and turn it into a community, a community that interacts with each other, a community that actually feels like there’s a purpose to being a member of this scheme.
Dr Chris: And that’s something I think is where I’m really looking desperately for people to try and move into, which is why, in a way, I’m very shockily saying I didn’t find anything I was impressed with, but that’s because my values are different.
Paula: Yeah, yeah.
Paula: No, but they’re important values, Chris, and, you know, more and more, I think they are becoming even more prominent.
Paula: So there’s plenty more evidence, and I know you’ve done research on it.
Paula: But I also just wanted to ask you, Chris, because I’m already convinced at that point, I suppose that there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind.
Paula: But I also really like that you focus on it’s not the power of social media.
Paula: It’s not about influencers or, you know, literally creating a group on a third party platform.
Paula: So just what’s the important distinction, I think, again, that, you know, brands listening need to be thinking about in terms of creating communities within their own customer groups when they can’t do it, as you’re saying, within social media effectively?
Dr Chris: I think the problem with social media is it doesn’t quite have the personalization of community.
Dr Chris: And I talk about personalization of community, not of individuals.
Dr Chris: That, for example, building your own platform.
Dr Chris: So, if you, for example, got a million…
Dr Chris: A good example of Virgin Media has a million members or customers, and they call them a community.
Dr Chris: They’re not a community.
Dr Chris: What is a community is the small group of about 20,000 people called, I hate Virgin Media, because they all feel united by a very passionate cause.
Dr Chris: The key thing to community is to understand the two words of makeup community, which is commonality and unity.
Dr Chris: Unity is through a commonality, and that commonality has to be of an emotional level.
Dr Chris: And what brands are not very good at is understanding the emotional aspect of community, how you bring people together on a commonality that is unifying through emotion.
Dr Chris: And if you’ve just got a database of people, and let’s take a loyalty scheme, let’s take Shell, for example.
Dr Chris: It’s a very, very well run and very functional loyalty scheme.
Dr Chris: It has all the tick boxes, it does all the technology, except I don’t feel any emotion about it.
Dr Chris: I feel no link to the next person in the queue who’s also a member.
Dr Chris: And yet somehow, I believe that scheme could go onto a much higher level.
Dr Chris: And they could turn that into a real community of people where I actually feel proud to be a member.
Dr Chris: And I actually look at the next person and say, Oh, you’re a member too.
Dr Chris: Wow, you know, we were doing good in the world.
Dr Chris: I think all companies are a good example where they really do need to be engaging their customers, creating communities and using the power of those communities to be doing something different, you know.
Dr Chris: And with all companies, it doesn’t have to be about environment.
Dr Chris: It can equally be much about society.
Dr Chris: So I think it’s really, really key, actually, that they understand what community really is.
Dr Chris: The problem is that social media has used the term, corrupted the term, to mean any collective of people.
Dr Chris: So, oh, we got a million likes on Facebook.
Dr Chris: Therefore, it’s a community.
Dr Chris: That’s the same as saying, I have a million customers.
Dr Chris: That’s a community.
Dr Chris: It’s not.
Dr Chris: And we looked into a lot of social media, and we discovered that very, very more often than anything, it is not a community.
Dr Chris: It is just a collective.
Dr Chris: And the interaction between individuals was minimal.
Dr Chris: Sometimes, it’s actually quite negative.
Dr Chris: To find a few examples was quite rare, to find stuff where people really…
Dr Chris: When you got to a thing of social local, which is social media, you’ll get locally, for example, like your local Facebook group around your area.
Dr Chris: If you live in something like Tottenham, then the Tottenham, or in my case, Crouch End groups, those have no ability for brands to get into that space.
Dr Chris: Yet most of us are integrating with each other on those local platforms.
Dr Chris: And where social media doesn’t want to talk about, this is the big elephant in the room.
Dr Chris: Social media is like it gets to the bubble outside the area, but then it can’t get in.
Dr Chris: Because we looked at one supermarket and we said, okay, you’ve got quite a lot of followers on your Facebook nationally.
Dr Chris: Divide that into your areas, look at your store divisions, and then look at the overlay, and you discover that less than 1% of people in this particular area, in this case, Wood Green, is actually on your major social media.
Dr Chris: Your social media department is only hitting less than 1% if you’re optimistic, probably more like 0.1%.
Dr Chris: Yet 46% of that local community are on the local Facebook group.
Dr Chris: But you can’t get in there because your social media team is not allowed to be in there, and if they tried, they’d be thrown out straight away.
Dr Chris: So how do you influence that community?
Dr Chris: Because at the moment, you think your social media department is, and it isn’t.
Dr Chris: This is the big elephant.
Dr Chris: Nobody wants to talk about the fact that social media, that they’re also not reaching dark social.
Dr Chris: Dark social is those platforms and areas where people have chosen to go off the grid, like WhatsApp.
Dr Chris: They’re not getting in there either.
Dr Chris: So in a way, social media has almost got its days numbered at the moment.
Paula: Yeah, there’s a couple of things actually.
Paula: I wanted you to explain dark social, Chris, because I didn’t understand what it meant.
Paula: So thank you for that.
Paula: I fundamentally believe that WhatsApp has a huge role in the future of loyalty programs and loyal behavior and loyalty as an emotion.
Paula: So really, I’m happy to hear you.
Dr Chris: Can I also add to that?
Dr Chris: WhatsApp is a good example.
Dr Chris: It’s called PCPs, private community platforms.
Dr Chris: PCPs are basically platforms that you can build that are not built on major brands’ platforms.
Dr Chris: So like Facebook owns all the data and all the algorithms and all the information.
Dr Chris: If you build your own, you can do it either on the web or you can do it on apps.
Dr Chris: Most people are using apps.
Dr Chris: You can actually build your own platform, which entirely you control.
Dr Chris: You ring fence, you have all the data, you can stop people advertising, but you also have all the security.
Dr Chris: So PCPs is the way people are going now, which is to actually build private community platforms.
Dr Chris: And that way you can make people feel very much part of that community, and then you can build sub-communities within it.
Dr Chris: So for example, if you built a platform for your customer base, which is all over 50s, say for example, you could then have lots of subdivisions of community interests within that.
Dr Chris: So you could actually explore all 24 plus of the areas we talk about and grow a very, very engaged community within that.
Dr Chris: And that’s where people are going.
Dr Chris: And of course, then all that data is not owned by Facebook or Microsoft or anyone else.
Paula: Well, I think you’ve given us an awful lot to think about Chris, because yes, I’m not sure many loyalty programs have really managed to drive that interaction between individuals, as you said, and I’m always impressed with them, you know, big, huge, fabulous databases of everyone listening to this program, who really does, with a lot of integrity, go out to try and reward their customers.
Paula: But I think it’s an added dimension that you’re bringing to that conversation to say, how can you connect those individuals between themselves and to give extra value?
Paula: So I think it’s another layer.
Paula: So I really love the idea and I hope we can continue the conversation, Chris.
Paula: So before we wrap up, is there anything else that you wanted to add in that we haven’t covered off in the conversation?
Dr Chris: Yes, I think as we move towards what people call a stakeholder society, I think you might want to think about instead of how can I reward individual, how can I reward the community?
Dr Chris: And I think that’s a bigger thing.
Dr Chris: If you said to yourself, let’s for a moment consider, we know we can throw incentives and rewards to the individual, but what if the individual is more interested in what they can do through you to reward others, be it giving to charity, giving to social courses or just general community, how can you do that?
Dr Chris: And that almost comes back to the Tesco’s Computer for Schools, still one of the best ever schemes on the planet.
Paula: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking as you said it, Chris, I think it really did tap into it.
Paula: And we’ve talked about there’s some great programs around the world that talk about, you know, my school, my village, my planet, for example, in South Africa.
Paula: I think I mentioned that one to you before.
Paula: So, yeah, I think more and more I’m just hearing that people want to have to feel like they’ve made a contribution.
Paula: So, yes, you know, fundamentally, we are sometimes selfish, but also I think that that doesn’t define us.
Paula: And the final piece that I wanted to reference, actually, from your website, and again, I’ll make sure this is linked in the show notes, Chris.
Paula: But you mentioned that consumers are like dice.
Paula: And, you know, there are six completely different aspects and multiple facets to human beings.
Paula: And I thought that was a very simple analogy to basically go, yeah, I’m not just the person who shops in Spinney’s or Wichita’s or whatever the local thing is.
Paula: So, yes, I have an identity that is multifaceted.
Paula: So whatever we could do as loyalty professionals to tap into that and really make a connection, I think will make a huge difference.
Dr Chris: Absolutely.
Dr Chris: I think you mean that the multiple persona concept again is starting to take hold.
Dr Chris: People are realizing that so often through data, we’ve kind of said that somebody is just one persona.
Dr Chris: Now we’re realizing that not the multiple personas are certainly buying.
Dr Chris: And, you know, one of those personas might be the right one to tap into.
Dr Chris: So I think we need to rethink.
Dr Chris: I think marketing needs a massive rethink.
Dr Chris: You know, we talk about the new thinking for the new normal.
Dr Chris: I think defending this pandemic crisis is hopefully making people, manager, consultants, user term, reset, to rethink everything they’re doing and say, maybe we’re not doing it right.
Dr Chris: Maybe we’re just more and more getting it more and more wrong.
Dr Chris: You know, really just completely throw away and start again.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: Brilliant.
Paula: Final question for you.
Paula: I know you have a new book either coming out or just come out called The New Consumer.
Paula: Tell us about the book.
Dr Chris: The new book coming out is called Flip, Unthink Everything You Know.
Paula: Okay, totally different.
Dr Chris: It’s been slightly delayed in publishing due to pandemic and also an original battle I have with one of my publishers.
Dr Chris: But it will be coming out hopefully before the end of the year.
Dr Chris: It is very much along, again, it’s a lot about marketing and thinking and business thinking.
Dr Chris: And it’s very much about getting people to rethink what they’re doing.
Dr Chris: So it’s core to what I’ve always been about, which is change your thinking, think differently, think in new ways.
Dr Chris: A lot of it works from really getting people to look at things the other way around.
Dr Chris: And that way to hopefully therefore get a more broader viewpoint.
Dr Chris: It’s not just about doing things in opposite ways, about changing the viewpoint.
Dr Chris: I think because I’m neurodiverse, and I’m very proud of being dyslexic, it does give you that ability to think differently and see things in different ways.
Dr Chris: And in a way, it’s much of a book about helping others see things in different ways.
Dr Chris: If you want to be a steep jobs, I’ll see you try to do that.
Paula: Wonderful, wonderful.
Paula: Well, listen, it’s been a fascinating conversation, and I have to say, so much food for thought.
Paula: I really hope we can continue to chat as the months and years evolve.
Paula: So, Dr.
Paula: Chris Arnold from Let’s Talk Loyalty, thank you so much.
Dr Chris: Thank you.
Paula: This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketeer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing news, insights and research.
Paula: The Wise Marketeer also offers loyalty marketing training through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 170 executives in 20 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.
Paula: For more information, check out thewisemarketeer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.
Paula: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Paula: If you’d like me to send you the latest show each week, simply sign up for the show newsletter on letstalkloyalty.com, and I’ll send you the latest episode to your inbox every Thursday.
Paula: Or just head to your favorite podcast platform.
Paula: Find Let’s Talk Loyalty and subscribe.
Paula: Of course I’d love your feedback and reviews, and thanks again for supporting the show.
Publisher’s Note:
This transcript was generated with the help of AI and podcast publishing tools such as Apple Podcast’s transcription service.
In the interests of efficiency and minimising our costs as a small business, it has not been checked by a human.
If you have any comments or concerns about the accuracy of this content, please do contact us for changes or corrections.
