Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals.
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.
Welcome to Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty, my new shorter show for loyalty marketing professionals.
In today’s episode, I’m summarizing my interview with Helene Brand, who is now a freelance marketing consultant and whose experience include marketing, social responsibility and insights manager for an incredible community-based loyalty program in South Africa called My School, My Village, My Planet, which won eight international loyalty awards.
As part of her work on that program, Helene herself was named Loyalty Personality of the Year in 2015.
Helene describes her approach to loyalty as balancing both transactional and emotional loyalty and making sure that program KPIs are always set to include both sets of objectives.
For example, she recommends measuring customer acquisition, frequency of transactions, program redemptions, and of course behavior changes as key KPIs for customer retention.
In terms of managing customer relationships, the key indicators she measures include customer lifetime value and net promoter score.
By way of background, Helene explained that the idea for the My School Loyalty program was firstly to simply raise funds for local schools.
Members signed up and when they shopped at any local partner store, a percentage of their spend would go towards that local school.
As they grew the program, they realized that a key reason that members eventually left was when their child completed school.
So the program was expanded to include other causes their members wanted to support, including their local village, and of course, ultimately the whole planet.
Helene’s recent work interests include helping brands to use the principles of storytelling to ensure their business purpose is clear to their target customers.
Every story, even in business, must first of all have a hero with a problem.
And in business, the hero is the customer.
The brand then becomes the guide, a character who offers empathy and authority.
Helene shared the power of the seven-step storytelling framework known worldwide as Story Brand.
And these principles, she says, can also be applied to any loyalty program to ensure that your members understand and appreciate your program’s purpose.
Finally, Helene mentioned an emerging platform in South Africa called Global Citizen, which leverages the power of loyalty mechanics for positive and purposeful causes.
It educates people on global issues and allows them to take action for causes they care about, perhaps by signing a petition, taking a quiz, or even tweeting about a cause, and then collecting points as a reward for those behaviors.
One incredible example of their work was a concert held in 2018 with performances by global celebrities, including Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Trevor Noah.
And the only way to get a ticket to the concert was through this program and behaving in ways that drive attention and focus on key issues that affect the whole world, such as sustainability, hunger, or others.
In closing, Helène mentioned that South Africa is actually considered an advanced loyalty market that offers some extraordinary programs for loyalty professionals to learn from.
And I totally agree.
To learn more about her journey and key insights, you can listen to the full interview.
It’s episode number 7 on letstalkloyalty.com.
That’s it from this episode of Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty.
This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing news, insights and research.
The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 170 executives in 20 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.
For more information, check out thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.
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