The Art of Loyalty: Insights from Nectar (#728)

Shaun: Nectar is the UK’s biggest coalition loyalty program.

Shaun: And for those of you people that aren’t familiar, it’s basically where you can earn or redeem the currency across multiple different brands.

Shaun: What we try to do is really give customers the ability to maximize their household spend, like I said, across all the industries that we can get, and give them really the flexibility and ease to redeem that currency back into things that are meaningful to them.

Shaun: Things need to be simple, and things need to be meaningful for a customer.

Shaun: In those types of things where customers have to jump through a lot of hoops, or the customer journey is really long and convoluted, I think people disengage.

Shaun: What AI will do is really improve the personalization, the pace of personalization that brands can do if they invest in the right technology.

Shaun: You know, it’s only when a customer redeems their points for the first time, and has an emotional engagement and goes, oh, I got something that’s meaningful to me, will they change their behavior, right?

Shaun: Nobody’s accumulating points for the sake of accumulating points to not have any value.

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

Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Lets 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 Charlie Hills, Chief Strategy Officer of MandoConnect, a UK based agency that uses smart data to create brilliant partnerships and rewards that really work. Enjoy.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to this episode of Lets Talk Loyalty.

Charlie: As Paula mentioned, I’m Charlie Hills, the Chief Strategy Officer for MandoConnect.

Charlie: In this episode, I’m delighted to interview Shaun Hatrick, the Director of Partnerships and Business Development for Nectar.

Charlie: Shaun is an expert in the Loyalty and Marketing space with almost two decades of experience shaping partnership and customer engagement strategies.

Charlie: Over his career, he’s led the development and launch of innovative Loyalty and Marketing propositions, some of the world’s most recognized brands, including American Express, British Airways, Sobeys, Esso and more.

Charlie: As Director of Nectar Partnerships and Business Development, he brings together data, creativity and commercial insight to build meaningful, high-value relationships across the Nectar Coalition.

Charlie: His focus is on driving growth and collaboration, connecting brands with millions of customers in ways that deliver real, measurable impact.

Charlie: Today, we’re going to be learning all about his favorite books, highlights and key learnings from the many programs he’s worked on, and all about what loyalty looks like now and in the future for Nectar.

Charlie: I hope you enjoy our conversation today.

Charlie: So hi, Shaun.

Charlie: It’s great to have you on the episode today.

Charlie: Thanks ever so much for joining us.

Charlie: Can’t wait to hear all about Nectar.

Shaun: Oh, thank you so much for having me today.

Shaun: Very excited.

Charlie: It’s going to be a really, really good episode.

Charlie: I’m sure nearly all our listeners and watchers know the Nectar program, so I’m sure they’re really, really going to be really interested to find out what goes on behind the scenes.

Charlie: But before we get into that kind of the overview of Nectar, I wanted to start with our sort of our favorite question really.

Charlie: We’re building up library recommendations.

Charlie: So what is your favorite book about life, loyalty or leadership?

Shaun: Do you know what?

Shaun: So I’ve not got a great answer to that because I’m going to say something, which is we get so inundated, I think, with work optics, right?

Shaun: Whether you’re attending conferences all the time, emails from work, things on LinkedIn, that I try to distance myself as much as I can when I have personal time to not continue reading on the things that we spend 40-plus hours a week doing.

Shaun: So I don’t have a great answer to that.

Shaun: I’m much more of a podcast or fiction reader when I have free time.

Shaun: But they tend to be on things that are a bit more fun or funny rather than business-related topics.

Charlie: I love that answer.

Charlie: We’ve had that from a few guests recently.

Charlie: Do you have any personal life recommendations, any podcasts that you particularly like, that you think people should go and check out?

Shaun: If you’re looking for something to switch off for just a good time, there’s one called Good Hang with Amy Poehler, who was, well, I think she might still be on Saturday Night Live, or she was on it for several years.

Shaun: So she just kind of interviews people in that kind of industry.

Shaun: Another one I quite like is called Les Culturistas, which is funny enough, a guy called Bowen Yang, who was also on Saturday Night Live, and a guy called Matt Rogers, and they have guests that are like other people that are from TV shows or the music industry, anything that’s kind of culturally relevant, and both are kind of like comedy related.

Shaun: So very good for when you’re on your way to work, commuting and just want to switch off.

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: Oh, that’s brilliant.

Charlie: Or in my case, as you know, when I’m walking my pug Edna along the road, and then along the river in the morning, I’ll definitely check out those and I hope everyone does.

Charlie: It’s nice to have a giggle, particularly at this time of year, as it gets a bit kind of dark and rainy.

Charlie: Absolutely.

Charlie: Thank you for sharing them.

Charlie: What about your favorite loyalty programs?

Charlie: Do you have any views on programs you particularly admire or like?

Shaun: Well, Nectar obviously being the top of the list, but I think that would probably be quite a boring answer if I just focused on the one that I work for.

Shaun: So I think one, again, it’s not a very niche program.

Shaun: So, you know, if somebody is expecting something very cutting edge or very different, I would say my favorite program is Avios, to be honest, outside of Nectar, which is obviously a very big program here in the UK.

Shaun: I am a frequent flyer for personal.

Shaun: I don’t actually fly too much for business, which makes it a little more difficult to get the most out of the program.

Shaun: But I do think they do so much right for customers.

Shaun: So you’ve got what I love about is you’ve got a great mix of a value exchange of, you know, you collect Avios points, and of course, you can redeem them for flights or upgrades or all those great things.

Shaun: They do a great job of also the emotional side of things, right?

Shaun: Because loyalty is very much made from your heart and not your head.

Shaun: And it’s those extra benefits that if you engage in the program and you get to silver, gold, any of these tier statuses, and you get the little perks like getting into the lounge, boarding the plane early, getting to pick your seat before anybody else to make sure you can get the extra leg room seat.

Shaun: I’m quite tall, you know, I’m over six feet tall.

Shaun: So getting that extra leg room is really, really helpful.

Shaun: And I think in recent years, they’ve done a great job of finding ways to differentiate the program just from airline and from flights, right?

Shaun: So you can, if you engage in their e-store, for example, there’s tons of ways you can buy online hundreds of different brands and get Avial’s points.

Shaun: Obviously now we’ve got a partnership with Nectar since 2021, so you can kind of move your points back and forth between Nectar and Avial’s.

Shaun: They’ve got a fantastic credit card program, right?

Shaun: I think it’s probably one of the biggest co-branded cards in the UK, if it’s not the biggest, when you get the ever loved companion voucher, right?

Shaun: So you use that with your partner or your friends.

Shaun: So I just think they’re actually firing on all cylinders.

Shaun: I love it.

Shaun: And going back to the emotion thing, it’s one of those things where you go, I’ve been actually just last night, I was planning a trip with a friend and trying to calculate everything like by the end of the year, by March 31st, am I going to have made enough tier points to keep my status?

Shaun: So you try to go, okay, well, should we upgrade this type of flight or should I pay more to travel in this premium or business just to make sure I make it?

Shaun: And if you sit there and actually think about the pounds you’re spending, and you think about you want the lounge, you want this, that, you probably could go to Heathrow and go to the most fancy restaurant in Heathrow, every time you travel and it would be less money that you pay to keep your status, right?

Shaun: But there’s something emotionally kind of gratifying about that.

Shaun: So I think that’s a really good example of advice I’ll have for people, right?

Shaun: Which is that loyalty is very much about emotion.

Shaun: You need to think about that when you’re building a program.

Shaun: So yeah, I’m a huge, huge aviose.

Charlie: I mean, I think it’s an absolutely brilliant program.

Charlie: And I think one of the things I absolutely love about it is the complexity, which sounds really strange because all of the rest of the loyalty industry is trying to keep things really simple and trying to strip out any complexity in the user journey, the membership experience.

Charlie: But I think aviose does it so well in the opposite way.

Charlie: I mean, anybody who’s actually managed to earn their companion voucher and then tries to actually redeem it, spend it, find a way to go on holiday, I think it’s a really clever way of bringing to life a lot of behavioral science principles about the more effort you have to put into something, the more you value it.

Charlie: And that experience you’ve just talked us through of actually working out your holidays and your upgrades so you can keep your status is a whole chunk of interesting behavioral science kind of principles all in one go.

Charlie: So yeah, that’s an amazing program.

Charlie: I’m also a huge fan.

Charlie: I’ve just earned my companion voucher.

Charlie: And I was honestly doing exactly the same thing last night, trying to work out where I can fly to and where I get the best value and what are the good routes and how I can work in an airport lounge visit.

Charlie: So yeah, a brilliant program.

Charlie: Great example.

Charlie: And nice that you’ve managed to keep that link to Nectar as well.

Charlie: So it’s a favorite.

Shaun: I’ve got one that’s also not Nectar related, but one that I’d urge people to look at is an industry actually outside of kind of retailer, traveler, the classic ones, which is the video game industry, I think does it very, very well.

Shaun: And they have a lot of great platforms that I think retailers could learn a lot from.

Shaun: So what they do often is create your and there’s lots of examples through a lot of different games where they create like kind of like daily challenges, right?

Shaun: Like log in, play the game, and I don’t know, play three games or do this or do it in this amount of time or whatever.

Shaun: And then they’ll reward you with either things that actually there’s there’s very little margin cost to the business, right?

Shaun: So like, let’s call it skins for your character, right?

Shaun: Like they change the way your avatar looks, which once they’ve had the person that works at their company code that and build that, there’s no cost of sending out millions, right?

Shaun: But the perceived value is quite high.

Shaun: And I think there’s a lot of that gamification, which people could think about, which is you don’t always need to give value in a way that that’s monetary, right?

Shaun: Value can be a lot of different things.

Shaun: And even this emotional thing of like, ooh, I get a new icon or I get an upgrade for something.

Shaun: I think actually a lot of companies could learn from from that moving forward.

Charlie: Yeah, they do it really, really well.

Charlie: One of my favorite examples, slightly tangential to game is Duolingo and the streaks.

Charlie: I think that’s really, really clever as well.

Charlie: And actually, I think there’s quite a lot of loyalty programs looking at that at the moment.

Charlie: And actually, we’re seeing a lot of gamification in the British market that’s designed to build habits.

Charlie: So for example, O2 Priorities Blue Mondays is a really good example of, you know, trying to get people to kind of build that habit of checking in every Monday.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s a really, really nice trend.

Charlie: What about your background in loyalty marketing?

Charlie: You’ve actually had the privilege of working in lots of markets for lots of programs.

Charlie: I’m sure our audience would love to hear a little bit about your history and what you like about working in loyalty marketing.

Shaun: Absolutely.

Shaun: So I’m coming up on two decades in loyalty.

Shaun: And so I started in the Canadian market.

Shaun: And I laughed because actually my first role was not technically in loyalty.

Shaun: I actually worked for the British clothing retail called Jaeger, and they were opening franchises in Canada.

Shaun: And I worked for the owner and I was a marketing manager that kind of covered everything.

Shaun: But I call it my first step into loyalty because Jaeger had apparently existed in Canada prior it closed for like, I don’t know, 15 years.

Shaun: The owner of the franchise was trying to bring it back.

Shaun: And she had a customer, I’ll call it database.

Shaun: It was a whole bunch of printouts with customers’ names, their phone numbers, lots of PII data that nowadays would not fly, right, in this format.

Shaun: But it was the best, the VIP customer list from ages past.

Shaun: And one of my first rules was to digitize that database, start contacting everybody to say, Oh, Jaeger’s coming back to Canada, you know, get them on an emailing list, lots of things that the principles were there, how it would be done, you know, in a post GDPR, post world where we understand actually data privacy probably wouldn’t fly anymore.

Shaun: But that was, I guess, my first foray.

Charlie: Fantastic.

Shaun: Yeah, from there, I actually saw my credit arrow plan.

Shaun: So that’s Air Canada’s frequent flyer program.

Shaun: That’s in the late 2000s.

Shaun: And back then, they had a very prominent retail program as well.

Shaun: So it was almost like a combination of Avios and Nectar together.

Shaun: You could earn both on Air Canada and Star Alliance Airlines, as well as a whole bunch of big retailers in Canada.

Shaun: So I worked there for about five, six years in a partnership space.

Shaun: So working with a whole bunch of different brands.

Shaun: So I cut my teeth on grocery.

Shaun: I helped launch the Sobeys partnership with Aeroplan, two pharmacies that were regional.

Shaun: So one in Quebec, one that was more in Western Canada.

Shaun: I did general merchandise.

Shaun: I did Esso.

Shaun: The list goes on and on of brands that I’d worked with in Canada.

Shaun: So a really great kind of grounding.

Shaun: And then in 2014, I moved over to Nectar, because Nectar back then was owned by the parent company that owned Aeroplan back in Canada called AMIA, which was a global company that owned and operated loyalty programs across the world.

Shaun: And I moved over with them, like I said, in 2014.

Shaun: And I’ve been with Nectar ever since, again, working on a number of different brands.

Shaun: So started in the B2B space, which is quite interesting.

Shaun: So managing partners like Breaks, Deluxe Decorating Center, ones that target more small businesses and helping them get the most out of the program.

Shaun: And then through the years, kind of the role evolved, shifted.

Shaun: And now I head up the partnerships and development team.

Charlie: Oh, that’s really nice history to see actually.

Charlie: So many of our guests come into Loyalty from different angles.

Charlie: You know, we might have kind of a finance background or a CRM background, but it’s really nice to have a guest who’s actually sort of grown up in Loyalty programs.

Shaun: Absolutely.

Charlie: You’ve made me think actually, because I always say my first job was at Boots, using Boots Advantage Card.

Charlie: But actually, thinking about it, my first job was very similar.

Charlie: I did a load of temp work for a diving company.

Charlie: And one of my first jobs was transferring all the paper cards where one had written out their PADD certificates with their sort of stuff stuck on it onto a digital database that was then used for commerce.

Charlie: I’ll have to change my answer when people tell me that was a brilliant job.

Shaun: It’s amazing to think like back then, actually, we, with one of the pharmacy partners in Canada, you could sign up to the program in store and it would come, like, the physical sign up sheets would come to me and I’d have to manually enter them.

Shaun: So every day of work, you know, you’d put aside 30 minutes to just do data entry on top of all the other things you’re doing.

Shaun: You just think nowadays how wild that would be to think of, like, such a manual process.

Shaun: But we’ve come a long way in 20 years.

Charlie: That’s funny, isn’t it?

Charlie: Yeah, many, many stories like that.

Charlie: My first job, there was a man who used to come around with a trolley with the printings.

Charlie: You’d send stuff to print and then it would arrive the next day with a man on a trolley.

Charlie: It’s quite funny now that we’ve pretty much moved to completely paperless.

Charlie: I’m sure our audience are familiar with Nectar.

Charlie: I mean, most people globally who work in the industry are familiar with the program.

Charlie: Obviously, it’s so well established, but it would be great to hear it from you.

Charlie: Please tell us about the Nectar program and what you think sort of sets it apart from the rest.

Shaun: Yeah, absolutely.

Shaun: So Nectar is the UK’s biggest coalition loyalty program.

Shaun: And when we say coalition, for those of you people that aren’t familiar, it’s basically where you can earn or redeem the currency across multiple different brands, right?

Shaun: So it’s not just a proprietary program of Sainsbury’s, though Sainsbury’s obviously plays a very major role in the Nectar program.

Shaun: It is a program where you can engage with it across a number of different industries.

Shaun: So what we try to do is really give customers the ability to maximize their household spend, like I said, across all the industries that we can get, and give them really the flexibility and ease to redeem that currency back into things that are meaningful to them.

Shaun: So in the coalition, you’ve got the keystones, which for any coalition program globally, it’s very much grocery and financial services.

Shaun: So you can earn and redeem at Sainsbury’s.

Shaun: You’ve got the Nectar credit card with American Express.

Shaun: We’ve got Argos, which is a partner, which you can pretty much get anything you want at Argos.

Shaun: And then travel recovered, you can move points back and forth with Avios.

Shaun: We’ve recently just this year signed a partnership with Marriott, Marriott Bonvoy, which is the biggest hotel chain globally.

Shaun: I think they’ve got over 50 brands, right?

Shaun: From the Ritz-Carlton’s down to more the hotels next to the airport that you’re trying to do just like an overnight stay.

Shaun: So really got flexibility in the travel space.

Shaun: So we’re there to really give customers some value back for stuff that they do for nothing, right?

Shaun: Like just engage in the program, maximize your spend at these retailers, use the app to get as many bonus points as you can.

Shaun: And then you can get some really significant value back.

Shaun: And from, I guess, the brands that work with us, there’s a lot of value that the Nectar program offers, right?

Shaun: So I think scale is probably the big one.

Shaun: We’ve got, I mean, the last, the numbers going up every day.

Shaun: We’ve got definitely over 24 million.

Shaun: I think the numbers probably, if I logged into the system today, would probably be higher than that.

Shaun: Like I said, a flexible currency that everybody knows and loves.

Shaun: Marketing channels that are really strong and evolving.

Shaun: So, you know, of that 24 million, 19 million are digitally active that we can contact through the app, through emails.

Shaun: So it really makes the one-to-one marketing really cost effective, right?

Shaun: For the brand that work with us.

Shaun: And of course, the data set is, I would say, unmatched in the UK market.

Shaun: So you’ve got all the skew level data from Sainsbury’s, all the data from Argos that gives you a really great picture of who a customer is, all the demographic data that we capture upon sign up, and then you add in the coalition data, right?

Shaun: So that really helps paint in the missing color by numbers of an individual’s profile to really help understand what a customer is into, what they want to buy, when they want to buy it.

Shaun: That really then helps the partners that we work with maximize their marketing investments.

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it?

Charlie: When you think about the scale of that program versus many of the other programs in the British market, but also globally, I think that’s one of the things that really stands out to me.

Charlie: You know, it’s a really successful, effective, and continuously evolving coalition as well, because coalition programs have struggled globally, you know, in the last sort of five to 10 years.

Charlie: They were everywhere, and they were the sort of the big success story.

Charlie: I remember when I did my MBA in Loyalty, it was held up as like, you know, this is the best model, and then there were a few challenges.

Charlie: But Nectar seems to have weathered those storms, and actually evolved and grown over time.

Charlie: So it’s a brilliant program.

Charlie: It’s amazing to see 24 million Brits, you know, that’s absolutely nuts across those retailers.

Charlie: What are your favorite bits of the program?

Charlie: You talked a lot in the sort of adios about bits that you love about that, you know, the companion of actually as a user or a member, you know, what are your favorite pieces?

Shaun: For me, I think it is the flexibility and the ease.

Shaun: And I’ll go back to the comment you just made, right?

Shaun: That loyalty programs were everywhere in the early 2000s, they’re kind of mid 2000s.

Shaun: And there’s not as many nowadays, and Nectar is still thriving.

Shaun: And the reason for that, I think, is evolving the proposition and being flexible to what you offer to customers.

Shaun: So in the past, you know, barriers to entry in loyalty were really significant, right?

Shaun: Like there was a tech investment required, you needed to have probably the cornerstone partners, like I said, like grocery or financial services, setting all that up, you know, there’s so much work that goes behind the scenes that Nectar provides a tricky solution for.

Shaun: So you’ve got loyalty experts, you’ve got data analysts, you’ve got a call center, right?

Shaun: If there’s a problem, you’ve got the databases, all those types of things that if a program wants to set that up themselves, there’s a lot of upfront investment.

Shaun: Now, the opposite is with online retailing being so much more prevalent, capturing first-party data becomes a lot more easy than it was in the past, right?

Shaun: You don’t necessarily need a loyalty card to get that one-to-one relationship with somebody.

Shaun: And so that’s where I think a lot of coalition programs probably didn’t evolve where they go, okay, well, we are going to be the loyalty solution and it has to be, you swipe our card, you are in our currency, redeem for the things that we want.

Shaun: And that doesn’t work because different programs can start doing their own things, they can start tailoring the program the way they want.

Shaun: And where I think Nectar has done a really great job in the way that we approach business development and kind of expanding the coalition is not having a one size fits all model for the brand that we work with.

Shaun: So if you take Esso, for example, where I’d say we are a very classic relationship, you know, it’s very difficult for a fuel retailer to capture one to one data because nobody is buying fuel online, right?

Shaun: Everything is done.

Charlie: And they just want to get in and out as quickly as possible.

Shaun: So our relationship there is very traditional.

Shaun: You scan the Nectar card, you earn points, you could redeem at Esso.

Shaun: Whereas our partnership with BA, for example, much more modern, right?

Shaun: It’s the conversion of currencies back and forth.

Shaun: With Marriott, the same thing.

Shaun: You can move Marriott Bonvoy into Nectar and Nectar into Marriott Bonvoy, or you can earn Nectar directly with Marriott on through the first three stays.

Shaun: So I think what I find exciting about the proposition is that we really look to understand what the business challenge is of the brand that we work with.

Shaun: We are not wed to a one size fits all model.

Shaun: But the thing that we are wed to is from a customer proposition, it needs to be easy and slick to engage with.

Shaun: So nothing, not a million hoops to jump through, and it has to be meaningful value.

Shaun: So not something that you engage with them.

Shaun: There’s no payoff at the end of it.

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: I think that’s so important, particularly in the British market actually, we’ve got such high penetration and such high activity rates in loyalty programs.

Charlie: Consumers really will talk about that value exchange, and I’ve sat in lots of research, and I know that Nectar is one of the ones where actually people can really see it and use it, and that kind of that grocery cornerstone, I think probably combined with the kind of the sectors that you have around the edge, I mean that people really, really love it.

Charlie: That’s clearly one of the highs of working on Nectar.

Charlie: Are there any other sort of highs of your experience?

Charlie: And also always have to ask about the lows, you know, I’m sure we’ll add more on the positives, but what are some of the best bits about working in Nectar?

Shaun: So for me, I love, actually, I’ll combine the high and low.

Shaun: So I love the breadth of Nectar.

Shaun: So like I said, because it’s a coalition program, from my point of view, I get, I’m fortunate enough to work with some amazing brand, right?

Shaun: Like, so I work in American Express.

Shaun: I work with British Airways and Avios, Marriott.

Shaun: The list goes on and on.

Shaun: So the benefit for me or anybody that’s working at Nectar is, you get a really broad loyalty perspective, right?

Shaun: It’s not just how does loyalty work for grocery, how does loyalty work for general merchandise, right?

Shaun: Or how does loyalty work for travel, which are kind of like the big ones.

Shaun: You can really understand how different retailers can get the most out of a program and actually how you have to structure a loyalty offering to work for a really broad array of industries, which I think for anybody who’s a loyalty geek is really, really exciting.

Shaun: So going more specifically, I think a high, and I’m going to combine it with a low, was when we were working on the launch of British Airways, everything was done in a very quick timeline, and it was supposed to launch in October of 2020.

Shaun: If you remember, and these deals, especially with these big brands, you’ll be working on them for, it could be two years before it hits the market.

Shaun: So you’re very emotionally invested.

Shaun: You’re spending your days living something that’s only going to see the light of day a while, several months down the road or even a year.

Shaun: Of course, the pandemic hits, and we are still continuing all the setup, all the tech integrations, everything that you need to make that work.

Shaun: We’re just looking, October.

Shaun: At the beginning, if you remember back, it’ll be done by October, absolutely.

Shaun: Right?

Shaun: To launch a very big telecom position.

Shaun: So I think, obviously, the pandemic went on.

Shaun: So we took the call to delay the launch, which is obviously a bit of a gutting moment, right?

Shaun: When you’ve been putting so much effort into it on both sides.

Shaun: And then we ended up launching, actually, in January of 2021.

Shaun: So the pandemic was still going, it was still locked down.

Shaun: But actually, because of the nature of the relationship, where it’s a two-way exchange, it actually gave Avios members who were grounded and weren’t able to fly, an opportunity to invest or move their points over into Nectar currency where you could still redeem at grocery, you could still redeem for online things.

Shaun: So actually, it gave value to both of our customers.

Shaun: And while not necessarily the launch we had all planned, from a creative standpoint, from aspiration of travel, it actually ended up being a really interesting case study to go, OK, well, actually, you can turn this negative around into something positive and actually demonstrate through the unique nature of the relationship of value for customers.

Shaun: So both a trialing point in our career, but actually something that ended up being really, really rewarding in the end.

Charlie: Yeah, I think that is a really key point, actually, about the flexibility that you need to work in loyalty, don’t you?

Charlie: You have to adapt to the consumer context, the market context.

Charlie: We had a very similar example at Mando.

Charlie: We were working with Michelle on a huge promotion with Michelle Go Plus during the pandemic when actually the government declared it was illegal to drive, except for essential purposes.

Charlie: Yeah, we had to pivot very quickly and delay timings and adapt to that kind of context.

Charlie: I do think that’s one of the areas where loyalty marketing is one of the more flexible marketing disciplines and actually you can adapt.

Charlie: So it’s a really nice example of a high and a low.

Charlie: It seems silly to ask this question because obviously we work for Nectar, we support the Loyalty Programme, it’s important because Nectar is a Loyalty Programme.

Charlie: But how important is Nectar to the brands that you work with?

Charlie: I mean, you talk about all those different sectors and all those different ways that you’ve set up the programme with different sectors.

Charlie: How important is it to those brands do you think?

Shaun: So I guess there’s a different scaling for different brands, right?

Shaun: So take Esso, for example, where we are the loyalty program, where you take up a big part of their marketing resource.

Shaun: It’s the way that they can build their data asset.

Shaun: I can talk probably from a Sainsbury’s point of view, and from a Sainsbury’s group.

Shaun: So Sainsbury’s, Argos to Nectar 360, which is kind of the subsidiary that I work for, which the Nectar program falls under.

Shaun: I mean, it’s central to everything that we do, and the flywheel that powers the majority of the marketing.

Shaun: So if you think about Sainsbury’s value prop, a lot of it now is Nectar prices.

Shaun: So you go in and you get the discounted price on different SKUs.

Shaun: But now you’ve got your Nectar prices, which is the personalized prices that depending on what you buy and how you engage in Sainsbury’s, you’ll get discounts that are really tailored to the things that you buy.

Charlie: The brilliant innovation, by the way, everyone.

Charlie: It’s worth joining Nectar just so you can see how clever the algorithm is and how quickly it learns.

Charlie: I think that’s one of the things that surprised me.

Charlie: There was very little time lag between launch and execution.

Charlie: It kind of felt like it got it right almost from day one, which is very unusual in our space.

Shaun: Yeah, it is.

Shaun: It’s one of those ones that you sit there as a customer, not just as an employee of the company, but you go like, I always love looking at my stream and going, yes, these are absolutely the things that I want to buy.

Shaun: So it’s something that I think we’re very, very proud of.

Shaun: And going back to, I guess, the value of Nectar for us anyways, and for for St.

Shaun: Vizagos, you know, the data asset is really central to everything that we do, the way we communicate to customers, right?

Shaun: To do that in a really cost effective way, you need to be doing it in a direct channels.

Shaun: You can’t always be investing in TV commercials, radio ads, you know, they’re very costly.

Shaun: They’re effective and they’re great for very top of funnel marketing.

Shaun: But to get that conversion, to drive, you know, trading moments in time, you need those more tailored, more personalized one to one.

Shaun: So the Nectar communication channels are really pivotal, right, to the different brands, understanding customers’ segments and even how we range in stores, right?

Shaun: You’ll look at the demographics of what a certain store, you might offer in Northern London versus in a different borough and in the South and the stores won’t, you know, they’ll obviously be skews.

Shaun: You’ll obviously have your milks, your cheeses, your breads, all those types of things, but you’ll have a flex of the different skew that might be tailored to if there’s, you know, a high proportion of a certain ethnicity that buys this really certain type of food, you might find more of those in a store and the ranging is completely different than somewhere else, right?

Shaun: So the data that sits behind Nectar is super, super important.

Shaun: And then from a Nectar 360 point of view, you know, we run all the retail media and all the digital media that FMCGs buy into.

Shaun: So when you’re going in and around a Sainsbury’s and you go in the beer wines in Spiritisle, and you might see an advertisement from some beer brand, right, with some beautiful creative in store, whether it be, you know, cardboard or whether it be on the digital screens, Nectar 360 uses the data to place that in the right stores at the right moments and really give value back to those FMCG brands.

Shaun: So like the data that sits behind Nectar is really, really pivotal.

Shaun: And from a customer point of view, the currency is really integral to give value back to the and our thanks back to customers that engage with us, right, which is ultimately what you want to do is make sure that customers are getting the value and seeing that there’s something in it for the loyalty for the brands.

Charlie: And it’s really nice there how you’ve highlighted all the different stakeholders that are getting value and importance back from the program.

Charlie: I think that’s one of those really interesting areas in loyalty, isn’t it?

Charlie: Because you always have to think about the customer, you always have to think about the brand, you have to think about the business.

Charlie: In your case, you also have to think about the partners, the coalition members, the customers, you know, the clients, the retail media business.

Charlie: So that is a lot of stakeholders.

Charlie: I mean, that’s a lot of people to keep happy for whom it’s really important.

Charlie: And it’s lovely to see the breadth of the value that, you know, Nectar has evolved over the last sort of 20 years and actually how that model has changed.

Charlie: What is sort of one of the most important lessons you’ve learned in your time?

Charlie: I mean, obviously, you joined in 2014, so you’ve had a good chance to have a think about that.

Charlie: Like, what are some of the most important things you think?

Shaun: Yeah, so I think and it’s really basic, but it’s something that I would urge anybody who’s either building their own brand or their own loyalty brand, I mean, or is looking to work, let’s say, with Nectar or someone equivalent is things need to be simple and things need to be meaningful for a customer, right?

Shaun: So I’ll use an example of a brand that used to be in the coalition ages ago and in an industry that typically would have loyalty and, you know, you look globally and loyalty kind of sits very well in this industry, but the partnership wasn’t simple in the sense that the customer journey was very convoluted.

Shaun: It was, there was lots of terms and conditions of when you could or couldn’t connect or points that was not clear to the customer.

Shaun: You know, you had to kind of go looking for it on the site.

Shaun: In those types of things where customers have to jump through a lot of hoops or the customer journey is really long and convoluted, I think people disengage.

Shaun: And it’s very easy when you are working in the loyalty program and you’re in your head office and you’re kind of living and breathing this, you know, seven days a week all the time.

Shaun: And something that you go, oh, well, that’s just easy, right?

Shaun: Like, it’s so simple.

Shaun: Just click this, do that, da, da, da.

Shaun: Because it’s something that you have so much knowledge about, you have to remember that the average consumer doesn’t give more than a few seconds of thought, right?

Shaun: So it has to be something that can grab them right at the beginning, that loyalty is in the customer journey at the time of making decisions, right?

Shaun: So that’s another thing I think that brands often look to loyalty to drive acquisition, right?

Shaun: And acquisition is one of those ones that any kind of CFO or marketing director, they always want to push because it’s very easy to prove to the finance team the incrementality of something, right?

Shaun: And not looking at the long term benefit of actually driving the repeat purchases, the retention of customers.

Shaun: You sometimes need to have a little bit of cannibalization for that long term payoff.

Shaun: So I’d say the ease of the customer journey, the ease of the proposition being super important, and then it’s got to be meaningful.

Shaun: So if you’re coming up with a promotion, and it’s generally on a promotion level that I see this, where somebody will have a great idea around, oh, wouldn’t it be exciting if there’s this cool mechanic or whatever, but then you come down to the commerciality of it, and it becomes very difficult for a browser.

Shaun: They’re very nervous about investing.

Shaun: And then the payoff to the customer is just a little flat.

Shaun: Again, I think customers can very quickly tell that the level of effort required, the attention span, like I said before, is not super, super high.

Shaun: So it’s got to be something that there’s a bit of a payoff.

Shaun: And I’ve got a really actually very good recent example of where somebody got this wrong.

Shaun: I was buying some summer clothes.

Shaun: I’m going on a holiday in a month.

Shaun: So for an online retailer in Australia, for more like beach wear, these types of things, and the brand has a loyalty program of points that if you buy through the shop app, you would accumulate points and you can get a coupon off.

Shaun: So I’ve bought from them a few times in the past.

Shaun: I was like, oh, I’ve actually accumulated enough points.

Shaun: I was actually very excited this week where I was like, I’ve got enough for 50 Australian dollars.

Shaun: So I was like, that’s fantastic because the average purchase was probably around 30 or 40 Australian dollars.

Shaun: So I go to redeem it and it just keeps going.

Shaun: The voucher code cannot be redeemed, the voucher code cannot be redeemed.

Shaun: Then finally looking in the terms and conditions, then I looked in the email where it said I had points, and I could not find an explanation.

Shaun: I had to really go digging.

Shaun: Then it was, oh, the voucher can only be used on purchases of 250 quid or more.

Shaun: Which for this retailer was the average basket, that is a stretch, the average basket of let’s say $30 to $40.

Shaun: So instantly I quite disengaged emotionally, and I had that very sour taste in my mouth to go in.

Shaun: They didn’t get it right in terms of the simplicity.

Shaun: Well, the simplicity was there in a sense of the customer jury to redeem the voucher actually was quite good, but the simplicity to understand the terms and conditions, not great, you didn’t put that up front, and then it wasn’t meaningful, because I said, well, this Loyalty program, to get any value of it, you actually have to spend way too much for what these products are, like buying a vest or a pair of shorts or whatever sort of shorts, like you’re not going to get to $250 very easily.

Shaun: So I would say those are kind of my two tips, and they kind of sound basic, but actually as people get caught up in the day to day, and you’re trying to make things work from an ROI point of view, like you’ve got to balance everything to make sure that it works for the customer.

Charlie: So they don’t sound simple.

Charlie: I think they sound like really kind of strong principles to keep kind of front and foremost.

Charlie: And we’ve run a lot of research actually, and although that’s an Australian example, that is the number one thing you can do to lose customer trust, which is hide something in the terms and conditions that they then don’t discover until the moment of kind of trying to claim it and use it.

Charlie: It’s pretty much the worst thing you can actually do to a British consumer.

Charlie: And I imagine it’s very similar for an Australian consumer.

Charlie: So that’s a great example.

Charlie: You’ve talked a little bit there about kind of KPIs and the challenge that we all face, you know, from commercial teams versus customer value versus cannibalization.

Charlie: How do you measure success in the Nectar program?

Charlie: Clearly, it’s member acquisition must be a struggle at 24 hours.

Charlie: You’re probably running out of people to get.

Charlie: So, you know, what does what does that look like?

Shaun: So it’s interesting because I get a perspective across all the brands that we work with, right?

Shaun: So proving the value of Nectar, you can imagine, is a big important role of me and my team, because brands invest quite a bit of money to be part of the Nectar program.

Shaun: So I’d say it often, you know, if I really boil it down, right, it comes to gain share of all of the customer.

Shaun: Like that’s all people want to do it, but that translates into very different things.

Shaun: So to your point, Nectar is a really good example of membership growth.

Shaun: While we are growing, actually we’ve grown quite significantly since the launch of Nectar prices.

Shaun: It’s about one third of UK consumers, right?

Shaun: If you look at the population, I think we’re probably around close to just south of 70 million in the country.

Shaun: We’ve got 24 million.

Shaun: So take out people that are under 18.

Shaun: You’ve got most households.

Shaun: So growth of trying to top a funnel is probably not as much a priority as getting customers to digitally engage with that.

Shaun: That’s a really important metric that will eventually obviously lead to share of wallet growth for St.

Shaun: Louis, for Argos.

Shaun: The reason being the value exchange is so prevalent when you engage in the app and it’s better for consumers, it’s better for us.

Shaun: So that’s a KPI that we definitely look at.

Shaun: Brands through the coalition often look at, and they’ll flex the importance of them up and down, acquisition of new customers, upselling.

Shaun: So can you get customers to shop more often with you?

Shaun: Can you get customers to be retained versus non-loyalty customers?

Shaun: Can you re-engage customers that are lapsed?

Shaun: Are generally, I’d say, the main leavers.

Shaun: The other one that’s probably less obvious that I would really push any brand who’s in loyalty to look at is the level of engagement of redemption of your loyalty program to customers, right?

Shaun: And so many people focus on the accumulation.

Shaun: How do you get customers to earn the currency or earn the value exchange of the program?

Shaun: But not as much necessarily on getting customers to use the program.

Shaun: And if you don’t use, it’s only at that moment of exchange of value.

Shaun: So I’ll use points, right?

Shaun: Because that’s what Nectar has.

Shaun: That’s a really obvious one.

Shaun: It’s only when a customer redeems their points for the first time and has an emotional engagement goes, I got something that’s meaningful to me.

Shaun: Will they change their behavior, right?

Shaun: Nobody’s accumulating points for the sake of accumulating points to not have any values change.

Shaun: So actually looking at making sure that that level of redemption or value back, however that looks for your program, and making sure that that’s not dipping and that actually a very sizable amount of customers are able to get that value.

Shaun: Otherwise, you’re not going to have a sustained program.

Charlie: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting.

Charlie: We’ve seen that a lot actually, particularly in the last three years.

Charlie: I think member prices in grocery has had a really big impact on how often the British market expects to be rewarded.

Charlie: It’s quite interesting, I think, when you look in restaurants, it’s a newer sector in loyalty.

Charlie: But I think the Pizza Express program is a really good example.

Charlie: They’ve really picked up on the insight that you need to get a reward almost every time, as well as then saving your points up.

Charlie: I do think that the member price is phenomenal that the British market has had a really big impact on that.

Charlie: We just used to look at activity levels.

Charlie: Actually, now we look at frequency of activity levels as well, a number of engagements and how often they’re getting rewarded, as well as a net score.

Charlie: Definitions of active rates have definitely changed, once every 12 months to once every six months, to once every three months.

Charlie: Now, I think ideally, you want more than once every 30 days, particularly in the grocery sector, probably every seven.

Shaun: Yeah, obviously, it’ll change depending on your industry.

Shaun: If you’re a travel program, let’s say you’re a cruise liner, you’re probably not going to have a frequency like grocery, obviously, but you still want for whatever your industry is in the right frequency, you want to make sure that customers are doing that value exchange often, and not just sitting on the currency or whatever it is that they’re building up with your load.

Charlie: Very much so.

Charlie: What about the future?

Charlie: You obviously talked about the importance of digital engagement.

Charlie: I think it’s great.

Charlie: I think you said 19 out of the 24 million are digitally active, which is extraordinary in terms of the reach that you’ve got.

Charlie: But what other areas are you looking at at Nectar for the future?

Charlie: What are your priorities?

Shaun: Yeah.

Shaun: Well, I can’t give too much away from an Nectar point of view, but obviously, we’re always looking at expanding the coalition and looking at what customers tell us they want.

Shaun: We’ve got some new programs launching in November, so just around the corner, so look out for that.

Shaun: But I guess I’ll go from a broader perspective.

Shaun: I think you’ve got to keep an eye on tech, right?

Shaun: I’m going to use the dreaded cliche word of AI, and I know it’s one of those ones that we all, you hear it in every conference, every keynote speeches focusing on that.

Shaun: But I do think it’s important to understand how that could impact the loyalty industry.

Shaun: If you think of agentic AI, which is AI that can make decisions for you, right?

Shaun: You set a goal and you can kind of just leave it and it can do the decision.

Shaun: Think about that famous phrase that we all see in the loyalty industry, which is the right offer at the right place at the right time.

Shaun: Well, you can now have AI start making that decision for you.

Shaun: So think about you are a grocery retailer and you might buy, I don’t know, a whole bunch of skewers that you buy day to day and it’s a beautiful summer day.

Shaun: And now the AI goes, well, actually today, you’ll get a discount on cans to go to the park with your friends or drinks for that and fruits rather than whatever other butter and those staples that you might not need for a picnic, right?

Shaun: So I think what AI will do is really improve the personalization, the pace of personalization that brands can do if they invest in the right technology.

Shaun: The other side of it is the ability to really adapt creatives to be much more tailored to individuals, right?

Shaun: So there’s lots of examples actually out there of companies that are creating video, personalized videos, right?

Shaun: So you load in the customer data and you’ll have somebody walking around and talking to you and using your name and using the product that you bring.

Shaun: So there’s kind of interesting things like that that are kind of emerging in the market.

Shaun: A really big trend actually is like targeting by micro communities, so areas of interest, right?

Shaun: So if people are interested, I’ll make something up.

Shaun: You’re interested in tennis, you’re interested in comic books, you’re interested in whatever, right?

Shaun: Marketing using that as a creative and a messaging works super, super well.

Shaun: There’s a ton of research that shows that that’s very, very difficult to do with any scale, right?

Shaun: If you’re, you know, take a program like Nectar, try to target by micro communities, you’d have an endless number of segments.

Shaun: Well, you know, it’s not unheard of to think in the future that AI will let you, you know, you can have a whole bunch of lists of interests, and you go develop creatives that speak to these kind of interests and kind of have copy that’s exciting and funny and work to that.

Shaun: That would resonate so much more with consumers.

Shaun: So I do think, while it is a little cliché to say AI, and often people don’t actually have the specifics of what they actually mean, I do think there are some really tangible examples that the future, we’re probably not too far off, right?

Shaun: Yeah.

Charlie: Well, I think it’s extraordinary how much, you know, it’s changed how we work, you know, even in the last six months as well.

Charlie: I think there are some really interesting team efficiencies as well as kind of consumer examples of it.

Charlie: And I love both those examples.

Charlie: The number of times we’ve sat there and we’ve got, there’s this really exciting micro community and this amazing passion.

Charlie: We work in brand partnerships at Mando and you want to do something for that audience, but you just can’t justify the budgets of it versus the big mainstream passions like, you know, television or cinema or coffee.

Charlie: So it’s really exciting time, I think, partnerships and for partner brands.

Charlie: Actually, some of those smaller passions where you’re going to see those higher payoffs but for much smaller audiences, AI really gives us the ability to do that.

Charlie: So yeah, it’s very, very cool.

Charlie: On a personal level, I absolutely love it as well.

Charlie: I can’t remember how I actually planned holidays or how to use my companion voucher in the world before AI.

Shaun: Absolutely.

Shaun: It is amazing how quickly we all become reliant on it to give us information.

Shaun: But then again, you’ve got my co-pilot on Microsoft, still can’t find emails from you sometimes, so it’s not perfect yet.

Charlie: No, it’s definitely not perfect.

Charlie: It’s definitely getting there.

Charlie: It’s funny, actually, I’ve got two teenage sons we were talking about before, and it wouldn’t occur to them not to use it, not to make it part of their decision-making process.

Charlie: It’s very exciting times, and I think it’s something that we all need to be looking at.

Charlie: I particularly love the experimentation mindset of it as well.

Charlie: It can do this now, but what will it be able to do in six months?

Charlie: Let’s give it a go, baby steps, and just keep moving with it.

Charlie: What about resources and industry updates?

Charlie: I mean, obviously, we’re all using co-pilot, obviously, we’re all using ChatGVT, but have you got any other resources you’d recommend to our audience that you use or enjoy?

Shaun: Yeah.

Shaun: I mean, there’s the obvious one.

Shaun: You get a lot from conferences, right?

Shaun: Going around and LinkedIn, obviously.

Shaun: I’m fortunate enough, like I said, because I get to work with so many brands, I get to see how they approach loyalty, right?

Shaun: So it’s great to get different perspectives.

Shaun: But the one thing I would say is, probably think more broad than just looking at niche loyalty publications or articles, but really look at tech.

Shaun: It goes back to what I was saying about AI.

Shaun: I’ll give you a really great example.

Shaun: You rewind a few years when wearable health tech was starting to become more prevalent, like Apple Watches, all those Fitbits, those things like that, where on the face of it, you’d go, well, I don’t see how that’s going to impact loyalty necessarily.

Shaun: Then you look at Vitality, what they’re doing in the UK market, and they’ve created a program where you get benefits for going to the gym.

Shaun: How many times do you go there?

Shaun: How healthy are you?

Shaun: How many steps are you doing?

Shaun: Which I think is absolutely one of the best programs, super, super creative.

Shaun: We actually had a loyalty event recently, the keynote speaker was talking about it saying, loyalty is built by emotion, like I was saying before.

Shaun: Insurance is not something anybody would tie to an emotional purchase usually, and she’s there saying how she’s such an advocate for this program to her neighbor is saying how exciting it is and how innovative it is.

Shaun: That’s what builds brand trust, that’s what drives acquisition, word of mouth, those types of things that is one of the strongest things when you have advocacy from an actual customer.

Shaun: My point of this whole story is, the tech advancements that drove wearable products like the Apple Watches, the Fitbit, those are the types of things that can really unlock changes in the loyalty space.

Shaun: So I would say, most important more than anything, is look at where tech is going and what that can do in terms of developing new propositions or new brands to work with.

Charlie: Yeah, and sparking new ideas, as you said, I really like that.

Charlie: It’s in the sort of the surfing and the mountain climbing programs as well, you know, they’ll recognize actually when you’ve got to the top of the mountain and then you reward you accordingly, I think that’s amazing.

Charlie: Yeah, I think that’s a really good top tip.

Charlie: Any other innovations or anything you’ve seen recently or anything else you’d like to share with us as we sort of move to the end of our episode?

Shaun: Yeah, so you know something that I think is actually fantastic and it goes back to the emotion sort of things where and you know and CFOs will love me for this is, you know, value exchange, like I said, it doesn’t always have to be pounds, right?

Shaun: And I think Spotify, you know, do an amazing thing with the Spotify rap, the data playback, which creates brand love, it creates free marketing, you know, how many people share their Spotify rap at the end and customers, there’s nothing customers love more than themselves, right?

Shaun: Like learning about themselves, taking quizzes of, you know, which friends character are you, you know, through my age, those types of things.

Shaun: And there’s not really a massive, like obviously you’ve got to invest in the tech to do that properly and to do that in kind of an exciting way.

Shaun: But once that’s built, you know, you can get so much value out of that with something that’s not necessarily giving a pound value back, but it’s driving brand love.

Shaun: It’s driving, you know, the, like I said, the sharing of this on social platforms.

Shaun: So I think that data playback is something that Spotify has gotten right.

Shaun: I think Nectar do a fairly good job at our year in review, right?

Shaun: Like you’re the number one buyer of this, you know, in this store.

Shaun: I don’t know if you’ve engaged.

Charlie: I have.

Charlie: I love that one.

Charlie: Number one toilet paper buyer in Manchester when it made the outdoor billboards and stuff.

Charlie: I thought was really funny.

Shaun: Oh, wow.

Charlie: Really, really good.

Charlie: Really good example.

Shaun: So that’s something that we’re looking to to kind of expand as the years go through, right?

Shaun: Like make that more relevant to customers and more exciting.

Shaun: So in terms of an like, is it massively innovative?

Shaun: Not necessarily.

Shaun: I don’t think it’s got cutting edge technology that sits behind it, right?

Shaun: But I do think it’s it’s something that’s in industry that is a untapped gem that I think a lot of people could could look to as a way to invest in promotions that don’t necessarily cost you a ton, but that can have a really big, big impact.

Charlie: No, that’s a great idea.

Charlie: I’m hoping everybody’s now Googling the campaign.

Charlie: Definitely go and check it out.

Charlie: It’s really good.

Charlie: And yeah, we’re coming up to Spotify wrapped as well.

Charlie: I’ve got to make my playlist cooler so that my kids don’t judge me too much at the end of the year.

Charlie: Well, look, thank you so much.

Charlie: What an amazing episode and some brilliant insights, some brilliant ideas shared throughout.

Charlie: I’m sure some of our listeners and some of our watchers might have some follow up questions for you.

Charlie: If they do, what’s the best way of reaching you?

Shaun: Oh, you could look for me on LinkedIn, Shaun Hatrick.

Shaun: I think it’s easy to find.

Shaun: I think I’m the only one.

Shaun: Or if you’re interested in, if you’re a brand and you’re interested in working with Nectar, you can email me at Shaun.Hatrick at nectar360.co.uk.

Charlie: Wonderful.

Charlie: We’ll put those links as well in the show notes for everybody so you can find them very easily.

Charlie: And all that’s left for me to say is thank you ever so much.

Charlie: What a brilliant episode.

Charlie: It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Shaun: Thank you so much for having me.

Shaun: It’s been great.

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