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: You So today’s show is brought to you by Epsilon and their People Cloud Loyalty Solution, which is a powerful platform that boasts over 50 years converting casual customers into lifetime fans.
Paula: Epsilon’s technology and services operate at the core of the publicist group worldwide, powering brands such as Dell, Dunkin, Gap and Walgreens.
Paula: And their platform is designed to give all of their clients the power and flexibility to create one of a kind emotional connections with their customers.
Paula: Epsilon’s People Cloud Loyalty is a market leading end-to-end solution and it is in fact the only company that has been named a leader in both the loyalty technology platforms and the loyalty services providers Forrester Waves in 2019.
Paula: As you can imagine, I’m delighted to be working with Epsilon and creating awareness of their People Cloud Loyalty solution.
Paula: So if you want more information, visit their website at emea.epsilon.com forward slash letstalkloyalty or drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch.
Paula: That website again is emea.epsilon.com forward slash letstalkloyalty.
Paula: Now let’s get on with the interview.
Paula: So welcome to episode 41 of Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Paula: And today’s guest is somebody who was definitely way up the top of my wishlist of guests when I was planning the podcast originally back in 2019.
Paula: So many of you will be very familiar with the name and career of Bryan Pearson, who is joining me on the line today directly from Canada.
Paula: And we’re going to have, I suppose, a really interesting conversation about his almost 30-year career in the loyalty industry.
Paula: So Bryan, first and foremost, is best known as president and chief executive officer of the LoyaltyOne group of companies until August of last year.
Paula: And in fact, when I was looking through the research, that group of companies had revenues totaling in excess of $2 billion.
Paula: So an incredible contribution as a company and as an individual to the loyalty industry.
Paula: So without further ado, let me first of all welcome Bryan Pearson to Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Bryan: Hi.
Bryan: It’s a pleasure to be on.
Paula: Great.
Paula: No, it’s fabulous to have you, Bryan.
Paula: And I mentioned before the call, in fact, that I did see you speaking in London at the 2018 Loyalty Surgery, when in fact you’d also just been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award as the industry personality of the year.
Paula: So I think a huge congratulations on that as well.
Bryan: Thanks.
Bryan: It was a wonderful evening and a nice surprise, let’s put it that way, to be recognized.
Bryan: So it was a real pleasure to be there.
Paula: Great.
Paula: Okay.
Paula: Well, listen, we’ll get into talking about your entire career.
Paula: But before we do that, as you know, I always start this show just talking about loyalty statistics and particularly with your credentials, I’m really intrigued to ask you, what is your favorite loyalty statistic?
Bryan: Oh, yes, it’s for me, I have to go to engagement metrics of some form or another.
Bryan: I mean, one one statistic is tough to actually get to measure what engagement is.
Bryan: But I think that over the years of running the air miles program in Canada and looking at specifically how we we were on an effort of continuously improving that program for the consumer and for our partners, since it’s a coalition scheme.
Bryan: You know, one thing we focused on a lot was engagement.
Bryan: And so we measured that everything from net promoter score all the way through to really the hard metrics, which was activation rates, how often people were using the card, how many partners they were actually visiting, how many miles they collected in a variety of periods of time.
Bryan: And, you know, as a good executive, what I wanted to see was a general listen to the right, and, you know, if you weren’t necessarily focused on the right metrics, then what happened is it was a great measure of whether you were doing the right thing for the consumer.
Paula: Wonderful, wonderful.
Paula: And again, Airmiles is probably the best known loyalty brand, in fact, in the world.
Paula: And I know you’re a big advocate of the coalition model overall.
Paula: So I’d love if you just explain LoyaltyOne actually, Bryan, because I know you had a consulting arm, you have, you know, the coalition program, but also some tactical operations as well.
Paula: So will you just give us a sense of what LoyaltyOne did in your, as I said, I think, 27 years as chief executive of that group?
Bryan: Yeah, well, I was only chief executive for the last 12 or 13 years, I think.
Bryan: I certainly had a key role in building the Airmiles program because I was president of that in back in 1999, which feels odd to say something without 2000 in front of it.
Bryan: So yeah, I think we started as the Airmiles reward program and really as an institute of Keith Mills’ vision to bring coalition to the world.
Bryan: We focused on that primarily for probably a decade and a half and then realized that we had some expertise and we wanted to think about how we would start expanding on that.
Bryan: So we bought a marketing services company which later got folded into Epsilon as we were part of Alliance Data, and LoyaltyOne still is a division of Alliance Data.
Bryan: And then we really did, let’s say, three or four things that I thought I was quite proud of as we progressed the organization.
Bryan: Number one was we never took our foot off the gas pedal on just making Airmiles the best expression of a coalition program that we could make it.
Bryan: We knew that we had deep analytical roots in there and particularly in high frequency retail, there was an opportunity to develop something akin to Dunhumbi, but maybe with a slightly different focus in how we approach the algorithms and analytics.
Bryan: So we built Presma, which has since been sold by Alliance Data to AC Nielsen, and Presma was a retail analytics organization helping the merchant and the vendor community understand how to price and promote their products more effectively.
Bryan: And then we also made the acquisition of Brand Loyalty, which was a Dutch short-term promotions company back, I think, in about six or seven years ago.
Bryan: And that really gave us a footprint and started to build an access point in high-frequency retail on a global basis.
Bryan: And then as you said, we had sort of a publishing and consulting area around Colloquy and LoyaltyOne Consulting, where we were getting so much outreach from companies all over the globe.
Bryan: But we really, for me, it did two things, number one is, it helped us understand how different organizations were thinking outside of the coalition and short-term loyalty sphere.
Bryan: You get very focused on your own dirty laundry, let’s say.
Bryan: And in addition to that, it just really made us think a bit more about where the industry was going and allowed us to position ourselves as thought leaders in the space.
Bryan: And so, that was the main piece.
Bryan: The last element I did just before leaving was we ran something called Zero Gravity Labs.
Bryan: And the objective there was to create a brick and beam space independent of the company where we were testing technologies and really trying to understand everything from facial recognition, payment technologies, etc.
Bryan: to understand how would this apply to the loyalty space, and to put that kind of lens on the technologies in the very vibrant tech community which existed in Toronto and beyond.
Bryan: So, you know, it was…
Paula: Lots going on.
Bryan: If you go back to the book, Paula, that I wrote back in 2011, which was published in 2012, The Loyalty Leap, the funny thing there is, you know, we talk about enterprise loyalty.
Bryan: And I think at the end of the day, you know, we continue to march towards trying to create an organization that could support our partners, as they thought about loyalty as a foundational element as they went to market from a strategy and from a customer engagement standpoint.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: And I did buy and read your book as well, Bryan, so congratulations.
Paula: And I know it was a bestseller.
Paula: So The Loyalty Leap, I’ll make sure that we link to that in the show notes.
Paula: And I know your key focus was turning customer information into customer intimacy.
Paula: And in many ways, actually, I mean, again, none of us had any clue what was coming now.
Paula: But certainly, even back then, you were talking about unprecedented change and all of the variables that were going into, I suppose, increasing consumer power.
Paula: So there was lots of really nice ideas coming through there.
Paula: How did you find writing about loyalty?
Paula: It was perhaps one of the very first books in the industry, was it?
Bryan: Well, there’s a couple that preceded it that I actually really enjoyed, like Scoring Points, which Sir Terry Leahy, I think, wrote, or was one of the prime architects of that.
Bryan: And Fred Reicheldt’s book, although I really felt it was a cure for insomnia, The Loyalty Effect, and then his later book on Net Promoter Score.
Bryan: I always, when I was writing mine, was trying to find a way to say, I want to make it readable and not a cure for insomnia.
Bryan: But anyways, I hope I achieved that.
Bryan: If anybody picks it up, and they can hear my voice now, that they’ll see my voice coming through in the book itself.
Paula: Yeah.
Bryan: It’s…
Bryan: I think for me, it was really after having been in the industry for 15 years, and understanding the potential that loyalty and customer data had, and seeing everything that was happening in the big trends in the marketplace, the intermediation of media, the power that was moving to the consumer, I kind of looked and said, loyalty has got a much bigger role to play in this.
Bryan: Customer data has a much bigger role to play in it.
Bryan: I actually, in preparation just for this call, picked up my copy and had an opportunity to leap through it again.
Bryan: And in hindsight, I should have named it something other than the Loyalty Leap, because while the technology in the environment has shifted, and while I think the market and the prevalence of loyalty programs has continued to increase and develop, a lot of the themes that are underlying the book, which was this call to action to start using that information to create the right kind of relationships with customers, to focus on the fact that if you can connect with the consumer, be highly relevant to where they are in their stage, age, thoughts, passions, whatever in life, that you had a real opportunity to build emotional loyalty versus behavioral loyalty.
Bryan: I think that where we are today in this COVID environment, and again, while the technology has moved along, the foundational issues that were identified in the book, I think, unfortunately, are still largely unaddressed, and so it’s still very relevant today.
Paula: Yes, I do.
Paula: I definitely found that.
Paula: I want to just go back to the technology piece that you mentioned, Bryan, because it’s something that fascinates me.
Paula: I have a real passion for innovation.
Paula: In terms of where is the technology going, and what should listeners be thinking about in terms of innovation, I read your article, for example, I know you write a lot for forbes.com.
Paula: You were talking about AI, for example, artificial intelligence in the context of COVID-19.
Paula: But I suppose I’m also wondering about the power of voice technology, such as Alexa and voice assistants.
Paula: I’m looking at WhatsApp, for example.
Paula: I know they launched a payments platform in Brazil this week.
Paula: I also wondering, what can we do with WhatsApp for loyalty?
Paula: Are there particular technologies that you believe will be increasingly important for us to understand as loyalty practitioners?
Bryan: Yeah, I mean, I think that you can kind of broadly put them into a number of buckets.
Bryan: I’m sort of free flow thinking now that you’ve given me this question.
Paula: Put you on the spot, Bryan.
Paula: I’m sorry.
Bryan: Put me on the spot.
Bryan: I think on one side, when you’re talking about WhatsApp and you’re talking about Siri and voice activation, you have to think about how are the engagement methodologies, how is the consumer going to connect?
Bryan: What’s the way that they’re going to create outreach to you?
Bryan: And we’ve seen that go through a massive change from the early days of when I started in this where we were basically tied to direct mail and excitement was when we did variable printing.
Bryan: Now I feel like a real dinosaur, but we were pushing the boundaries of what was possible back then because we were trying to get to that one to one experience or one to few at a minimum.
Bryan: So I think you need to be accommodating and really embrace whatever the technologies are about access and connectivity and how you make it easy for the consumer to basically connect with you.
Bryan: So I think that’s called that in the inflow pipe.
Bryan: And then in the middle, you’ve got really your data analytics and you’ve got how you’re actually going to understand who the consumer is and create that connectivity.
Bryan: And so a lot of that really hasn’t changed.
Bryan: I think the ARI article in particular was just focused on the fact that different tools for different moments, different tools for different applications and artificial intelligence machine learning.
Bryan: It’s the company CEO that I referenced in there, Gary Serenvera from Daisy Intelligence.
Bryan: He has a great saying, which is, let the humans focus on strategy and let the machines do what the machines do back, let the run of the mill pieces underlie it and underlie everything.
Bryan: I think in the AI piece, it’s really about, are we understanding and integrating all the tools that we have available and applying them to the right issues, right tool for the right problem, let’s put it that way.
Bryan: I think on the back end of this is really the outflow, which is how do you connect with the consumer?
Bryan: What’s the engagement device?
Bryan: Certainly, that’s where we’ve seen the greatest amount of splintering in the last decade.
Bryan: Probably one of the biggest two-decade spans of change that marketers have seen just in general and I don’t care if you’re a loyalty marketer or just somebody trying to move an FMCG through to the marketplace overall.
Bryan: The mechanism, if I took my toolbox from back in my quicker oats FMCG days and tried to apply it to this, I’d be the last person in the middle of the desert wondering around going, what the heck is happening?
Bryan: Imagine being transported to today from 30 odd years ago.
Bryan: On that side, I think you also get back to things like voice.
Bryan: You also get back to the digital engagement components and how you actually create the right level of outreach and the right level of personalization that, as I said in my book, was about you balance the care and connection versus the creepy.
Bryan: You really need to figure that piece out and grow that out.
Bryan: If I had one word that overrides the inflow and exhaust of this, it really is that piece of choice.
Bryan: Unfortunately, today, as marketers, you cut off a channel or you cut off an engagement mechanism, and you cut off a segment of your customers who expect that you’re going to be providing them a channel choice one way or another.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: I’d love to just talk about the whole model of Airmiles, Bryan, just because even going to the last loyalty surgery there in 2019, I was over in London, and there was a lot of talk about coalition and again, in the book, you talk about it’s been hugely successful in most parts of the world, with the exception of the United States, but there were a lot of challenges, which sounded like increasingly vocal challenges for the, I suppose, independence that brands give up in order to be part of a coalition program.
Paula: So I suppose for people out there listening, thinking about is there an opportunity in my country for a coalition program?
Paula: What do you think is happening with that model overall and the whole, I suppose, idea of consolidated spend?
Bryan: So depending on the country and depending on data availability, you have a very different environment you have to deal with.
Bryan: So the foundational reason why coalition was such an elegant solution, let’s say 25 years ago was, it was really easy for companies to think about the technology and work with a partner who would be able to put together the whole loyalty environment tech-wise to provide a platform for communications, to provide the analytical service to help the companies wind their way through this myriad of information that was coming through and to create a data asset that at its foundation gave you a very broad perspective on the spend of your consumer and therefore would identify not only your shoppers, which is always a risk in a loyalty program, is if you’re only looking at your existing shoppers, you don’t understand who your non-shoppers are.
Bryan: And so it’s about changing that mindset a little bit and having a fuller view.
Bryan: That’s the benefits of coalition.
Bryan: Fast forward a quarter century and well, that sounds weird to say, but fast forward a quarter century, and the world has changed.
Bryan: Technology is cheap.
Bryan: Your ability to source a platform from any number of providers is relatively easy.
Bryan: The prevalence of analytic tools relatively available.
Bryan: The availability of talent who has had an understanding of this, you know, very, very available.
Bryan: That’s not to say we’re all unemployed right now.
Bryan: It’s just to say, you know, that the market has been filled and the skill sets that are required to do this is to get the digital natives in the marketplace now much more prevalent.
Bryan: I mean, it’s at some point I will do an audit in Canada, but today, but a number of years ago I did one and of the top 10 programs in Canada, eight of the people running those programs had been alumni from the LoyaltyOne organization.
Bryan: So you know, it is this exporting of talent and people who understand how to apply these methodologies, which is important.
Bryan: So today we’re sitting in an environment where some of the elements of coalition are still viable, and particularly the cross-stending data and information.
Bryan: That’s the one I referred to at the beginning, which essentially is, hey, depending on the environment you work in, like the United States is a very free data environment.
Bryan: There’s a number of ways you can obtain very detailed information on what customers are buying or not buying, maybe not down to the SKU level or the item level, but certainly category-based decisions that consumers are making.
Bryan: The digital environment, the tracking mechanisms that every single app on your phone has embedded in it, effectively are rendering some of the benefits of coalition a little bit more moot.
Bryan: As a consumer, if you stand up the proposition with the right partners, with the right value of based offering, and you market effectively through it, I don’t think there’s anything that matches the effectiveness of a really well-run coalition.
Bryan: The question is, can you create conditions to have what we would say is a really well-run coalition in a world where people are, as you said right off the beginning, where they want to control the brand experience 100% and they don’t want to subjugate their brand to another brand on the way through?
Bryan: And the question we always answered was loyalty to who or whom?
Bryan: I don’t know which one it would be.
Bryan: But loyalty to who?
Bryan: Is it loyalty to the program or loyalty to me?
Bryan: And my answer to that always was, that’s entirely dependent on how you actually work with the customer who has come to you because of the program and it’s your job to really provide a superior brand experience.
Bryan: And if you do, then you’ve got a chance of retaining that customer should you decide not to continue in the coalition.
Bryan: But there are more hurdles and more optionality, more technology, more solutions means it’s that much harder to get a coalition up and running today.
Bryan: An existing coalition that’s running, I think we’ve seen seems to have the legs to weather and continue very effectively on an ongoing basis.
Bryan: And I think what we’re seeing is coalitions morph, which is sort of the conversation from the surgery, morph to a world where they are more about loose affiliations of brands versus necessarily being a hardwired, connected program like traditional coalitions would have been.
Paula: And I guess again, because Airmiles was so early to the party and again coming from, I know originally the UK, as you said, with Keith Mills and the brand experience, the Airmiles brand was very powerful.
Paula: So I can imagine launching in Canada the amount of excitement that you would have had to get the partners on board.
Paula: But I think it is increasingly difficult to navigate those terms.
Paula: So I’m not surprised to hear you saying that they’re more loose affiliations.
Paula: And I’ve certainly done a lot of work in the partnership space.
Paula: So is that the direction that you think more and more brands will go?
Bryan: Well, I think we’ve seen that.
Bryan: And again, that comes down to it is about people wanting to control their experience much more tightly and therefore, and loyalty is being recognized more and more as being a critical component of the overall brand experience.
Bryan: And so linking those things together, you kind of look and say, why would people prefer maybe to launch their own bespoke program as opposed to partnering up with something that’s ready made?
Bryan: And if they are going to partner, I think you’ll see currency conversions or just affiliate relationships in terms of benefits flowing back and forth.
Bryan: And that’s effectively what the airlines have done forever, right?
Bryan: So I think that’s your world, Paula, not mine.
Bryan: But it’s no question that there’s been, in the travel industry, a lot more of that that has happened because you’re trying to target and identify a very specific group of customers moving around.
Bryan: But exclusivity and some of the things that are hallmarks of a benefit of a national country by country based coalition, you know, fall by the wayside when your customer is moving around as much as it would in the travel industry.
Paula: So one of the things I noticed in the article you wrote on Forbes recently, actually, Bryan, was around, I suppose, the importance of practicality and creativity and how they are coming through.
Paula: And just as you’re mentioning the airline industry, I think there’s some really interesting ideas coming through.
Paula: So tell us what do you think are the opportunities around that kind of space?
Bryan: Yeah, I think in general, I had this concept in the book, which was a framework I just always thought of when it came to loyalty, and it was this idea of the three Rs, I would call it rewards, recognition and relevance.
Bryan: And on the reward side, what has been encouraging to me, even as somebody who essentially made their livelihood off of the sale and redemption of points, is that they’re seeing more programs that are experience based, that are sort of de-emphasizing what I would say are the hard benefits of a program, and really focusing more on the soft benefits of enrollment or membership in a lot of ways, and finding ways to enhance the overall experience.
Bryan: And so they’re leaning more on the second two Rs, which is recognition and unrelevancy.
Bryan: And the rewards is part of that, in that, as you say, in the airline world, being on the plane is just a portion of what you have to do when you’re traveling, pre travel, on the ground, the lounges, the concierge services, same thing.
Bryan: And when you land in terms of express access through customs, and sometimes somebody will actually take you through the entire process.
Bryan: Those are the kind of elements which, as somebody who’s been a frequent flyer, who spent far too much time on a plane, for business reasons, I really valued, I mean, I wanted to maintain my status.
Bryan: It had nothing to do with the points, it had to do with the overall experience because my objective was to make the time I spent in airports or connecting to and leaving the plane as efficient as possible.
Bryan: And that was my mission.
Bryan: And that played a very important role.
Bryan: And so I tried to maintain and gain that status on two or three airlines, which was able to do, it’s frightening, in such a way that I had the choice between those when I was traveling, but it certainly narrowed the airlines I was operating with.
Bryan: And I think we will see more of that in retail.
Bryan: I think we’ll see more of that in banking.
Bryan: And it’s great to see, in my opinion, it’s great to see the creativity come to bear on those kind of opportunities for loyalty.
Paula: And the two examples you gave, Bryan, actually in that article, one was around a wine company, which amazingly, and I’d love you just to tell listeners about how they’re managing to do sampling of new wines, given the lockdown.
Bryan: Yeah, so this was early in the lockdown.
Bryan: I’d actually visited that winery in advance of COVID hitting.
Bryan: I made a trip through Oregon, wonderful wine country for anybody looking for an interesting trip.
Bryan: And Portland’s a super cool city.
Bryan: But I was on their mail list.
Bryan: And so I got this invitation where I could set up a tasting, like I would be in their tasting room in the winery, but that they would send the wines to you.
Bryan: And then you could in turn, with little empty bottles that you could decant the wine into, send the little bottles off to all the friends who were going to do the tasting with you and then create a Zoom taste experience with the winemakers and with the wine.
Bryan: And I just thought, you know, the one thing that I’ve been so excited about, and so it’s been so much fun to watch, is while the economy in a lot of ways is being devastated and small business is being devastated, the creativity and the ingenuity like this winery has been just so exciting to watch.
Bryan: And I can comment on Canada because that’s where I’ve been self distancing from the rest of the world, social distancing from each other.
Bryan: And I would say that it took two or three weeks for people to kind of pivot and figure out their angles.
Bryan: But the way they’ve actually found ways to continue to keep the doors open, to continue to keep some of the lights on in the business and connect with customers and the adoption rate of everything from curbside pickup, which was a non-starter in Canada for any of the major retailers, all the way through to Concierge Services for shopping has been astonishing.
Bryan: And so I’m hoping that that sticks around.
Bryan: And in there, there’s probably lessons for those of us who are more tuning into the loyalty angle around them.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: And the cliché comes to mind, Bryan, you know this one which says necessity is the mother of invention, so I think that’s exactly what’s happening.
Paula: And as you were talking about the Concierge Service, I know it was Best Buy that you were referencing.
Paula: And you’re right.
Paula: I mean, for me, that definitely drives an emotional loyalty connection with the brand.
Paula: And certainly here in Dubai, I’ve been waiting to go back to the Apple stores.
Paula: They reopened here now about a week ago.
Paula: And like that, it’s not positioned as a Concierge Service.
Paula: But as soon as I read your article, I was like, that’s exactly what I’m getting, which is a one-to-one dedicated concierge.
Paula: So all of my needs will be taken care of.
Paula: There won’t be loads of, I don’t know what, you know, random children running around while I’m trying to buy a new laptop.
Paula: So it’s incredible what drives loyalty in the most unexpected ways.
Bryan: Well, in the Apple Store, you might actually get to touch the product at that point.
Bryan: You want to move the kids out and people doing their email.
Bryan: So that’s for certain.
Bryan: It’s in the whole concern of safety during this time period.
Bryan: We have a chain here in Canada called Bulk Barn, which sells bulk baking supplies, soup mixes, nuts, all those kinds of things.
Bryan: Things that you very much use for baking and ingredients.
Bryan: And you could do the online curbside or you can go in store.
Bryan: I didn’t write about this one in the article.
Bryan: And an employee actually walks around and you don’t touch anything.
Bryan: You just point and say, I’d like some wallets.
Bryan: And they say, how much would you like and you’d sort of indicate as best you can.
Bryan: And then you put it in your basket and you go to the checkout.
Bryan: That’s the only touch that you’re doing.
Bryan: And the employees who are the ones who are touching all the bins and everything else.
Bryan: So they found a very creative way to get past some of the health concerns.
Bryan: But in the same way, create a pretty positive experience.
Bryan: And you’re seeing other retailers do appointment based.
Bryan: And, you know, when you think about how our smaller retailers and the mums and pops and going to compete against the big chains that are out there, who could be very dominant and sort of crush everybody at this stage because of the financial wherewithal that many of them have.
Bryan: The way they’re going to compete is by thinking completely differently.
Bryan: And this may well be opening the doors for them to think about, you know, how is the how am I going to differ the experience and create something that’s truly unique and that the larger retailers may be will have trouble replicating.
Bryan: And then the next question would be given the ability to do something from a customer database or a loyalty initiative would then be, okay, how does this tie back to what I want to do on maintaining those relationships with customers and thinking about how will I integrate some sort of customer engagement program to do that.
Bryan: And I’ve really started talking a lot about customer engagement versus loyalty because, again, you say loyalty, and I mean big loyalty, loyalty of the customer, not small loyalty, which is loyalty program.
Bryan: And so I love points.
Bryan: I think they play a super way to attract people to the value offering that sometimes might be really difficult for you to communicate if that’s some of these first visits to your store.
Bryan: Oh, yeah, you should come because then we’re going to do this and this and this and that and all these features and the person’s head spinning because they just made a single purchase.
Bryan: And it’s way easier to turn around and say, would you like to sign up for this?
Bryan: We’ll give you X percent back on this purchase.
Bryan: And every time you come, you collect this currency, which is worth some.
Bryan: It’s a much softer sell if you want than the complexity of the experientially based programs.
Bryan: But you need to create that balance and find a way to do both effectively in a way that attracts a customer, but long term is sustaining in the excitement that you can create for them.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: But I particularly love what you talked about in terms of that wine store, Bryan, because when I think about the very basics and the psychology of us as human beings, I’ve often written about, for example, that what a lot of people are really missing in their lives is a sense of connection.
Paula: And what I’m hearing coming through there is particularly there’s a lot of, I’d say, loneliness going on around COVID-19 and whether or not it’s admitted or discussed.
Paula: And we could get into all of the implications of that, but the very simple piece of gathering around a laptop with your sample of wine and discussing it and sharing that experience, I think that that will serve them very much in the long term as a way to drive consumer loyalty that they may never have thought of before.
Bryan: No, and it extends the experience.
Bryan: If you weren’t in Oregon and in this little town and able to go to the winery, you could never have that experience.
Bryan: Now they have a national experience, they have an ability to connect with customers anywhere in the US.
Bryan: It’s a little…
Bryan: They could probably do it internationally.
Bryan: It’s a little more challenging to ship the wine with duties and everything.
Bryan: But you’re right, it is about finding a new way to extend your brand and the brand experience overall.
Bryan: I feel like I’m pushing the book all the time.
Bryan: In advance of doing this, you gave me the opportunity to go back and flip through it again, which I haven’t done in a number of years.
Bryan: I was shaking my head saying, wow, this stuff is still very relevant, which is rewarding at some level.
Bryan: My favorite chapter in the book was a chapter on fear and hope.
Bryan: It was turning fear into fear.
Bryan: It was a sixth chapter.
Bryan: I got to this little graphic there.
Bryan: We’d done some work on understanding the psychology of consumer, the psychology of people at the deepest, almost Maslow’s lowest level on the hierarchy and working your way up.
Bryan: There were five foundational fears that I referenced and then said, how do you…
Bryan: How do you take advantage of working against those so that it was sort of like you have a fear of death of yourself or people who are close to you, you have a fear of strangers, you have a fear of the unknown or what might happen in the future, fear of chaos, and a fear of being insignificant.
Bryan: Those are sort of the baseline human fears that we all tie into.
Bryan: We’ll talk about a period of time where we’ve dialed up the contrast on all of these.
Bryan: So when you talk about community and bonding, that’s the opposite of fear of strangers, fear of the unknown sort of leads you towards the understanding and clarity and fear of insignificance as being recognized and understanding the impact that you’re having overall.
Bryan: And I think there’s rich communication and tactical things that loyalty marketers can do knowing who their customers are, how loyal they’ve been in the past, the connections they’ve had to the brand.
Bryan: How do you kind of put a pin in that and say, is there something in these territories that I can kind of build up?
Bryan: And I think that’s what Flonera, which is the winery, did so effectively with the wine tasting is they connected with existing customers who wanted to share experiences that sort of speaks to significance, it speaks to recognition, it speaks to the community bonding.
Bryan: It’s all those kinds of things all tied in neatly into a very simple offering.
Bryan: And that’s the kind of clarity that I think we’re all looking for at this particular time is even as things open up, there’s this huge amount of consumer uncertainty as to what they’re going to do.
Bryan: I don’t know what Dubai is like, but while it’s open, what you’re hearing here in North America is people aren’t necessarily rushing back, they may be outside more, they may have an increase in social circles, but it’s not like you go to Macy’s and it’s overrun with people.
Bryan: A beach might be, that’s a different problem, but the retail community isn’t necessarily overrun with people.
Bryan: And that’s because there have been alternatives put in place.
Bryan: And you know what, by and large, they’re working pretty well.
Bryan: So that’s what we’re seeing.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: And I also liked the words you said, dialing up the contrast, Brian, because I do think there is this increasing fear of the unknown, but particularly unknown people, so strangers.
Paula: And that’s why I think a lot of people are kind of going, okay, yeah, my friends and my family, I kind of assume that that’s okay to hang out with them.
Paula: But maybe being in a retail environment just increases distrust.
Paula: So again, back to your winery, that community.
Paula: And actually, I was just thinking as you were speaking, probably the cleverest part was, you know, providing the additional sampling bottles for you to involve your friends.
Paula: Because obviously, that’s a viral effect.
Paula: It’s a network effect.
Paula: So you were the one who got to Oregon, and now presumably your friends and family around you are now aware of that winery as well.
Paula: So yeah, just a lot of them clever thinking that went into that, as we said, is working very well right now.
Bryan: And it’s interesting to see the sharp contrast.
Bryan: Let me just stay on the winery for a second is, you’ve got Flaner doing that, which is creating this, which is tapping into all sorts of current, very relevant cohort and in community issues and in safety issues and all the things we talk.
Bryan: And then on the other side, you’ve got the other wineries that I visited who have spent no end of time clearly discounting and just moving stock.
Bryan: And so, the parallel there is very similar to what we’ve been talking about in the loyalty space in that, you’ve got the wineries and loyalty programs are just out there.
Bryan: They went silent for a little bit and then you started to see offer, offer, offer, offer.
Bryan: But it’s all about the currency and what’s there versus, I think those operators who are on the other side of things who said, no, I understand what’s going on here.
Bryan: I’m going to use this as a communication means I’m going to connect with customers.
Bryan: I want to make sure that there’s a clear understanding of what we’re doing.
Bryan: And as things become more open, it’s how do I create those little moments of community or special recognition that actually take my brand to a different place than just trying to sell somebody stuff or to get somebody to buy something from me.
Bryan: And if we could just put that in a bottle, that essence of kind of creativity, as you said in a bottle and then sort of just carry it forward with us as a little elixir that we can sprinkle on what we do, wouldn’t the loyalty world be so much more exciting in the next 10 years?
Bryan: So let’s bottle that up, Paula.
Bryan: We’ll sell it to people.
Paula: Totally.
Paula: This is an amazing concept.
Paula: And I want to refer to some words in your book, actually, which I thought were certainly true in 2012.
Paula: I still think they’re true now.
Paula: Would you use the term, let’s abandon the conquest mentality?
Paula: And I thought, oh my God, yes, there is a lot of that in marketing, you know?
Paula: So, yeah, it shouldn’t be about conquest, you know, it is about community and getting together.
Paula: And it kind of feels in many ways quite different to the $2 billion corporation that we talked about, Bryan, that you were leading in terms of the whole LoyaltyOne group.
Paula: I know you talked a bit as well about CX and moving into the field of customer experience.
Paula: So, how do you see the loyalty and CX worlds going forward, you know, alongside each other and overlapping?
Paula: Or what’s your view on those two different spaces?
Bryan: I think for me, it’s a continuum.
Bryan: So overlapping is probably the best way to put it.
Bryan: I did talk about employee loyalty and its connectivity to this idea of enterprise loyalty within the book and still believe very strongly in that.
Bryan: In fact, I sit on the board of directors of a company called Nudge Rewards, which provides an app that’s downloaded onto the frontline employee in retail or hospitality, primarily their own device.
Bryan: And then companies can use that to make sure that the associates in their organization right at the frontline meeting, the customer understands products better, they’re well trained, they can do peer to peer recognition, all those kinds of events, which have proven to actually enhance customer loyalty.
Bryan: If you are going into a retail location, you want to be talking to somebody who has a really good understanding on the product that they’re selling and is very well connected to all the features of different experiences that that retailer or the hospitality organization might present.
Bryan: And if the associates stay longer, so there’s a retention factor, if they feel like they’re being recognized, if they feel like they’re being well trained and they’re comfortable with what they’re doing, their likelihood to be retained goes up as well.
Bryan: And again, those are all interlinked, they’re all proven.
Bryan: They’re all proven to actually enhance the experience and ultimately enhance and that will in turn enhance customer loyalty.
Bryan: So back to your question on CX, I’m not sure where you draw the line on customer experience.
Bryan: I mean, it’s a little bit of all the facets of what you do.
Bryan: And as somebody who was, and still is a marketer, who’s pulling on these different levers over time and has watched people in all sorts of categories and sectors do this.
Bryan: It’s the whole.
Bryan: I mean, you can’t just dial up one aspect and ignore other pieces within it.
Bryan: And you know, what we’ve seen for many, many years, especially in retail, especially in North America is this sort of race to the bottom, which is, I’m just going to figure out how I become as operationally efficient as I can so I can drop my prices and crush everybody else because I’m still making money and they aren’t because I’m just more efficient.
Bryan: And you know, I think that’s not what the consumer is looking for.
Bryan: I think the consumer at the end of the day, yeah, they want a fair price, but how you define value is not just determined by the cheapest price.
Bryan: There’s always going to be consumers out there who will take different categories and be indifferent to anything but price.
Bryan: But I think the vast majority of people are willing to pay a little bit more for something that creates a fuller, rounder experience and you know what, look at everything that’s going on.
Bryan: I think climate change is going to push us in that direction.
Bryan: I think that all the social issues that are happening, how the world has reacted to that spurred on by what’s been going on in the US, these things are really putting a focus even more on organizations around ESG, environment, social and governance and how companies are run.
Bryan: And so, where does that fit in customer experience?
Bryan: Well, for certain customers, understanding that a company has a certain ethos around how they come to market and they live their values is going to be mission critical.
Bryan: Does that normally sit on something on a customer experience spectrum?
Bryan: I don’t think so.
Bryan: Not in the most of the companies that I’ve looked at.
Bryan: But I’ll bet that that’s going to be something that’s going to be very front and center, if not in the next 12 to 18 months, certainly in the next 48 months.
Bryan: So, I definitely feel that purpose-based organizations that understand their values, that are proven to live those consistently, that create unique experiences or unique products, those are the ones that are truly going to win in the long run.
Bryan: And they’re going to have to focus on meeting consumer needs, but also meeting consumer expectations.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: It’s very well said, Bryan, and I love the idea of purpose-led organizations.
Paula: And as I said at the start of the show, you finished up your role with LoyaltyOne there back in August 2019, after 27 years in total with all of your various roles.
Paula: So what are you thinking about doing or what are you doing now, I suppose?
Paula: And what’s next for Bryan Pearson?
Bryan: Well, Paula, I was trying to travel for a year.
Bryan: Nature got the best of me, so I rushed back from Australia two weeks into a four-week holiday down there or travel.
Bryan: I don’t know if it’s holiday when you’re taking a break.
Bryan: But as I mentioned, I’m on the board of a couple of smaller organizations that I think are doing some interesting things, trying to keep myself and starting to reconnect back into what’s happening, loyalty and analytics and reach with a bit of a retail twist.
Bryan: And so, you know, there’s been lots of invitations like yourself, and I’ve been taking advantage of the opportunity to have some fun conversations and a little bit all over the world, I think.
Bryan: I’ve had some speaking engagements, which have been pushed off a little bit.
Bryan: But yeah, it’s, you know, a few board roles, doing some advisory work with some interesting you know, when I see an interesting leader or interesting businesses, those are great opportunities just to have conversations.
Bryan: And I don’t have a plan to go back and sit in the big seat anytime soon.
Bryan: But I’m very interested to help some of these fledgling ideas and companies that I think are some intriguing opportunity to impact that world that I lived in for almost three decades and I’m still very much attached to.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Well, we definitely share a passion for intriguing ideas, Bryan.
Paula: So just as we’re wrapping up now, Bryan, the final question, I suppose, was just to ask you about the best, I suppose, resources in your opinion for the busy loyalty practitioners all over the world, obviously, trying to run their programs and stay up to date with the latest thinking.
Paula: So what do you, I suppose, look to in terms of staying up to date for this industry?
Bryan: You know, Paula, there’s a lot of really good resources.
Bryan: And I certainly found when I was the chief executive that I sort of sampled from a number of places because some of them had regional focuses.
Bryan: Some of them were more focused on sectors like retail.
Bryan: But I’ll give you a few that I certainly go back as touchstones.
Bryan: I think the wise marketer, those guys are doing a great job of sort of funneling the news and writing about the big changes that are going on.
Bryan: I think there’s a number of podcast providers like you.
Bryan: I mean, I’ve really enjoyed listening to a number of your podcasts.
Bryan: And I think you asked some provocative questions and you get some very interesting people on board.
Bryan: Anish over at Loyalty Magazine has done a very good job of sort of tracking the European marketplace.
Bryan: She’s trying to go more global.
Bryan: And then Bond Brand and Loyalty in combination with Visa has been doing a study for the last 10 years globally on trying to understand loyalty and customer experience and how different consumers are reacting to that.
Bryan: And we stopped doing the colloquy study a few years ago.
Bryan: I don’t think LoyaltyOne is continuing to do that now.
Bryan: So Bond is probably your closest measure and longitudinal view at what’s going on.
Bryan: So those are some of the key resources that I would link into.
Bryan: But even I’m seeing more and more organizations as they try to engage their customers, create bespoke content and bespoke surveys and understanding.
Bryan: Even my old company, Brand Loyalty, just released something, I think this morning on Gen Z.
Bryan: And so I really do take a fish in many ponds kind of approach because what I’m trying to look for is the general trends and what’s consistent and I don’t know if anybody necessarily asks all the questions exactly the way it needs to be done.
Bryan: But if I get a general direction, then I can figure out what needs to happen from there.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Well, I’ll definitely again make sure to link to the Brand Loyalty studies and the Brand Loyalty Gen Z study.
Paula: They both sound fascinating.
Paula: So super useful.
Paula: So I’m really happy to have had this conversation, Bryan.
Paula: Is there anything else you wanted to touch on before we finish up?
Bryan: No, I just said thank you for the conversation.
Bryan: It’s so much fun to go back over some of the work that’s been done over the years.
Bryan: I must say, I do think for everyone who’s in the loyalty space, this remains as current and as needed as possible.
Bryan: And I think, as I’ve said on some other calls, I think a lot of companies woke up in the middle of this COVID situation and said, oh, we’ve got something to deal with this.
Bryan: We have this loyalty asset, went over to look at it and realized that a fraction of what they thought was there.
Bryan: So I do also…
Bryan: My last prediction will be that there will be a re-energized environment and a more interest in how to maintain that, the asset of the loyalty program, the data file on customers.
Bryan: If nothing else happens and that’s what happens coming out of this, then that’s good for the industry overall.
Bryan: I mean, it’s very exciting.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: Well, I totally agree with everything you’ve said, Bryan.
Paula: So, just want to say thank you so much for your time and from everyone at Let’s Talk Loyalty, Bryan Pearson, thank you so much.
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 both online and in workshops around the world through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 150 executives in 18 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.
Paula: For more information, check out www.thewisemarketeer.com and www.loyaltyecademy.org.
Paula: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.
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