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 today, I’m speaking to somebody who really made a huge impact on me when I saw her speaking at the Loyalty Surgery Conference in London, maybe four or five years ago.
Paula: I think as business people, we all sit in an awful lot of meetings, and we hear an awful lot of presentations.
Paula: And there’s very few that you kind of retain long term, either in terms of the person on stage, or maybe the key messages that they shared.
Paula: And for me, this particular presentation was definitely one of those.
Paula: So I’m going to talk today on a number of very varied topics, in fact, with a woman by the name of Helène Brand.
Paula: And when I was talking to her about coming on the show, she told me first of all, that she’s moved into a freelance marketing consultancy role, and really bringing some fresh thinking and new approaches to building customer loyalty, even beyond loyalty programs.
Paula: And that was a really interesting idea to me, because of course we love our structured loyalty programs.
Paula: They are an incredible asset, but also the mindset around loyalty and the whole customer experience is something that Helène has an incredible amount of experience on, and is clearly very passionate about.
Paula: So let me give you her bio first and foremost, and then we’ll get into a really interesting discussion with her.
Paula: So Helène Brand has over 13 years experience in business marketing, in strategy, in business development, in customer loyalty and social responsibility.
Paula: She graduated from Stellenbosch University with a BCom Honours Cum Laude in 2006, and she told me that she thought then that life and business would be quite simply just applying everything she’d learned in the business workplace.
Paula: But in fact, her working career, she says, is her greatest teacher, and I definitely agree with her on that one.
Paula: For almost 10 years, Helène was the marketing, social responsibility and insights manager for a program called My School, My Village, My Planet in South Africa, which is essentially a community-based loyalty program where together with the team, she helped to create a powerful household brand.
Paula: And in fact, they have given back over 36 million US dollars in investments and rewards to schools and charities to date.
Paula: So a truly incredible program in terms of its impact.
Paula: Her professional highlights include winning eight international awards for the program, being named the Loyalty Personality of the Year in 2015, as well as lots of other milestones along the journey with the My School program, which we’ll talk through in this discussion.
Paula: Last year then in June 2018, Helène decided to take on a new opportunity for herself.
Paula: And she now consults on marketing strategy, strategic branding, customer experience, and of course, loyalty.
Paula: She has described her career to date as being both expiring and challenging, and has been delighted to have lots of amazing support and mentors.
Paula: And I love her approach.
Paula: She basically said that she believes we need to apply a blend of data with a good helping of intuitive insight to understand our increasingly complex world.
Paula: So, Helène, as you know, I am opening all of my shows asking my guests about their favorite loyalty statistic.
Paula: So I’m hoping you’ve done your homework and that you have something to talk to us about.
Paula: So tell us, what is your favorite loyalty statistic?
Helène: I love this question.
Helène: I’ll be honest, I don’t have a favorite statistic.
Helène: I do have a favorite word of warning from an analyst that I worked with many years ago.
Helène: His name is Sean Smith.
Helène: And he always warned me to use data carefully and to test my thinking, stress testing the data, especially if the data will be used to make predictions about future behavior.
Helène: So he would say, beware of the flaw of averages rather than the law of averages.
Helène: Now, when it comes to data and statistics, we love to use averages to define our customer, to design solutions for these averages.
Helène: This is what he would say.
Helène: If averages were the norm, then every human would have one testicle.
Paula: Oh, my God.
Helène: That really shook my world.
Paula: I was going to say I wasn’t expecting that.
Helène: And this was very useful for me to understand that we should absolutely respect the data and respect the statistics.
Helène: But we should also apply our own stress tests to this data to ensure it is doing what we intend and imply for it to do.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: And with your bio that you sent over in advance, I know I’ve already mentioned that you like to combine the science of the data along with a good degree of intuitive understanding as well.
Paula: So I think you’ve made a really good point there about the flaw of averages and not to take everything just based on the science.
Helène: Yes.
Paula: Got it.
Paula: Got it.
Paula: Brilliant.
Paula: OK.
Paula: And, you know, I think a word of warning is a brilliant way, actually, you know, to make sure again as a guiding principle.
Paula: I think, as you know, this podcast is entirely designed to educate.
Paula: So really interesting to hear that kind of word of warning.
Paula: And you also actually mentioned, Helène, about your favorite loyalty concept, which was very, very insightful, I thought.
Paula: So will you tell the listeners about essentially what what you’re talking about in terms of your favorite loyalty concept?
Paula: Because we definitely have a lot to learn from that.
Helène: When it comes to loyalty and I speak to business business leaders and entrepreneurs about loyalty, I taste what they understand loyalty means.
Helène: It comes down to retention.
Helène: They want retention from their customers and they want purchases from their customers.
Helène: I think that’s interesting because retention and repeat purchases is a type of a behavior that we want to incentivize from customers.
Helène: And I think you can do that in various ways.
Helène: You don’t need a loyalty, traditional points based loyalty program, for example, to do that.
Helène: When I think about loyalty, I like to think of it at a higher level in terms of the long term impact that your loyalty strategy today will have on customer retention into the future and moving beyond retention to the relationship.
Helène: So basically, if I could summarize that for me, loyalty is about the relationship, whereas retention is only about behavior.
Helène: And what I’m proposing is that when we look at loyalty, you should have a blended model.
Helène: You should have a model that looks at inputs and outputs for retention, as well as inputs and outputs around relationships.
Helène: You can also build your scorecards and your KPIs around this to make sure you’re not favoring one above the other or at the cost of the other.
Paula: I love that, Hélène, and I think what you’ve touched on there is the balance between transactional and emotional loyalty.
Paula: And what I loved as well is that you’ve given us some insights, which I’d love you to talk through, actually.
Paula: Just what would you be measuring, for example, in terms of the KPIs around retention?
Paula: And what other KPIs should we all be thinking about in terms of measuring those relationships?
Helène: Yes.
Helène: So I don’t know if you’ve noticed in the past few years, a lot of businesses are moving to short term measures and short term campaigns to drive sales, which is very much behavior or retention strategies.
Helène: And sometimes these are at the cost of the relationship and the brand value.
Helène: So continuous discounting, for example, can tarnish the perceived value of your brand, even though it might drive frequency today.
Helène: And as loyalty practitioners, our job in the boardroom is to challenge the short term sales mindset to make sure that we are delivering both on the short term results, but that we’re building for the future and building future customers as well.
Helène: We all know and we all nod when we say this.
Helène: Do we do it?
Helène: That’s what we need to challenge.
Helène: So to come back to your question, how do we measure retention and how do we measure relationships?
Helène: At the MySchool program, when we looked at retention measurements, we looked at measurements such as acquisition.
Helène: So the frequency of acquisition and the rate of acquisition of new customers, the frequency of the shop, which was in our business, one of the best indicators of loyalty and impact.
Helène: We looked at basket size to look at our influence on the value that our customers are spending.
Helène: We would look at cross shop to see whether our loyalty program is encouraging customers to explore the breadth of our partner stores.
Helène: And if you are in a points-based loyalty program, you should also look at redemption.
Helène: MySchoolProgram is a program that gave cash back on your behalf to schools and charities.
Helène: So redemption was 100%.
Helène: If you’re in a business where you’re working with points or virtual currency, then redemption figures of that virtual currency is a great indicator of whether your current customers actually value the rewards you’re offering.
Helène: Some of your finance colleagues might be very happy if customers don’t redeem because that might benefit your bottom line.
Helène: But to be honest, if you think about it, you want your redemption to be as high as possible because that shows customers love what you’re offering them.
Helène: That’s retention.
Helène: And then if you look at relationships, one of the measurements I would use is customer lifetime value, churn and net promoter score.
Paula: Okay.
Paula: And they’re all fabulous.
Paula: And Helène, when we talk through the MySchool program, I think it would be fabulous to get some sense of what success might look like.
Paula: I’d love if you would just explain for listeners the brand, the supermarket brand that the program operated within.
Paula: And just a bit around that kind of value proposition and how, I suppose, just the whole program was structured and even how far back it went, because I know it’s one of the longest running programs, maybe in the world, I don’t know.
Helène: So let me tell you a little bit more about MySchool, MyVillage, MyPlanet.
Helène: It’s quite a mouthful.
Helène: So if you’ll allow me, I’m simply going to call it MySchool.
Paula: Oh, great.
Helène: But if you’re looking for it online, look for MySchool, MyVillage, MyPlanet.
Helène: The MySchool program was started many years ago by an entrepreneurial father who noticed that every second Saturday, he had to stand next to the rugby field making hot dog rolls and working on the school fundraising committee.
Helène: And he was quite an entrepreneurial man.
Helène: And he had an idea or a thought around how do we help local schools to raise money better and more efficiently.
Helène: And that’s how he developed the concept that what if you could encourage local businesses to support local schools if local parents support local businesses.
Helène: And that’s essentially where this microcosm of community loyalty started.
Helène: When you sign up for your MySchool card, you can select up to three causes or charities or schools that you want to support.
Helène: And every time you shop and swipe your card at the partner stores, it’s a community of partner stores across the country, those stores give back a percentage of whatever you’ve spent to the school or charity on your behalf.
Helène: So essentially, rather than getting points for yourself or discounts for yourself, you are raising funds every time you shop.
Helène: The key partner to the MySchool program is Woolworths South Africa, which is one of the biggest food and clothing retailers in the country.
Paula: And it is a premium brand.
Paula: Sorry there, my understanding is it’s a premium supermarket?
Helène: Correct.
Helène: So Woolworths would be the equivalent of a Marks and Spencers in the UK.
Helène: That’s the brand equivalent.
Paula: Okay.
Paula: Beautiful and I know I mentioned in the introduction already, but I think it’s worth repeating that over the, I think it’s 20 years you mentioned that program has been operating.
Paula: And essentially the rewards back to the community are in excess of 36 million US dollars.
Helène: Yes.
Helène: So the MySchool program when I started had a few thousand schools and charities on board and it had only about 250,000 active users or active supporters.
Helène: We were able to grow that in less than 10 years to 1 million active customers, not just the database, but the active users.
Helène: And by that time, the program had given back more than 500 million Rand, South African Rand, which, sorry, you had the number there is equivalent to how many dollars?
Paula: Thirty six million, a lot.
Paula: Yeah, six million.
Helène: My conversion math was lagging.
Paula: That’s okay.
Helène: So the program really, what we found is in running this loyalty program, there were one or two pivots that really elevated the program throughout its career.
Helène: Initially, the program was designed only to raise funds for schools.
Helène: And so there was a limited capacity and reach.
Helène: Also, because we were tracking customer retention, we saw a drop off after a certain number of years that a customer was part of the program.
Helène: That was typically when their child left school.
Helène: So we realized that we could extend the customer lifetime value of this program.
Helène: If we gave customers opportunities beyond the school environment.
Helène: Now, education in South Africa is one of the most crucial areas of investment.
Helène: And that’s why even till today, education remains a top priority for government and corporate social responsibility spend.
Helène: But what we did is when we added the My Village and My Planet component, which allows you to raise funds for charities that care for people, as well as animals in the environment.
Helène: We gave this program, essentially, a cradle to grave opportunity.
Helène: Now, as a customer, I could support a local primary school, then a high school as my child progresses through the school system.
Helène: And once my child leaves the school, thank him, and now I’m done with school.
Helène: Finally, I can also swipe and raise funds for other causes that I care about, whether it might be the hospice or a local animal shelter.
Helène: So that really was one of our first big ones.
Helène: And this is important if you’re thinking of your own loyalty program, is how you use the system that you have already and add levels of variety that maximize what you have already.
Paula: Lovely.
Paula: Yeah, that’s a great idea.
Paula: And I do remember actually you mentioning this point when you spoke in London, Hèlene, and it really is so clever.
Paula: And to go back again, I suppose, to last week’s podcast, it sounds like you had exactly the same experience.
Paula: So again, for listeners, it’s to understand that you can’t tell people what to care about, but what you can do is make it accessible for them to contribute to what they already want to support and make your program relevant for them.
Helène: So essentially, if you could compare this to other loyalty programs, it’s personalization of your fundraising.
Paula: Yeah.
Helène: Or personalization of your points and your redemption.
Helène: If you could compare it, for example, to the Moxs & Spence’s Spark program.
Helène: So everybody’s talking about personalization.
Helène: I think we should be thinking about what is it in our system that we have already?
Helène: What is it that customers value most when they work with our brands?
Helène: And how can they personalize these experiences or these rewards?
Paula: And I think for me, the bravest decision, and maybe it was just always that way, but you made the point that this is not about rewarding the individual.
Paula: It’s about rewarding something greater.
Paula: And I’ve seen a lot of consumer research where customers will say, yeah, I’m a good person.
Paula: I want to reward the community and I want to support charity.
Paula: But often their behavior wouldn’t always be consistent with that.
Paula: So what’s your experience of a brand that might be considering a corporate social responsibility strategy for their loyalty program like you’ve done?
Helène: Yes, I think this question and whether we should be rewarding customers, whether rewarding their choice of cause is enough to motivate them.
Helène: This has been a question that haunts us every single year.
Helène: It’s something that we have to prove and review every single year.
Helène: So please, when I talk about the successes of my school and the program, please don’t imagine that the entire board thinks it’s easy to sign off on this money.
Helène: As any reward program manager will tell you, any loyalty program manager will tell you, you have to constantly stress-taste and prove the efficacy of your program.
Helène: The my school program is no different.
Helène: In my experience, what I have seen from the my school program is that the reward of giving back is definitely motivating to the customer because of the fact that she has a close bond with the cause that she has selected.
Helène: The school environment is a great example.
Helène: And if you are a parent, you will know that when the school principal tells you to put in all the children must wear black and white on Friday, and that’s what all parents will ensure happens on Friday.
Helène: We are very accustomed to listening and responding to the requests from schools and school principals in South Africa.
Helène: We support our local schools.
Helène: We are very involved in our children’s school career.
Helène: And so when a school principal tells us, we are raising funds for upgrading the security at the school, and when you swipe your MySchool card, that will go towards the security upgrade target, that is very, very motivating, because I know that it will be money that I don’t have to take out of my own pocket.
Helène: That money will be raised as I go shopping.
Helène: So as in anything in life, it’s in the execution.
Helène: It’s in how you do it, how you deliver it.
Helène: On the other hand, so that’s more anecdotal possibly.
Helène: On the other hand, we have independent research that was done on the MySchool customers.
Helène: Every, I would say every two to three years, independent research gets done to review the ROI and the customer lifetime value of a MySchool card holder compared to other card holders, compared to other programs and compared to other marketing initiatives.
Helène: And it’s always been very favorable.
Paula: Okay, I love that actually.
Paula: Yes, I think external research and validation is something that I’ve never seen enough.
Paula: I don’t think you can do enough of that.
Paula: So that’s lovely to hear.
Helène: Managing your internal stakeholders is just as important as managing your customer.
Helène: And not only to prove to them that it’s right.
Helène: I think we really should encourage internal questioning and internal stress testing of our programs.
Helène: It helps us to make sure that we’re not making decisions based on our own love and our own infatuation with our program.
Helène: Often what happens is we’re so close to the program, it’s like our baby.
Helène: But it’s also got to grow up and leave the nest and be influenced by our peers and other people to stress test it.
Helène: And that’s where you’ll get the great insights.
Helène: And that’s also where you’ll get the buy-in from your business.
Helène: If you’re part of a large business, you will have experienced this.
Helène: Without the buy-in from your senior leadership, your program won’t get the exposure, the aid time, the budgets, the resources it needs to keep growing.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: And I want to even, I suppose, pick up on a point that again probably goes back to your presentation in London.
Paula: I was clearly paying very good attention to you.
Paula: But I remember the point.
Paula: You’ve already talked about the schools promoting the program because it was in their vested interest.
Paula: So that’s extraordinary.
Paula: So I think all loyalty programs, I’m sure you’ve experienced this, you can only communicate from the brand on so many occasions.
Paula: So there are limits in terms of your capacity and just the frequency that you want to be outbound communicating with customers.
Paula: So to have extra communications coming through from a third party, like a school, is extraordinary.
Paula: But Eva and I remember you talking about the media.
Paula: Am I right in saying that every time you reached a new milestone in your donations, you would have got amazing media coverage as well?
Helène: I think it’s essentially the original influencer marketing.
Helène: Before we had Instagram, My School was already doing influencer marketing.
Paula: Wow.
Helène: I think so definitely.
Helène: Because of what the My School program does for its community and the way that it empowers schools and charities to raise funds for themselves by giving them a tool to fundraise with and by partnering with them, you have other advocates in the market speaking on your behalf.
Helène: And that adds incredible credibility to what you do and to what you say.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: Super.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: And that’s going to be, I think, a key outtake for me is, you know, the better the idea is, the more external people will talk about it.
Paula: So definitely a lesson I think we all need to keep in mind.
Paula: So yeah, a good one to remember.
Helène: I like that you mentioned the financial implications.
Helène: So it’s easy to do the math and you can see how expensive this program is also at the same time.
Helène: So while it might be the good thing to do and the right thing to do in the community, in business such as Woolworths and other partners, they have to make the money to be able to spend this money.
Helène: So at the same time, there needs to be sufficient value back to the partner brands in terms of their exposure and their impact.
Helène: But what I’ve found is that no customer will ever…
Helène: See now I’m stuck in my Afrikaans, which is my first language.
Helène: My pick of the English word.
Helène: Customers will always appreciate a generous brand.
Helène: No one will ever get wrapped over the knuckles for being generous.
Helène: And I think it’s the generosity, the seeds of generosity of the program that has also been able to carry it over generations.
Helène: There’s, for me, an interesting sense that a program that my mother used when I was in school, I mean, that’s long ago, can still be relevant to me now.
Helène: There are a few brands that can transition across generations like that.
Paula: And it’s a beautiful point.
Paula: And I think it leads into very nicely the next kind of topic that we want to talk about today.
Paula: And I know we could talk about the MySchool program for the full hour, but actually there’s loads of other insights that you wanted to go through.
Paula: And I really want to hear about.
Paula: And I think generosity really fits in with the entire mindset of telling a story from your brand.
Paula: So I know that that’s what you’ve been working on in the last couple of years.
Paula: So I’d love to understand all about the concept of building loyalty through storytelling.
Helène: I am simply in love with anything related to storytelling.
Helène: It’s just a phase of my life, perhaps a season.
Helène: I remember as a young marketer being told, you’ve got to use the principles of storytelling.
Helène: And I would nod my head furiously and write notes.
Helène: And still I did not know, what does it practically mean to write, to use the principles of storytelling?
Helène: You know, was I supposed to write a story about my school?
Helène: Must I make up a story?
Helène: Is there supposed to be a character that I make?
Helène: Is that why I need a mascot?
Helène: I was just confused.
Helène: So the aha moments really started happening for me.
Helène: The universe kind of conspired for me to reach this individual.
Helène: And it’s the work by Donald Miller, and they call it a story brand.
Helène: If you’re interested, just Google Donald Miller and story brand.
Helène: You’ll see that Don was a story writer, a book writer in his early career, and used the principle of storytelling to write his novels.
Helène: He’s also a man who’s really passionate about business, and he developed a very simple 7-step framework regarding how you can use the principles of storytelling to clarify your message to reach your customers better.
Helène: And this has been a very helpful tool and framework for me.
Helène: And it’s a framework I’ve been doing a lot more research about, and I’ve also completed all of the courses on story branding.
Helène: And I now offer it as a workshop with my customers and clients, because I find it empowers their team to have a single message, a single point of view and a really clear perspective on how they will communicate with their customers.
Helène: Now, I don’t want to go through the entire framework with you, but there are one or two things that I would like to highlight.
Paula: Okay.
Helène: Firstly, every story has got a hero, and that hero has a problem.
Helène: And as brands, we often make the mistake of thinking we are the hero in the story.
Helène: We position ourselves as powerful.
Helène: We’re an insurance company with so many years of experience.
Helène: We have so many awards that we have won.
Helène: And that is great for us.
Helène: But when I ask you about what you want, that’s when you get interested in the story.
Helène: You don’t want to hear a story about someone who’s already succeeded.
Helène: You have your own problem when you wake up in the morning and you’re trying to solve that problem.
Helène: So if the hero of the story is the customer, the person who has a problem that they want to solve, then what is the role of the brand?
Helène: In the story, the brand is the guide.
Helène: So essentially the brand is the Yoda of the story.
Helène: The brand is the Gandalf of the story.
Helène: Our role is to guide the hero, to provide them with a plan or a solution so that they can achieve success and transformation.
Helène: If you think about the great stories of the world, the guide has already won the battles many times.
Helène: They have the scars, they have an amazing backstory, they’re very powerful characters, they’re very stable characters.
Helène: That’s what your brand wants to be, stable and powerful.
Helène: The hero often is confused.
Helène: You know, Bridget Jones is asking herself, must I date another guy?
Helène: Should I?
Helène: Will somebody ever love me?
Helène: The hero is often fallible and insecure.
Helène: You definitely don’t want your brand to be the hero in that case.
Helène: You want to be the guide.
Helène: And what you’ll realize is brands that provide empathy and authority when it comes to helping their customers, they’re perfectly positioned as guides.
Helène: I think of brands such as Netflix.
Helène: They never brag about themselves.
Helène: It’s all about you and you finding that awesome show you like or being empowered to do entertainment your way.
Helène: And their job is to say, we get you, which is showing empathy and then saying, we’re the best to do it for you, just showing competence.
Helène: Other brands that are great guides are Holly Davidson, for example.
Helène: Not about them.
Helène: It’s about you and your journey, your individuality.
Helène: I could go on.
Helène: But does that make sense?
Paula: It really does, Helène.
Paula: And you know, when we were talking before today, what I loved was, first of all, there is a structure because I’m certainly not a brand expert.
Paula: And yet I have both a personal brand and I work with clients’ loyalty brands.
Paula: So it was amazing to kind of go, oh, there is something I can go and learn about that I really have been hearing coming through.
Paula: So I definitely will make sure in the show notes that we talk through, you know, story brand and your own offering, I think, as well, in terms of, you know, holding people’s hands if they want to build their story.
Helène: I have a lovely cheat sheet, a little two-page cheat sheet.
Paula: Great.
Helène: If anybody wants that, I’m happy to share it with them.
Paula: Okay.
Helène: It’s content that, you know, Don Miller shares his framework for free online.
Helène: You can also get it on the book if you buy the book.
Helène: So absolutely happy to share it with you.
Helène: Brilliant.
Helène: It’s in the workshops that you really get into the nitty-gritty, but I think it’s important for all of us to think about how we communicate better and more clearly.
Helène: I see a lot of brands and loyalty programs fail because they’re perceived as being complex or complicated or they just don’t land for the customer.
Helène: They’re competing almost against the rest of the business rather than flowing with the business.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: And what I also even loved was this same strategic framework can apply whether you’re a hairdresser or whether you are a multinational.
Paula: So again, for me, as a one woman show like yourself, I feel like actually this framework could help me clarify for myself, if nobody else, the positioning and the intention of the work that I do.
Helène: I’ve used this framework with many entrepreneurs.
Helène: I’ve used it with NGO clients.
Helène: And I’m also currently using it with a large retail partner.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Well, we will definitely make sure that the world learns more about storytelling and story brand.
Paula: And the next piece I wanted to get into, there is so much to talk to you about, Hèlene.
Paula: I really love this whole concept around understanding everyone’s perception of where loyalty is going.
Paula: So you’ve come from a very authentic corporate social responsibility background, as we’ve talked about.
Paula: You’re moving into the more emotional side of loyalty.
Paula: And I think what we talked about is there is a zeitgeist at the moment that we really need to be very clear on.
Paula: And understanding how to drive consumer loyalty in the future is very much going to be guided around bigger ideas.
Paula: And you have some fascinating insights around being a global citizen.
Paula: So can we talk a bit about your thoughts on that?
Paula: I think you had a couple of stories about what happens in South Africa with them, with a couple of organizations that you can share with us.
Helène: Yes, you would have noticed there is an upsell in community, community activism around the issue of national and international investors, global warming, climate change, many, many social issues are receiving traction unlike ever before.
Helène: There is a global movement called, well, there is an organization called Globalism, and I think that there is a very unique loyalty around how they’ve been able to mobilize millions of people to support social justice causes, while at the same time rewarding those activists with very, very tangible benefits, movie tickets or access to amazing concerts and gift vouchers and things like that.
Helène: So Global Citizen is an online app.
Helène: You can dive into your phone and also have a look at the website.
Helène: There are millions of actions taking global citizens to achieve the vision of ending poverty by 2030.
Helène: On the platform, register as a global citizen and you take actions on the platform which might include signing a petition, sharing a tweet, sending an email, checking in some way or doing a quiz.
Helène: All around social causes that interest you.
Helène: And every time you do that, you get rewarded with points.
Helène: So I might be building my points balance every time I send a tweet to pressurize the Canadian government to provide all women in schools with sanitary products.
Helène: I might be receiving points every time I sign a petition on deforestation in Brazil.
Helène: And as my points build, I can redeem my points for entries into very socially popular events and local opportunities.
Helène: A great example is in 2018 was the Mandela’s Centenary and the Global Citizen hosted, I can only call it a massive, massive event in Johannesburg, where the headline act was Beyonce and Jay-Z.
Helène: The MC was Trevor Noah.
Helène: We had some of the top, top local artists from South Africa and Africa there.
Helène: Literally a full day event from 11 o’clock in the morning to 11 o’clock in the evening.
Helène: Here’s the catch, you can’t buy tickets.
Helène: You’ve got to earn them.
Helène: So as a global citizen, the only way to get tickets to this event was to take actions on the Global Citizen app, collect your points and then submit entries for the random draw.
Helène: So I did win tickets.
Helène: And I must admit, I was so excited.
Helène: Flew up from Cape Town to Joburg, enjoyed it thoroughly.
Helène: And it really, if you think about it, it is a community loyalty program.
Helène: And my question would be to myself, is I wonder when local and international brands are going to start partnering with Global Citizen to offer points and redemptions and prizes to support the Global Citizen movement.
Helène: I think it would be a great way to connect with this type of an audience, an audience who is very passionate about global issues.
Helène: And it’s a great way for brands to step into that market without changing the loyalty program and changing their whole business.
Paula: It’s an extraordinary concept.
Paula: And again, I have a load of questions around it.
Paula: The first one would be, and you might know the answer to this one, Helène, but how are they funded?
Paula: How does Global Citizen, you know, what’s the kind of revenue model if they’re not already kind of partnering with brands?
Paula: Like who’s paying for that concert to run and paying Beyonce, you know?
Helène: So, I mean, there definitely has to be quite a lot of money moving through this business.
Helène: I believe that Global Citizen is a non-profit organization already.
Helène: So all the funds that they raise are donations and are therefore tax deductible.
Helène: They definitely do partner with corporates, such as when they were in South Africa for this Mandela Centenary event.
Helène: They partnered with the Mozepe Foundation.
Helène: They partnered with a few big local brands.
Helène: So I don’t want to mention all the brands, but they were definitely partnerships.
Helène: So what I’m saying is that was just for one event.
Helène: In South Africa, I haven’t really seen much else in terms of brand partnerships.
Helène: Then obviously in terms of…
Helène: I also think that if I look at the model, I would assume that if I’m hosting an event, if I’m a local band, I would be happy to offer team tickets for free to global citizens.
Helène: So that might be a quid pro quo rather than cash exchanges.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: And it’s a lovely model.
Paula: And I think from a brand perspective, because again, we’ve both been on the client side and the amount of time, effort and work that goes into building, particularly experiences for customers.
Paula: I think if there’s somebody doing all the hard work, I mean, I would be straight in there going, please, you know, take my money.
Helène: Absolutely.
Helène: Actually, when I was on the Global Citizen website recently, I saw that there were a few big BMW events as well that you could win tickets to.
Helène: So I think if you’re hosting an event, you could be giving tickets to Global Citizen to use as rewards.
Helène: Or you could be partnering with Global Citizen to create and facilitate events without you being at the center of orchestrating all of it.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: And I’m sure, you know, an organization like that, particularly as a nonprofit, has a very good understanding of the needs of big corporate brands.
Paula: And it will, you know, do an exceptionally good job, I’m sure, of making BMW look good or whoever it is that’s supporting them.
Paula: So, yeah, it’s a lovely, lovely idea.
Paula: So definitely, I’m going to go and check that one out.
Paula: And I think, as you said, it fits in with this idea of the zeitgeist where consumers are just looking for more purpose in terms of their relationships with them, the companies that they do business with.
Paula: So, so a lovely point.
Paula: And the last thing then I just wanted to talk through today, Helène, is resources.
Paula: So, as you know, I’m really keen, it’s all about education on this podcast.
Paula: And we’ve mentioned Story Brand and we’ve mentioned a couple of things.
Paula: But where do you go to to stay up to date on your kind of own knowledge?
Helène: Absolutely.
Helène: So I love podcasts because I have to travel and commute a lot.
Helène: I listen to Don Miller’s podcast, Story Brand.
Helène: I do listen to Michael Hyatt.
Helène: His podcast is called Need to Win.
Helène: I like to read, but I don’t find a lot of time.
Helène: Currently, I’m reading a book called Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein.
Helène: It’s on how to improve decisions about health, wealth and happiness by nudging people, providing them with better choice selection.
Helène: It’s useful for someone in the loyalty space because we wish to influence customer behavior that will maximize their benefits and also maximize the benefit for business.
Helène: That’s what I’m reading at the moment.
Helène: And other than that, I find that when you ask people interesting questions, you get the most interesting answers.
Helène: I like to connect potentially unrelated things.
Helène: So, for example, I’ll be sitting and having a glass of wine and someone tells me there’s a job opening at their company.
Helène: And I say, well, what is this about?
Helène: And it’s for a sociologist or a social scientist.
Helène: And it’s in the banking industry.
Helène: And I say, well, what is the bank going to do with someone in the background, sociology and stuff like that?
Helène: I mean, I don’t understand half of it.
Helène: And they say, well, in our loyalty program at this bank, we analyze people’s spend behavior and we classify them by three or four personality types that we think that they might be based on their spend behavior.
Helène: And I’ve never heard of that.
Paula: That’s amazing.
Helène: And how interesting is that?
Helène: So this bank would be looking at my spending behavior, seeing whether I’m an erratic spender or a diligent shopper, or do I spend the same amount every month at the same place at the same time?
Helène: And what can I say about my personality?
Helène: And if you have those insights about my personality, do you also understand what I value in a bank?
Helène: So for example, if the bank wins an award, would I care?
Helène: And is that a message that I’m interested in?
Helène: Or is the fact that the bank is saving me 0.001% of my interest more important?
Helène: And I think it’s just interesting when you, when you listen to what people are saying, you will discover things about what businesses are doing and how they’re thinking differently without having to snoop into their boardrooms.
Helène: You’ll put the pieces together.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: Yes.
Paula: Well, I think, yeah, interest, intellectual curiosity and just paying attention provides amazing answers.
Paula: You know, it’s amazing, you know, when you look, what you find.
Paula: So well done.
Paula: Brilliant.
Paula: And so I just a final comment.
Paula: Just want to see if you agree with this because what has struck me, I suppose, in terms of the research and talking to you and to other people in South Africa, I really haven’t appreciated how sophisticated some of the loyalty programs are in your country.
Paula: Would you agree that South Africa is quite an advanced loyalty market in terms of global kind of trends and stages of development?
Helène: Yes, I think that South Africa, perhaps we don’t lead, but we’re certainly not lagging.
Helène: Loyalty is a very dedicated profession in South Africa.
Helène: It certainly is a growing profession.
Helène: We have some excellent boutique.
Helène: Well, how do I call it?
Helène: Maybe I should just repeat.
Helène: South Africa is definitely not lagging behind when it comes to loyalty.
Helène: The loyalty industry is regarded as a high profession and certainly something we take very, very seriously.
Helène: I find that loyalty in South Africa is taken very seriously and we establish ourselves against international benchmarks.
Helène: We’re certainly leading in Africa.
Paula: Love it.
Paula: Love it.
Paula: And it’s not often actually that I do think that loyalty is taken as seriously as clearly I would want it to be taken, with my vested interests very clear there.
Paula: But I like to hear that and I don’t think anyone’s ever said something so clearly in terms of like the whole country is taking it seriously, you know, in terms of the various brands that you’ve worked with.
Paula: So that’s really cool to hear.
Paula: My goodness, I have learned so much.
Paula: There’s a lot to digest.
Helène: Well, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you.
Helène: This has been so much fun and it’s been good for me to think about all these questions as well.
Helène: It also stimulates my thoughts.
Paula: There you go.
Paula: Well, I think the key thing for us is to stay in touch.
Paula: And I also want to make sure that we give people an opportunity to connect with you because I’m sure your skills are going to be really interesting to lots of people.
Paula: So tell us, where should people get in contact with you if they want to?
Helène: So interestingly enough, the shoemaker never makes shoes for their own children.
Helène: I don’t have my own website, but you’re welcome to find me on email.
Helène: My email is helene, that’s H-E-L-E-N-E, helenebrand84 at gmail.com.
Helène: And on LinkedIn, I’m simply Helène Brand.
Helène: You’re welcome to look me up.
Helène: And that’s it.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Well, all I can say in closing is, Helène, you are an inspiration.
Paula: I can see why you won the Loyalty Personality of the Year with all of that amazing work that you’ve done.
Paula: So I really look forward to staying in touch and hopefully working with you at some stage in the future.
Paula: So thank you for coming on Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Helène: Excellent.
Helène: Thank you, everyone.
Helène: And best of luck with the Loyalty Programme that you run.
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.
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