Customer Advocacy and Emotional Loyalty Driven by Value-Based Alignment (#649)

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 Truth, an international loyalty consultancy.

PAULA: She’s also the author of the book, Blind Loyalty, 101 Loyalty Concepts, Radically Simplified.

PAULA: Enjoy.

AMANDA: Hi, I’m Amanda Cromhout from Truth Loyalty.

AMANDA: Today I have the pleasure of chatting with Professor Yuping Liu-Thompkins.

AMANDA: She is the director of the Loyalty Science Lab and the professor of marketing at the Old Dominion University.

AMANDA: This is not the first time we’ve had Yuping on Let’s Talk Loyalty.

AMANDA: This is the first time on Loyalty TV.

AMANDA: And today we talk about another phenomenal white paper that she has curated.

AMANDA: This time it’s around the politics of brand loyalty.

AMANDA: Some of the key takeouts from this white paper is that value alignment is worth more than product, price and service in terms of driving that emotional loyalty and advocacy.

AMANDA: And different customer groups are impacted very much differently by ideology and how that impacts their brand choice.

AMANDA: And lastly, my key takeout to leave with you before you download the white paper is that employee management, the internal politics, plays an enormous role in terms of how consumers make their brand choices.

AMANDA: This is absolutely a Loyalty TV episode to watch.

AMANDA: Enjoy it, and at the end, you’ll be rushing to download this white paper.

AMANDA: For today’s Loyalty TV, I have the pleasure of talking to Yuping Liu-Thompkins, who needs absolutely no introduction to the world of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

AMANDA: It’s actually her third time on Let’s Talk Loyalty, but the first time on Loyalty TV.

AMANDA: So welcome, Yuping.

AMANDA: Welcome back to Let’s Talk Loyalty, and welcome to Loyalty TV.

YUPING: Thank you, Amanda.

YUPING: It’s so great to be back.

AMANDA: And as I say, I don’t think you need any introduction to anyone, but you are the Director of the Loyalty Science Lab and Professor of Marketing at the Old Dominion University.

AMANDA: And the reason we’re talking today is on the back of a release of yet another white paper from yourselves.

AMANDA: But this time, it has a different viewpoint than some of the pieces that we’ve discussed with you previously.

AMANDA: So I’m going to unpack that in a moment.

AMANDA: But before we do, Yuping, we’ve started Loyalty TV with a slightly different question this year.

AMANDA: And I want to pose that question to you is, what is your favorite business book?

AMANDA: Not loyalty, so what is your favorite business book?

YUPING: Oh, that’s a great question.

YUPING: There are a lot of great business books out there.

YUPING: I would definitely say, Amanda, that I would say your book on blind loyalty is definitely among my favorites.

YUPING: Yeah.

YUPING: I really likes how it lay out the fundamental principles of loyalty in a very accessible way.

YUPING: So I think that’s definitely one of my favorites.

YUPING: If I’m allowed to share another one is that recently, I would say I have also read the Marketplace Dignity Book from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

YUPING: And I really find myself very engaged with the theme of that topic.

YUPING: I think it also reframed the concept of business success and consumer well-being, put it that way.

YUPING: So typically, we consider those are competing priorities.

YUPING: You either go with the business or go with the social well-being and so forth.

YUPING: And that book is really showing us that that’s not necessarily the case, that you can actually win in both, and how you can design your product design and customer experience in such a way that you actually are able to capture success in both areas.

YUPING: So I thought it was interesting and very relevant to today’s concept.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: I love that.

AMANDA: I haven’t heard of it.

AMANDA: So thank you.

AMANDA: For me personally, that’ll be a great follow up read.

AMANDA: And thank you for your comments about blind loyalty.

AMANDA: That’s very, very, very sweet and appreciated.

YUPING: Oh, I loved it.

AMANDA: Thank you.

AMANDA: So, well, we respect your work so much that you are featured many times in the book.

AMANDA: So it’s a good read for everyone.

AMANDA: So Yuping, as I say, I don’t think you need much introduction to the loyalty world, but I think it’s fair that we understand a little bit more about your background apart from your current role as a professor, but a really highly regarded spokesperson in the world of loyalty.

AMANDA: So please talk us through how you’ve got to where you’re at and almost why you’re specializing now in loyalty.

YUPING: Sure.

YUPING: That was very nice of you to say that.

YUPING: I am currently a professor of marketing and also founder and director of the Loyalty Science Lab at Old Dominion University.

YUPING: So I’m located in Virginia in the US.

YUPING: In my role, I have really studied customer loyalty for quite a while.

YUPING: So my starting point was more than 20 years ago in the C-store industry, where I studied the impact of loyalty programs and looking at what is ROI of such programs and how it impacts consumer behavior.

YUPING: So that’s kind of my starting point with really looking at loyalty as a concept.

YUPING: And I think I fell in love with the idea and really devoted the last probably 20 years doing a lot of research in this area.

YUPING: And so some of that has to do with loyalty programs in general, like how to shape behavior through loyalty programs and how to communicate with loyalty program members.

YUPING: But also some of that is also related to the bigger picture of loyalty as well.

YUPING: So, for example, what’s the difference between true loyalty and habit, and how consumers respond to personalized communication and things like that.

YUPING: And I have the privilege of really collaborating with businesses across different sectors and seeing firsthand how that loyalty principles kind of work out in practice.

YUPING: And of course, you know that, you know, back in 2020, I started the Loyalty Science Lab, which is really meant to be a bridge to kind of bring academic researchers and industry practitioners together to kind of create a deeper dialogue, I think, in this space that I find it near and dear to my heart.

YUPING: And so we have been fortunate to be able to communicate with a lot of practitioners and bring research to a lot of the Loyalty Marketers.

YUPING: And I have learned a lot through this process and find myself to be very fortunate to be in this position.

AMANDA: Listening to you, Yuping, I’m almost hearing a little bit of my own passion for the subject of loyalty.

AMANDA: You use the words of I fell in love with the subject and how you talk now about why you did the Loyalty Science Lab.

AMANDA: It’s so clear that it’s not just a job for you.

AMANDA: It comes from the heart.

AMANDA: You’re determined to connect academia with the real world of business through this wonderful subject of ours of loyalty.

AMANDA: So, well, thank you for the passion you have that came through just then.

AMANDA: But now we’re going to talk about the passion you pile into yet another white paper.

AMANDA: So I look out for your white papers year on year.

AMANDA: But this one obviously is different.

AMANDA: And when I first read it, I was like, wow, this is very different.

AMANDA: So the white paper we’re going to discuss today is the politics of brand loyalty.

AMANDA: And really, rather than just looking at loyalty programs, it’s looking at the impact of ideology and the values, the value system on brand loyalty.

AMANDA: So I think the best way for us to kick off this discussion, because the white paper obviously is definitely worth everyone downloading.

AMANDA: That’s first and foremost, and we’ll make sure that’s all the details in the show notes for that.

AMANDA: But actually, for you, why don’t we kick off with your top three takeouts of your white paper?

YUPING: Sure.

YUPING: If I were to pick three most important takeaways from the research, I would probably start with the aspect of value alignment in the importance in driving loyalty.

YUPING: So one of the findings that we have from the research is that even though when we ask people, you know, what are the influencing factors on loyalty, and not surprisingly, you know, we see product quality, we see service, and we see competitive price still remain fundamentally important to everyone, or I should say probably almost everyone.

YUPING: But we are also seeing for different aspects of loyalty, other factors really coming into play as well.

YUPING: And so one perspective is really, when it comes to emotional loyalty, value alignment becomes much more crucial compared with just a typical transactional or purchase loyalty.

YUPING: In fact, when we look at the percentage of consumers’ rate of value alignment is important, there is actually a higher percentage of consumers doing that compared with considering price to be important to emotional loyalty.

YUPING: And so I think this is a very clear message that suggests that, once you get your fundamentals right, you have your product, you have your service, and you have your price.

YUPING: Value alignment essentially can potentially offer a path towards the more premium, I think, brand positioning, where you move beyond the traditional cost-benefit calculation and to be able to connect with consumers on these kinds of value-based issues.

YUPING: So I would say that’s one of the key learnings from the research.

YUPING: A second point I will share is also that we see significant variations in how different consumer groups arrive at their brand loyalty decisions.

YUPING: So ideology or a lot of times when we think about that term, we think about it as politics, but really it goes much beyond politics.

YUPING: It really reflects a way to view the world, put it that way.

YUPING: So it can comprehensively influence many areas, even including something placed straightforward as consumption space.

YUPING: And so we saw, for example, liberal consumers tend to place more emphasis on these kinds of value alignment, value driven factors.

YUPING: While consumers who hold a more moderate ideological views, they tend to be more pragmatic and pay much less attention to the value factor.

YUPING: And the other thing too that’s interesting is that brands also are considered to kind of are attached to these kind of ideological stances as well.

YUPING: So consumers also see brands as being ideological oriented.

YUPING: For example, in the brands that we studied in our research, Ben and Jerry’s and New York Times are perceived to be the more liberal brands.

YUPING: And then on the other spectrum is that the other end of the spectrum, we have Fox News and Tesla are considered to be the more conservative brands.

YUPING: So it’s just more than consumer differences.

YUPING: It’s also consumers see these kinds of differences across brands as well.

YUPING: And so that I would say is an important second takeaway.

YUPING: And then I will wrap it up with one more point is that when you look at the relationship between those two things, where the consumer stands in terms of ideology, and then where they see the brand stand ideology, that the match or the fit between the two things actually really have a big impact on consumer’s loyalty decisions, which brands they decided to be loyal to.

YUPING: So when we isolate, for example, liberal perceived brands, so basically brands that consumer consider to be more liberal, they are twice as likely to have liberal consumers as their loyal customers, compared with having conservative consumers as their loyal customers.

YUPING: So this ideological alignment is really, I think, interesting in terms of when you, like I mentioned it before, that political ideology is more than just something that happens in the political world.

YUPING: It actually spills over to other aspects of people’s life as well.

AMANDA: I’m almost speechless because I’m finding it so utterly fascinating.

AMANDA: I really am.

AMANDA: So given that this is so different than the normal white paper that maybe we talk about on Let’s Talk Loyalty or Loyalty TV, why did you do this?

AMANDA: Why did you create this very comprehensive study?

AMANDA: I know the timing in terms of the US political landscape is quite time-y-ous.

AMANDA: I think it’s a good way of expressing it.

AMANDA: So why this study?

AMANDA: Why now?

AMANDA: Like give us some of the background between your sort of motivation.

YUPING: Sure.

YUPING: You got it right that, you know, the I think a big part of the inspiration really coming from, came from observing that intense dynamics of the 2024 US presidential election.

YUPING: So that was a couple of months ago.

YUPING: And it was interesting to see how different brands are navigating that landscape.

YUPING: We saw some company leaders basically come out and openly endorse some candidates.

YUPING: And others are carefully maintaining their distance intentionally, trying to remain silent on the issue.

YUPING: So that raised an intriguing question in terms of how brands really should navigate those kinds of situations and how their responses in those situations actually affect customer relationships.

YUPING: And so that’s, that’s, I would say, the broad kind of background of what inspired a study.

YUPING: But one of the catalysts I would say for the study too is also came from when a member of our university PR team actually approached me and asked a question about how a quite political charged tweet by a company at the time had affected not just his, but also a friend of his brand perception and how they decide to interact with the, which is not to never interact with the brand ever again.

YUPING: So that kind of reaction really kind of suggests that this is more than just a political domain and suggests there are broader questions we can potentially ask in terms of the influence of these ideological differences and how political values actually factor into the brand loyalty decision.

YUPING: So that was sort of the broader and more specific background to why we decided to do this study.

AMANDA: Incredible.

AMANDA: I think it’s really powerful and super interesting and lovely sound bite around one of your colleagues, actually their reaction and their friend’s reaction and that igniting a broader discussion point for a paper like this.

AMANDA: So for the research fundings amongst us, the data guys amongst us, talk us through methodology and the sample size.

AMANDA: How deep did you have to go to get your robust numbers?

YUPING: Yeah, sure.

YUPING: So we actually, the research methodology is mostly based on survey, but I will perhaps explain in a minute that we ask more than the typical survey questions.

YUPING: As far as the sample is concerned, we were looking at US consumers, so we surveyed roughly about 1000 participants in the US.

YUPING: And in order to get a representative response in that situation, we also tried to match our participants demographically in terms of age, gender, race and ethnicity.

YUPING: And so we created a relatively, I would say, balanced kind of age distribution.

YUPING: So we had a wide spectrum of consumers all the way from 18 to 24 years old to 55 and 65 plus years old.

YUPING: And with roughly about an equal portion of males and females.

YUPING: And so one of the things I mentioned earlier is that, you know, some of one of the shortcomings, I would say, with survey question is that sometimes we ask questions to consumers, one, they may not necessarily know very well what their answers are.

YUPING: And so directly asking them a certain question is going to be a little bit challenging.

YUPING: The other thing is that they might potentially exaggerate how they influence their actual behaviors.

YUPING: So in order to kind of make up for those shortcomings, besides the direct type of questioning, we also try to conclude what we see in the data by looking at a relationship between their answers across different questions, but also use scenarios to help us as well.

YUPING: For example, creating scenarios related to the employee treatment issues at companies and looking at positive and negative scenarios, randomly assigning people into the different scenarios, and then kind of compare individuals, not just one person’s response, but also across different individuals’ response on these kind of issues as well.

YUPING: So that helps us kind of get more at the more challenging to answer type of questions and identify the relationship across different things.

AMANDA: Incredible.

AMANDA: I mean, we talk about so many white papers on Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty, and I think the listeners are, as you know, global but also highly educated, capable individuals who will understand the importance of what you’ve just explained.

AMANDA: So thank you for sharing that.

AMANDA: I’m very involved with white papers, so I was hanging on every word.

AMANDA: But I did ask you your three main takeouts, but I think now I’m going to get a little bit more personal.

AMANDA: What was the most insightful discovery?

AMANDA: What’s your favorite takeout from the whole paper?

YUPING: I would probably definitely say is the ideological fit.

YUPING: As a driver in loyalty.

YUPING: So previously, in one of our earlier studies on the future of loyalty, we have already studied the value alignment as a potential driver.

YUPING: And even in there, we also saw that value alignment is a really important issue in loyalty.

YUPING: And of course, the political environment in the US was also driving force behind the study as well.

YUPING: But I would say that the extent of the impact was probably stronger than what I anticipated, right?

YUPING: Because when you really think about consumption, supposed to be a somewhat neutral domain, that you would expect to be kind of more of a tangential influence from these value issues and so forth.

YUPING: And I’m not denying that a product, and like I mentioned earlier, product is still very important.

YUPING: Service is definitely important.

YUPING: But at the same time, to be able to see these kind of issues, to also have the degree of influence it did, to me is remarkable, particularly among the younger consumers.

YUPING: And I would say the age difference that we saw across how consumers across the different age groups, as their life cycle, the stage of their life changes, and how that also reflects in how they make these kind of value alignment decisions, is really interesting to me as well.

YUPING: So yeah, so just really generally the overall concept of how etiology is driving choices, driving loyalty, and how consumers across different age bands are really changing because of that.

AMANDA: Yeah, I love it.

AMANDA: I love it.

AMANDA: I mean, I think principally we would expect that, but to actually see it play out to the impact that the white paper explains is fascinating.

AMANDA: So thinking of the audience of Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty, taking your white paper, and as I do, and I’m sure many people will do after today’s show, they’ll read it front cover to back cover.

AMANDA: But where do you see the relevance for the Loyalty program operators, managers, the audience of Let’s Talk Loyalty, Loyalty TV, where’s the relevance to apply this thinking to their daily job?

YUPING: Yeah, so I think it actually has really important implications for Loyalty program operators because I think for years now, I think Loyalty program operators are really finding ways to potentially move beyond that traditional points and rewards programs.

YUPING: You know, any companies can kind of start and run such a program, and it has shown to really affect people’s behavior, so I’m not discounting that.

YUPING: But at the same time, I think it’s similar to how product and service today may not necessarily be as easy as a differentiating factor.

YUPING: I think it’s the same with Loyalty program operators.

YUPING: I think many of them are realizing that these kind of points and rewards programs, the transactional elements, even though it still is important in driving people’s purchase behaviors and so forth, the path to really getting deeper into the loyalty space also involves the more emotional connection, involves more advocacy behavior.

YUPING: And so that’s something that our research, I would say, actually see that to be the case.

YUPING: Right.

YUPING: You know, I mentioned earlier that value alignment is considered to be very important to the loyalty decisions of consumers.

YUPING: And for emotional loyalty specifically, I think roughly about three-fourth of the consumers that we surveyed actually considered this to be really important.

YUPING: And so, practical implications perspective, right?

YUPING: When consumers feel aligned with a brand’s value, with a program’s value, they are more likely to engage in that advocacy behavior and they’re able to show resilience to competitive offers.

YUPING: And so this is particularly true.

YUPING: We found that for younger consumers that are under the age of 35.

YUPING: And so, this suggests, I think, to me, enormous opportunity for loyalty program operators to think through beyond in addition, perhaps, to your points and reward system.

YUPING: How do you build that sense of community?

YUPING: How do you build a stronger customer engagement into your program?

YUPING: And this is an opportunity for doing that.

YUPING: And I think with existing programs, we already seen some examples of that.

YUPING: For example, in Australia, Qantas Airlines frequent fire program.

YUPING: I really love the idea that they have a green tier, where they reward consumers for engaging in sustainable behavior, such as sustainable travel, the recycling behaviors, all of these encouraged green behaviors.

YUPING: And by doing that, I think it creates a community of like-minded consumers that can derive value from this kind of participation.

YUPING: Not only do I find it personally fulfilling, but I’m also connecting with others.

YUPING: I feel like I’m part of others that share the same kind of value.

YUPING: And so I think our research really affirms the value of that approach.

YUPING: And I think for a lot of loyalty program providers, that is something that they need to consider as integrating as part of their program.

YUPING: But I will also sound a probably a little caution is that we do also find that even though value alignment itself is very powerful, value misalignment for a lot of consumers is even more powerful as well.

YUPING: So it is as many people consider as somewhat of a landmine situation.

YUPING: So I would make the recommendation that for Loyalty Program Providers, one is to potentially start with relatively broadly supported causes or values.

YUPING: Environmental protection is definitely a big one that a lot of consumers can get behind.

YUPING: And the other thing too is also to really have a deep understanding of their customers as well, to kind of see what are the issues and values important to their consumer’s mindset.

YUPING: And to also align with the brand as well, because we all know that loyalty program does not exist in isolation, but exists to serve the brand as part of it as well.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: I think about the concluding chapters I have in Blind Loyalty and they’re almost like the most important chapters.

AMANDA: And they touch on emotional loyalty, advocacy, loyalty psychology, like everything you’ve just wrapped up in terms of how we take the alignment against brand values and push that into advocacy or emotional loyalty.

AMANDA: And you think about every other day, I see a webinar about emotional loyalty around our industry.

AMANDA: So our industry is craving for this understanding, which I think you’ve you’ve you’ve hit a really, a really not sensitive, but a really powerful issue through through this white paper.

AMANDA: So just encouraging everyone we need to we need to absolutely download this and read the white paper.

AMANDA: There is another element in the white paper we haven’t touched on yet.

AMANDA: And I definitely don’t want to conclude this discussion without touching on it.

AMANDA: And it’s around the internal versus external politics, almost employee management.

AMANDA: And I was I was surprisingly pleased, so to speak, when I found that in the white paper, because I wasn’t expecting it.

AMANDA: Can you talk us through what your findings are and how that came to be part of this white paper?

YUPING: Yeah, definitely.

YUPING: So, you know, when you really think about etiology, like I mentioned earlier, it’s a broader worldview issue that’s beyond politics.

YUPING: And so one part of that is also considering the equity among individuals and what do you think to be the rights of individuals, right?

YUPING: And so that kind of inspired the idea of thinking about what are other typical points of interaction consumers can potentially have with brands beyond just I saw the brand endorse this particular issue or I saw this brand leader to endorse a particular political candidate.

YUPING: And so one significant issue, I think, particularly these days, for consumers to kind of see very easily is how companies are treating their employees.

YUPING: And so we kind of label that as internal politics.

YUPING: And with social media, with news paying more attention to these areas, we’re seeing more and more of the relationship between companies and their employees kind of really come out in the news cycle.

YUPING: And so what’s striking, I think, in our finding is the idea that these internal political issues with the employees actually has even bigger impact on the outward external type of political endorsements.

YUPING: And specifically, what we found in between, I mentioned earlier about this kind of use of the scenario kind of approach, when we look at the difference between what the positive scenario in terms of treating employees well positively versus the negative scenario of having mistreatment, employee mistreatment issues, it can shift people’s loyalty level really as much as like 50% of the scale.

YUPING: So if we kind of take each of these scenarios from where consumers start without that piece of information to where they receive that information, kind of adjust their loyalty level, you really look at people like a quarter of the way up or down the scale, depending on whether they are getting that positive or negative scenario.

YUPING: And so the impact of that is even more significant than what a brand can potentially achieve by endorsing a potential political cause or social cause in that matter.

YUPING: And so I think this, we’ve seen in practice, for example, in the United States, Starbucks in the early days gained a lot of goodwill from consumers by how well they’re treating their employees, including even the part-time employees.

YUPING: And then during the COVID pandemic, we also saw that companies really quickly backlash in how they’re treating their employees, making unsafe requirements and so forth during the pandemic time when everybody was kind of going through significant challenges in their lives.

YUPING: And so this is just a sort of sounding alarm to companies that employees is, other than customers, employees are really significant asset to you.

YUPING: And the two kind of the stakeholders of employees and stakeholders of customers are really intertwined with each other.

YUPING: You need to be able to do well in both domains.

YUPING: Otherwise, they kind of create an influence or backlash across the…

YUPING: So, you know, I would say that, you know, loyalty program actually in order for it to run well, it really hugely depends on employees, right?

YUPING: So when you think about from the very beginning point of program signups, you need employees to be able to market the program really to consumers.

YUPING: Then at the back end, you need to provide good service for program members.

YUPING: And that again is the employees work.

YUPING: So there are so many touch points that involve employees, that you cannot have disgruntled employee force to be dealing with your customers and still expecting to be really successful.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: Great.

AMANDA: So you did talk earlier about younger consumers, and you talked about how this study cuts across the representation of the demographic, US demographic.

AMANDA: So what are you seeing in the findings that how loyalty decisions or brand loyalty changes over a consumer’s lifespan?

YUPING: Yeah, that’s a great question.

YUPING: So one of the things I wanted to start first is to say that out of all the demographic factors, when we look at, for example, income, education, gender, and age, age really pops up as the most significant difference in terms of how people make these kind of decisions.

YUPING: And particularly, we see kind of a shifting point of 35 being sort of the shifting point in people’s decisions and behaviors in these areas.

YUPING: And for consumers under the age of 35, we see a much stronger emphasis on value alignment and also on social connection in building brand relationships.

YUPING: And for example, about 77 percent of the 18 to 24-year-olds consider value alignment to be important to their loyalty decision.

YUPING: And so as a contrast for individuals who are 65 and above, is that percentage goes down to roughly about 48 percent.

YUPING: And so a dramatic gap in between how much value alignment really means to consumers.

YUPING: But what’s also really interesting to me as well is the difference in terms of do you reward brands for aligning to the issues you care about or do you punishing brands for supporting things that you do not support, right?

YUPING: And so for the older consumer groups, we really see much more bias towards punishing brands.

YUPING: So in other words, I don’t necessarily reward you as much, but if you do something wrong, I’m going to really be not very happy with you, right?

YUPING: Versus on the younger consumer end, I think because they’re starting up in the marketplace, they’re kind of looking for connections.

YUPING: And so they’re still looking for reasons to really be loyal to select brands, and therefore, in that domain, if you are doing things that they’re really like, do you have supporting values that they also value?

YUPING: In those situations, they are much more likely to actually engage with you and to become emotionally loyal to you as well.

YUPING: And so there’s the difference between, do we tread this carefully with not upsetting consumers, or do we actually proactively do more things to connect with consumers?

YUPING: I would definitely say the proactive approach really works well or better with the younger generation, perhaps the Gen Z and so forth.

YUPING: So I think that to me is a really big influence, in a big difference that we see in terms of age groups.

YUPING: And when it comes to ideological influences, we also see that even though the older consumers tend to be more extreme, more polarized, when it comes to ideological issues, the overall impact of ideology itself kind of drops as we get older, perhaps having a more, I don’t necessarily want to do sophisticated worldviews, but having understanding the issues a little bit more holistically, versus in the younger group, I think we also saw more flexibility in terms of our mindset when it comes to ideology, but at the same time, the more emphasis placed into these kind of areas as well.

AMANDA: That’s really fascinating, honestly, I could listen to you all day, Yuping.

AMANDA: But we unfortunately don’t have all day.

AMANDA: So my last question is, obviously, you started off telling us this is a US based study of a thousand individuals, but obviously matched to the population.

AMANDA: A large majority of Let’s Talk Loyalty, Loyalty TV listeners are outside of the US.

AMANDA: So how applicable is this outside of the US?

YUPING: I definitely think that even though our sample itself involved only US consumers, the fundamental dynamics of that value alignment idea and also ideological differentiation, likely extend globally, right?

YUPING: So the difference between kind of more liberal views versus conservative views, I think that apply in many different cultures.

YUPING: Although I would say that the degree of impact is perhaps different depending on where we are.

YUPING: And so we might see different countries having different portions, proportions of various ideological point of views and perhaps polarized to a different extent.

YUPING: But the basic fundamental principle, I think still applies, is that consumers care more than just price and product, right?

YUPING: And in many cultures where product and price is no longer the elements that can make you become differentiated in your competitive landscape, if you’re looking for opportunities for differentiating beyond the typical traditional factors of product, service, and price, then I think this is something that you definitely wanted to look into, both as a potential challenge of how do you align in a more polarizing environment if your country is in a more polarized situation, or as an opportunity, if you’re more, you know, united type of ideological landscape, there may be more ways to be able to connect with consumers on those type of issues.

AMANDA: Wonderful.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: Great.

AMANDA: Well, I’m going to make sure in the show notes that we have your previous shows, because I think anyone who may be listening to you for the first time will definitely want to tap into the previous shows, which are maybe, I think one was last year and one was a few years ago.

AMANDA: So, but that’s okay.

AMANDA: Trust me, anybody who’s, I’ve listened to them, they’re still absolutely relevant.

AMANDA: We’re going to make sure your LinkedIn profile is there, and obviously a link to download this wonderful report.

AMANDA: So, just before we close out, Yuping, anything else you’d like to add for our listeners?

YUPING: No, I think we had a pretty thorough discussion about the research.

YUPING: I just wanted to encourage a lot of the listeners who are Loyalty Program operators to really think beyond the traditional point system and to really think into the future of Loyalty Space and how to turn Loyalty Program into a bigger engagement tool with consumers.

AMANDA: Wonderful.

AMANDA: Absolutely.

AMANDA: You all heard it here first, so Yuping has given us an order as an industry.

AMANDA: Yuping, thank you so much and congratulations again on a phenomenal report.

AMANDA: Honestly, it’s really fabulous to see what quality of work your environment gives us.

AMANDA: So thank you.

YUPING: Thank you so much.

YUPING: I really appreciate it.

YUPING: It’s a pleasure talking to you about the research.

PAULA: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

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