Hornby Hobbies: Turning Collectibles into Loyalty Leadership (#747)

Louisa: We make miniature things.

Louisa: This is our office.

Louisa: This is an actual model of our office to scale.

Louisa: The brands are very well known, and they’re really a massive part of British culture.

Louisa: Hornby, miniature railway, is what we’re all about, from scenics that I just showed you, all the way through to kind of engines that trough steam around your living room and things like that.

Amanda: Tell us a little bit about your career.

Amanda: I’d love to know more about that.

Louisa: I, bizarrely, started doing medicine at Oxford.

Louisa: And I suddenly found this incredible treasure trove of a very bifurcated discipline.

Louisa: There’s the hard science.

Louisa: At that time, the data processing and storage was just becoming cheaper and more available to retail.

Louisa: And it was a really exciting time to be interested in blending both the marketing aspects and the creative aspects of creating customer experiences with some really hardcore math.

Amanda: Tell us exactly why Hornby Hobbies launched the Rewards program.

Louisa: Hobby Rewards reflects our internal understanding now of how vital those hobbyists have been to keeping our brands alive.

Louisa: All of our customers, all of our treasurers looked after us throughout.

Louisa: And Hobby Rewards became a way of at least saying thank you to our direct to consumer customers.

Louisa: The heart of Hobby Rewards is time well spent.

Louisa: Hobby Rewards is a points-based program, and you can earn and collect points to use as cash as it were, like any other points-based system.

Louisa: But across any of our brands, there’s a core group of customers that have actually purchased over 200 times in lifetime with us, which was absolutely extraordinary.

Louisa: I ran straight to the CEO’s office, and I was like, I need to bring these people on out.

Louisa: They’re the ones that really help us shape the future of our hobby as well.

Paula: Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.

Paula: Today’s episode is hosted by Amanda Cromhout, the founder of TruthLoyalty, an international loyalty consultancy.

Paula: She’s also the author of the book Blind Loyalty, 101 Loyalty Concepts Radically Simplified, and the founder of the Blind Loyalty Trust.

Paula: Enjoy.

Amanda: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout, the founder of Truth and the author of Blind Loyalty.

Amanda: Today, I interview Louisa Evans.

Amanda: She is from Hornby Hobbies in the UK, which is a phenomenally interesting brand.

Amanda: They have pivoted from a B2B organization, B2B strategy with a D2C strategy with loyalty at the heart of that, with Hobby Rewards, beautiful program that recognizes the transactional behavior of their customers, but also the emotional attachment.

Amanda: She talks about things like time well spent and generational loyalty, which I’ve never heard before.

Amanda: But she’s talking about generational loyalty of the grandson with the grandfather and the model train and the love and experience that they have through Hornby Hobbies, but then the ability for the loyalty program to bring that to life, and the power of data enabling that to happen.

Amanda: She also explains the cultural shift within the organization from being a very engineering product led organization, for now everyone in the organization owning a part of that customer lifetime experience and a real positive cultural shift.

Amanda: So I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoy the conversation.

Amanda: It’s such a pleasure today to welcome Louisa Evans.

Amanda: She is Head of Customer Loyalty and Retention at Hornby Hobbies, based in the UK, and she has an incredible story to share with us.

Amanda: So Louisa, welcome to Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Louisa: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Louisa: It’s really great to be here today.

Amanda: Now, we always start the episode with the same question for all of our guests, so I’m going to go straight into it.

Amanda: Tell us about your favorite book.

Amanda: It may be a business book, it may not be, but share with us your favorite book to share with the readers.

Louisa: So I have to, as ever.

Louisa: But my hands down, Prize Loyalty and CRM Possession is, and I brought it in because I love it so much, is this book which I read about 15 years ago, Scoring Points by Humby, Hunt and Tim Phillips.

Louisa: It’s well-thumbed and notes in the margins.

Louisa: And what it does is it tells the story of Dun Humby, which is behind the Tesco Club Card, which is one of the kind of OG loyalty programs here in the UK.

Louisa: And maybe they’ve just fundamentally determined the discipline and the industry in general.

Louisa: And what this book details is kind of the trials and tribulations from building something like that from scratch.

Louisa: And it’s just, for me, for someone like me, it’s a thrilling read.

Louisa: It shows the grit and resilience of the industry from its starting stages.

Louisa: About five years ago, I met Simon Hay and I completely fangirled him.

Louisa: And he was the CEO of Dun Humby for a very long time.

Louisa: And I got him to…

Amanda: Oh, it’s stunning.

Amanda: That’s super.

Louisa: I treasure this book.

Louisa: My other one is a really cool book.

Louisa: Again, another lots of stickers, and it’s Applying Behavioral Science to the Private Sector, which gives us loads of complementary thinking beyond the numbers and the mathematics into, how do we make and retain behavior change from the behavioral science perspective.

Louisa: Absolutely fantastic book and very slim.

Amanda: Who’s that by as well?

Louisa: Helena Rubinstein.

Louisa: Well worth a read.

Amanda: Very good.

Amanda: I’m going to definitely have a look at that one.

Amanda: But Scoring Points, I think the majority of loyalty professionals, if you haven’t read it, I’m sure you’ll have it on the list.

Amanda: We give it to every new recruiter into truth and say, please read this as well.

Amanda: So great, great choice there.

Amanda: So Louisa, in your role in the broadest sense of loyalty and retention and everything that comes with that, what gets you to your current position?

Amanda: Tell us a little bit about your career.

Amanda: I’d love to know more about that.

Louisa: I bizarrely started doing medicine at Oxford.

Amanda: A long road.

Louisa: Right, so really different, really, really long and different, but a kind of a pattern emerged straight away.

Louisa: Medicine itself is a science that is centered around human wellness.

Louisa: I then went on to do a PhD in biophysics, again, a kind of intersectional science.

Louisa: And after that, I kind of wanted to explore a little bit more about commerciality and the human condition, etc.

Louisa: So I did market research for a while, using that kind of quantity background of being from a science background, and applying it to the commercial world and business in general.

Louisa: I think that’s where my love of loyalty came out.

Louisa: And about 15 years ago, I almost stumbled, as it were, into loyalty and CRM.

Louisa: After working in branding with Interbrand and market research with Kant.

Louisa: And I suddenly found this incredible treasure trove of a very bifurcated discipline.

Louisa: There’s the hard science.

Louisa: At that time, the data processing and storage was just becoming cheaper and more available to retail.

Louisa: And it was a really exciting time to be kind of interested in blending both the marketing aspects and the creative aspects of creating customer experiences with some really hardcore maths that seemed to be repeatable, showing us predictable behaviors and helping guide us away from kind of throw it at the wall and see what happens to something a little more steadied and actually relationship building.

Amanda: Stunning.

Amanda: I don’t think we’ve had someone on here who’s got a PhD in biophysics before.

Amanda: We’ve had some great careers.

Amanda: And so that’s super.

Amanda: And how fascinating for everyone listening to this to actually see how, you know, medicine at Oxford, I’m sure then you didn’t think you’d be you’d be working for a wonderful toy.

Amanda: If I may say a toy brand, Hornby Hobbies, more than toys, I know.

Amanda: But it’s just a great, great sort of pivot of your of your career.

Amanda: And super and obviously your brain thinks that way.

Amanda: So I feel like you’re in the perfect role.

Louisa: I have been in this discipline or industry for 15, 16 years.

Louisa: I cannot see myself anywhere else.

Louisa: I do think it is really exciting.

Louisa: No, I don’t know 11 year old me what she would think.

Louisa: I find it astonishing to be associated with these brands that I am.

Amanda: So for the listeners of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, who are all over the world, they may not know your brand.

Amanda: So I think you need to tell us more about Hornby Hobbies and around what it is, what it does for the consumer, but also what it does in the B2B market.

Amanda: So I know you’ve got a D2C strategy we’re going to talk about, but D2C, B2B, but what are you?

Amanda: What is this fabulous brand all about?

Louisa: It’s actually an ecosystem of brands.

Louisa: And I think that’s what’s quite so exciting about it.

Louisa: We make miniature things.

Louisa: This is our office.

Louisa: This is an actual model of our office, to scale.

Louisa: So the brands are very well known and they’re really a massive part of British culture.

Louisa: So Hornby, Miniature Railway, is what we’re all about.

Louisa: From scenics that I just showed you, all the way through to kind of engines that trough steam around your living room and things like that.

Louisa: Then Airfix is about ships and boats and planes that you can make, suspended from ceilings generally, and like really amazingly painted.

Louisa: Scale-Electrics and Corgear are another couple of brands that you might know.

Louisa: Scale-Electrics was slot car racing.

Louisa: And Corgear is all about collectibles.

Louisa: So we have loads of kind of film licenses and huge brands and things like that.

Louisa: So we’ve got like Batman, et cetera, and Wallace and Gromit.

Louisa: So really cherished cultural moments.

Louisa: It’s an absolute joy to be there, to be here working with these brands.

Louisa: I think one of our kind of really most interesting brands, actually over the Italian heritage, is Pocca.

Louisa: And they are extremely premium, really for advanced modeling.

Louisa: They are metal, pre-painted, exquisite models of supercars, really.

Louisa: So that’s where we are.

Louisa: Now, Hornby has been around for like a hundred years.

Louisa: And during that time, the vast majority of that time, Hornby is a manufacturing brand.

Louisa: And therefore, and today, and to date, rather, the B2B side, the trade side, our trade partnerships, are actually core to generating the communities, giving us guidance on where we should go, what people love.

Louisa: That was really, really, really fundamental to how Hornby has survived to today and continues to thrive.

Louisa: I think what happened in COVID, and that was slightly before my time, was that unfortunately, that entire ecosystem of trade partners, independent model shops up and down the country across the world, heavily constrained and they really struggled.

Louisa: And we lost complete visibility of what our hobbyists were doing and wanting at a time when hobbyism was on an unprecedented rise.

Louisa: It was so much time at home.

Louisa: So the DTC component really came into focus at that moment more for listening and learning and seeing if we could step up where we needed to.

Louisa: And I think that’s really where the DTC supports our kind of overall ecosystem, but primarily a trade organization first and foremost and has always been.

Amanda: But great to see, as you said, during that COVID period that you pivoted into the direct consumer.

Amanda: But what I most loved about what you’re saying then is around you didn’t know how to have that relationship with your hobbyists.

Amanda: You didn’t know enough about them.

Amanda: You didn’t know how to contact them and so on.

Amanda: So that completely and utterly makes sense.

Amanda: And interesting that it all happened during COVID.

Louisa: Yeah, I mean, it really was the mother of invention.

Louisa: It forced our hands.

Louisa: I think COVID was chiefly about learning what we were capable of.

Louisa: How can we support our growing in a community that desperately really needed everything that modeling and collecting at that time.

Louisa: And when we really needed to get closer to our customers.

Louisa: So I think really during that period, it was all about implementation, reorganizing our text and reorganizing our data.

Louisa: And that was the focus.

Louisa: When I joined a few years later, we were still kind of in that digital transformation, but implementation has certainly finally wrapped up.

Amanda: So as you say, the Hobby Rewards is three years old.

Amanda: I’ve got a sense of why you launched it, but tell us exactly why Hornby Hobbies launched the rewards program.

Louisa: It’s actually quite profound.

Louisa: Internally, every now and again, when we come up for air, we think back to that period.

Louisa: And it was an incredible time of internal transformation and pivoting, so it was quite special for many people.

Louisa: The Hobby Rewards reflects our internal understanding now of how vital those hobbyists have been to keeping our brands alive.

Louisa: Like really, really openly, they have looked after us, all of our customers, all of our travel, looked after us throughout.

Louisa: And Hobby Rewards became a way of at least saying thank you to our direct to consumer customers quite directly.

Louisa: And it’s a points mechanism.

Louisa: It’s a really easy way of doing it.

Louisa: We were trying to wrestle with a lot of new technologies, completely new ways of thinking.

Louisa: And I think that’s the beauty of a points mechanism.

Louisa: You can deliver to your promise of saying thank you back and adding value without having every sophisticated mechanism or understanding in place.

Louisa: And I think that’s really why it was such a win when it landed with our customers.

Amanda: So is that the value proposition?

Amanda: So just talk us through the, if I know nothing about the Hobby Rewards, what is the value proposition that the consumer experiences?

Louisa: Yeah, so Hobby Rewards, actually at the heart of Hobby Rewards is a value proposition, which is really, really simple to understand and kind of keeps us honest.

Louisa: It’s time well spent.

Louisa: Hobby Rewards is a points-based program, and you can earn and collect points to use as cash as it were, you know, like any other points-based system, but across any of our brands.

Louisa: So Airfix, you know, you could be model railway link, you could model railways one day and then be putting together exquisite models of ships and racing slot cards.

Louisa: So all of that is part of what we look after, you know, that custom experience.

Louisa: And time well spent reflects the fact that our hobbyists and our communities are like exceptionally creative.

Louisa: They spend, they dedicate hours and they get in the flow and they research the models, and they know everything about the history.

Louisa: And that’s one half of it.

Louisa: And the second half of time well spent is not only the lived hobby, but the IRL experience.

Louisa: So we work with miniatures and we celebrate through their miniatures, the original incredible feats of engineering all across human history.

Louisa: That are the original machines.

Louisa: And the second half of time well spent is designed to reflect that moment when granddad shares with the grandson the real model they’re visiting at a, you know, the real locomotive they’re visiting at an attraction, a heritage railway or something like that, or in a museum.

Louisa: And that’s kind of what underlies our reward partnership side.

Louisa: So that’s kind of the value proposition.

Louisa: There’s this kind of really tactical points based system, so you can collect all the time and feed your hobby.

Louisa: And there’s this other side of it, which is about this, the heritage, the cultural side of it and time well spent restoring, visiting and celebrating these amazing feats of engineering.

Amanda: Do you know what, Louisa, I absolutely love that, like time well spent.

Amanda: I mean, it’s just like the golden nugget, right?

Amanda: And then something I know you and I talked about previously was this concept of generational loyalty.

Amanda: And you’ve just spoken about the grandson and the grandfather.

Amanda: I think it’s magical.

Amanda: And I think that really epitomizes, as you described, you’ve got the points based program, which is a transactional build up points for money off for a future thing.

Amanda: But then that emotional hook of time well spent and generational loyalty, I absolutely love it.

Amanda: So you arrived three months after the launch of the program.

Amanda: I’m sure that meant you went straight into a heap of challenges.

Amanda: Share with us, because there’s probably a lot of listeners out there in the global world of loyalty, just facing similar scenarios where they’re moving into a new job and maybe the program’s just been relaunched or launched.

Amanda: What were the challenges you faced?

Louisa: I think that it was kind of wider than the program initially.

Louisa: So I came in and I almost spoke a foreign language.

Louisa: When you are working in this field, your measures of success are at the product level.

Louisa: How much of a perfect replication is this?

Louisa: How well does the model fit together?

Louisa: There’s a huge, incredible amount of engineering talent in this building that I’m in.

Louisa: Which dedicates themselves, years and years, to understanding at the product level what works and what doesn’t.

Louisa: And I came in and I remember the moment where I turned to the room at large and said, I don’t care about the product.

Louisa: I’m surprised I’m still here, frankly.

Louisa: But it was because I care about the human.

Louisa: I don’t need to care about the product because the world’s best at caring about the product are already here.

Louisa: So the biggest challenge was to create a common language, which meant that we could, in parallel to our product understanding and processing and analyzing, bring in this conversation about customer life cycles.

Louisa: And also just become more familiar with the data that was kind of growing in the background.

Louisa: What did we understand?

Louisa: Try and slice up that big data and make it into something meaningful for the brands.

Louisa: How does it translate into a type of marketing campaign?

Louisa: When or when not to do things, you know, things like that.

Louisa: So it was about introducing that language.

Louisa: And that was, it was both a challenge and a really exciting time.

Louisa: It’s amazing to be in at the ground at that kind of juncture.

Louisa: So we’re a bit further ahead now.

Louisa: We definitely still were feeling, you know, the after effects of fast and multi-platform integration and implementation.

Louisa: And I’m very glad to say that we’re now, we’re now kind of riding steady on both the technology.

Louisa: We’re really pushing it now to its boundaries.

Louisa: And the customer language is definitely front and center in terms of how we think about things, how we plan and how we strategize better.

Amanda: What I’ve heard, Louisa, is like, I mean, I love the way you said you just arrived.

Amanda: I said, I don’t care about the product.

Amanda: I mean, that’s a cultural time bomb, I guess.

Amanda: But it sounds like you landed the bomb and there’s been that cultural shift from product to customer.

Amanda: But what I did love about what you said is to say, but it’s okay, the product is still taken care of because we’ve got the world’s best engineers in the background.

Amanda: And I think that’s really important to remember that is that whilst businesses need to go through that cultural shift to customer, that the product still exists and it still needs the same love and attention.

Amanda: But hopefully most organizations have that in place.

Amanda: And most of the time they do because that’s the bread and butter of how they’ve got to that place before you do that cultural pivot to customer.

Amanda: So thank you for sharing that because I don’t think many people really express that in that way.

Amanda: And I think it’s really powerful how you’ve expressed that, especially as you came in three months after the law.

Amanda: So good for you.

Amanda: I’m all up for a bit of disruption.

Amanda: So let’s have a think now, like you’re three years on, what are the main KPIs you measure the program against and the success of it?

Louisa: I mean, I think they are the classics at the moment.

Louisa: I mean, they’re kind of two channels.

Louisa: You know, during those early days, when I was busy making friends, but during those early days, we had to figure out how to measure the population in general.

Louisa: And so kind of those RFM metrics were important to kind of implement and keep tracking in real time.

Louisa: And we use technologies that allow us to do that.

Louisa: I think in terms of the loyalty program then, because it was transactional, there’s financial obligations in terms of the reporting.

Louisa: So memberships, obviously very important, active participation, and then progression through either a range of products or a product step, or purchase frequency milestones, et cetera.

Louisa: So I think those are the kind of classic RFM-based KPIs that we keep.

Louisa: I was looking at them recently, and I was just playing around again with our technology and with our analytics platform, and it allowed me to identify the customers.

Louisa: We have kind of a seven-way segmentation of purchase in lifetime, which acts as a really good proxy for understanding or kind of inferring if someone is kind of a casual hobbyist or a gifter, all the way through a really full-blown enthusiast.

Louisa: And I kind of wanted to look at that top end, and I saw that there’s a core group of customers that have actually purchased over 200 times in lifetime with us, which was absolutely extraordinary.

Louisa: I ran straight to the CEO’s office and I was like, I need to bring these people now.

Amanda: Yeah.

Louisa: People, and they’re the ones that really, really help us shape the future of our hobby as well.

Amanda: That’s beautiful.

Amanda: And as you say, like there’s probably a few of them, there’s not millions of them.

Amanda: So you can phone them and you can build that direct relationship.

Amanda: That’s exactly what you should be doing.

Amanda: It’s beautiful.

Louisa: Yeah.

Amanda: Great that the data revealed that for you.

Amanda: So let’s talk a little bit more about that data.

Amanda: So you’ve gone from having no data on your customers before the program and now obviously, hopefully some fabulous first zero party data and so on.

Amanda: What do you do as an organization over and above, for example, the example you’ve just given around phoning your top customers or analyzing a marketing campaign?

Amanda: What do you do with that data?

Amanda: How is it starting to impact the rest of the organization?

Louisa: I think we’ve taken a look.

Louisa: Now we have three pillars for the way we look at our customer cohorts, gain, grow and retain, which fit that RFM thinking.

Louisa: We are able now to say, okay, our data is tracking how many people we have acquired in a period.

Louisa: What is the nature of the retention and also what are we doing about lapse?

Louisa: We’ve gone from being really expert at product design and product delivery to now thinking about customer life cycles quite commonly across the business.

Louisa: It’s very well accepted and standard.

Louisa: And I think that measure, that moment where I found the 200 purchase, it really shook me.

Louisa: And I said, we need to recognize these people differently.

Louisa: We need to, they’re potentially more experts than some of us in the building.

Louisa: Build the product, and that’s an incredible opportunity for us.

Louisa: It’s led us relatively rapidly to develop the gold tier pilot that we ran live with, and it’s still live now.

Louisa: And the learnings from that pilot, so they have a faster reward, a faster earn rate within the program.

Louisa: And we’ve taken some learnings.

Louisa: We’ve also been able to reach out to them and speak to them directly and get some feedback back as well.

Louisa: So we’re reshaping the gold tier.

Louisa: So I think we’re nearly ready to go live with a completely, our first public tier within the loyalty program, but strategically, that is a very important group to our business, and we’d like to maintain a really good dialogue and also reflect back how much we value them as our customer set.

Amanda: That’s a wonderful story about how you actually came up with your top tier.

Amanda: And I don’t often think a lot of organizations do it in that way.

Amanda: I think you’ve, you launched and then you found this niche set of customers, created CVP, piloted it, and as you say, you’re about to launch it properly as an overt tier.

Amanda: I think it’s a wonderful story and shows how it’s data-led rather than just marketing-led.

Amanda: So congratulations and we look forward to following how the gold tier progresses.

Amanda: So I’m sure this doesn’t all happen, Louisa, by just sitting comfortably and just letting it all happen around you.

Amanda: You must have a lot of structural support, whether it’s from external parties or internally.

Amanda: So talk to us a little bit about how does it all come together?

Amanda: What is the IT impact?

Amanda: Do you use external vendors?

Amanda: Like what makes this happen?

Louisa: Yeah, we rely really heavily on kind of two platforms.

Louisa: I spend my whole working life within the Bloom Reach engagement platform.

Louisa: Bloom Reach is a CDP and it’s integrated and it’s used for orchestrating communications, doing our analytics, maintaining our consents, keeping control of our GDPR, etc.

Louisa: And email is a very important channel for us, but it also surfaces things on our website too.

Louisa: And so we can create gamified experiences on our website itself.

Louisa: And obviously points as prize money is a great mechanism for us, just for a little bit of fun every now and again across the year.

Louisa: So Bloom Reach is really, really fundamental.

Louisa: And then the points program itself and the mechanics that award bonus points and all of that kind of tactical stuff, that’s run by Antavo Loyalty Cloud.

Louisa: And both of them together are an absolutely amazing ensemble of a global world class tech.

Louisa: And beyond that, we are, you know, within that, that’s rich enough for us at the moment.

Louisa: We obviously have our second terms of the websites, et cetera.

Louisa: But those two programs, those two pieces of technology and their ability to track in real time, the fact that their data is event led.

Louisa: So, everything within it is a single view.

Louisa: So, it’s all the unique identity of the unique human.

Louisa: There are embedded machine learning algorithms for us to understand show and prediction, et cetera.

Louisa: So, it kind of really loads our code.

Louisa: But yeah, those are the two fundamental pieces of technology that really help us every day.

Amanda: Okay, amazing.

Amanda: And then internally, Louisa, how do you, how big is your team?

Amanda: We hear on this fabulous show, some organizations that have 650 people running their loyalty program.

Amanda: We hear other organizations that have two people running their loyalty program, and neither is right or wrong, right?

Amanda: So, tell us a little bit about you and your team.

Amanda: I’d love to know.

Amanda: And then on the back of that, how do you create impact change management within the whole organization?

Louisa: I think you probably have to ask them that.

Louisa: I’m not sure I’d like the answers that they might give to me.

Amanda: Fair enough, yeah.

Louisa: In terms of loyalty teams, I’ve worked at Nectar in a previous, not at Nectar, but with Nectar.

Louisa: So, I’ve seen these amazing organizations.

Louisa: And obviously, I started the conversation with Dunhumbay, which is an incredible organization as well.

Louisa: Our team is, I would say, small.

Louisa: And as a result, in order to achieve things, it’s not about a command structure, it’s much more about an influence structure and a collaboration structure.

Louisa: So, we have a CRM exec, we have a loyalty manager, and we’re a very tight team.

Louisa: But I would argue that every brand marketing manager is also a huge part of the program.

Louisa: I also look after some forums, and those moderators are also a huge part of the program.

Louisa: So, the forums themselves are a direct communique between myself and the customers.

Louisa: And it’s really, really amazing having real-time data in terms of transactions.

Louisa: But it’s even more amazing to have the voice of your customer at your fingertips in the forums.

Louisa: So, I think for me, it’s this incredible blend of technology enablement, but also just keeping as close as I can to the people’s real-life experiences.

Louisa: It’s amazing.

Louisa: And we also ran the Hobby Rewards Academy internally, with our customer service agents.

Louisa: So, I really feel that although we have an official team of one and a half of me to run the loyalty program, actually, it’s kind of on everyone’s radar now.

Louisa: And I feel like I’m serving it for use by our brands, more than I’m directly in control or looking after a loyalty program, as it were.

Louisa: Yeah, and so it’s influence, it’s influence and collaboration and presenting the technology alongside the potential uplifts we see or the learnings that we got from doing a loyalty based or points based activation and sharing that back with the brands and then the brands knowing their products and knowing their event schedule, saying, oh, we can use this here.

Louisa: So I think that’s really what it’s been about.

Louisa: Although it’s kind of been about influence, it’s also been about this co-collaboration and that the loyalty program is actually owned by everyone else.

Louisa: And I’m becoming more and more of a kind of techie, engineering person.

Louisa: And I kind of love it.

Louisa: I’m not going to listen to it.

Amanda: I love that.

Amanda: Absolutely love what you just said around two things, actually.

Amanda: You pulled out from what you said around the forums with customers and the voice of customers and how critical that is.

Amanda: And I really think that’s an element missing from so many loyalty programs and how they’re run.

Amanda: So I think it’s fabulous you’re doing that.

Amanda: And then secondly, what I also love is how all of your colleagues around the business or collaborators and owners of this program, it’s not just sitting with you and your small team.

Amanda: And I think that’s the only way a program can really be successful within an organization is when everyone is behind it.

Amanda: So all credit to you for pulling that together in such a short space of time.

Amanda: I’ve really enjoyed listening to it.

Amanda: So we’ve talked about quite a lot already, but is there anything we haven’t talked about?

Amanda: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Louisa: I think, oh yeah, there is actually.

Louisa: There’s one thing I’m thinking about at the moment, and I don’t know if there is a solution out there yet.

Louisa: And what it is, is this.

Louisa: Our products back there, our products are stories.

Louisa: They are great stories.

Louisa: A locomotive model celebrates the designer or a particular era.

Louisa: It celebrates the engineering of the original model.

Louisa: And then, of course, it itself has a heritage within the Hornby ecosystem.

Louisa: It’s meaningful to our modelers in loads of different ways.

Louisa: And they all have their own languages and their own preferred natural progressions through product groups.

Louisa: So each of these have stories, and each of these have language.

Louisa: And it’s all kind of personal to each individual community, be you an Airfix fan or a Scale-Electrics fan.

Louisa: And one of the things that I’m thinking about right now, it lends itself, any product grouping lends themselves really well to a classic machine learning algorithm of recommend engines.

Louisa: However, if the only data you keep at the product level is color and price, we do more than that, but just for the sake of argument, then the only metric or the only thing I can give back, the only thing I can give back is color and price.

Louisa: And it does no justice to why these products exist in the first place, which is that story.

Louisa: So I would like to meet, I would like to know how I can go about enriching data.

Louisa: How do we go and enrich our product catalogs so that we can harness the technologies that are now available to us?

Louisa: Better.

Louisa: It’s great having chatbots, it’s great having automated workflows, etc.

Louisa: That’s fantastic.

Louisa: But let’s get back to that experience.

Louisa: How do I capture those new product attributes dynamically so that I can feed them into a recommendation engine, for example, and just, and see, create new relevancies for the individual customer?

Amanda: I think it’s stunning.

Amanda: I’m listening to how your brain works, Louisa, and I love it.

Amanda: I mean, it’s the simplicity of what you just said, is what I love about it, is that if you only tag the product in the product hierarchy with price and color, that’s all you can give back.

Amanda: Whereas if you can tag it with the emotion and the storytelling and the generational loyalty and the, etc., then can you imagine what the personalization experience is going to be?

Louisa: Absolutely.

Louisa: And I think that’s really at the heart of what I believe loyalty is.

Louisa: I’m really lucky to have kind of a tactical points-based system to get us from the starting point.

Louisa: But it’s all about the emotions.

Louisa: It’s all about that historical and lived experience and where we fit in culture today.

Amanda: Absolutely great.

Amanda: Louisa, I could talk to you all day.

Amanda: I’ve really enjoyed our discussion.

Amanda: I’ve learned a lot.

Amanda: And I think you’re sitting on such a beautiful brand, like just listening to you.

Amanda: I can’t wait to come back to the UK and visit your store and just immerse myself in what a fabulous brand and the loyalty program that you’ve launched.

Amanda: So congratulations to you and the team.

Amanda: I know it’s not a one-man show.

Amanda: You’ve described that.

Amanda: And thank you for sharing your story with everyone on Loyalty TV and Lets Talk Loyalty.

Louisa: My pleasure.

Louisa: Thank you so much for having me.

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