The Four Dimensions of Loyalty: Insights from Ogilvy One’s Dayoán Daumont (#682)

Dayoán: It’s fun because what I like about loyalty is the same thing I dislike about loyalty.

Dayoán: The idea that somehow by creating a program of points and tiers that will drive loyalty, I think that that’s where I think we failed, because we’ve created what we call structural bonds rather than emotional bonds.

Dayoán: I think the best loyalty programs are sometimes the ones that don’t have any formal structure.

Charlie: That brings us on really nicely, actually, to your amazing new research that’s come out.

Charlie: The Four Dimensions of Loyalty.

Charlie: It would be really useful to have an overview of the research, what drove you to commission it, and what was the methodology.

Dayoán: We recognize that loyalty was going to be one of the big needs of our customers and our clients.

Dayoán: What we were missing was a psychographic analysis and understanding of how customers stay loyal to brands.

Dayoán: So we commissioned two studies, actually, and the one that we’re speaking about today was a global, across six nations, 500 respondents per nation.

Dayoán: And when we received the data back, we started to analyze it against what we call The Four Dimensions of Loyalty.

Dayoán: And the dimensions were principle, community, potential, and culture.

Dayoán: Principle is how brands must live their values, not just market.

Dayoán: Community is about the places where you are already connecting.

Dayoán: That could be your church groups, sports clubs.

Dayoán: It could be hobby, your family, your friends, your neighborhood.

Dayoán: That’s your community.

Dayoán: Can the brand be part of that environment?

Dayoán: Potential.

Dayoán: And that’s where the experience reinforces brands in the fact that they’re part of my journey.

Dayoán: Culture is a thing that keeps customers engaged.

Charlie: Is there a dominant dimension that people should be really focusing on first?

Dayoán: One dimension wasn’t necessarily more important across sectors.

Dayoán: It was the collection of the principles that made the most impact.

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 Charlie Hills, Chief Strategy Officer of MandoConnect, a UK based agency that uses smart data to create brilliant partnerships and rewards that really work.

Paula: Enjoy.

Charlie: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Charlie: As Paula mentioned, I’m Charlie Hills, the Chief Strategy Officer of Mando.

Charlie: In this episode, I’m delighted to interview Dejouan, the Head of Strategy at Ogilvy One, where he leads consumer engagement and loyalty strategy across the entire brand ecosystem for clients like FIFA, Nestlé and Michelin.

Charlie: He bends behavioral insight with creative precision to turn fleeting moments into lasting relationships.

Charlie: Today, we’re going to be learning all about his favorite book and loyalty programs, highlights and the key learnings from the many programs and brands he’s worked on, and all about the new Ogilvy One loyalty research, The Four Dimensions of Loyalty.

Charlie: I really hope you enjoy our conversation today.

Charlie: Hello, and welcome to the show.

Charlie: I’m absolutely delighted to have you on the podcast today.

Charlie: Thanks for joining us.

Dayoán: Thank you for having me, Charlie.

Charlie: It should be a really good episode.

Charlie: For all our loyalty listeners today, this is one of the most exciting bits of loyalty research that I’ve seen come out globally in a long time.

Charlie: So I’m really excited to talk about it today.

Charlie: But before we get into all of that, we’re going to start with the same question.

Charlie: We ask all our guests, which is please tell us about your favorite book, about life, leadership or loyalty, or what stood out for you recently?

Charlie: What would you recommend?

Dayoán: To be fair, I read mostly fiction.

Charlie: Excellent.

Dayoán: Still to this day, one of my favorites is New Romancer.

Dayoán: It’s the book that got me involved and interested in technology, and I still go back to it once in a while.

Charlie: That’s lovely.

Charlie: It’s like a comfort book.

Dayoán: It is.

Charlie: But I have a few of those that I’ve read for years and years and years.

Charlie: I just love going back and it takes you back, doesn’t it, to all the other times you’ve read it over time.

Charlie: That’s brilliant.

Charlie: What about your favorite loyalty programs then?

Charlie: What are the ones you’ve worked on or ones you’ve seen?

Charlie: Which ones have stood out for you at the moment?

Dayoán: It’s fun because what I like about loyalty is the same thing I dislike about loyalty.

Dayoán: What I dislike about loyalty is the formalization of loyalty, the idea that somehow by creating a program of points and tiers that that will drive loyalty and yet what I like about loyalty is a sense of recognition, progression, value that I’m valued by a brand.

Dayoán: So we’ve sort of gotten to a point where we think that loyalty means recognition through those kinds of financial incentives.

Dayoán: And I think that that’s where I think we failed because we’ve created what we call structural bonds rather than emotional bonds.

Dayoán: And I think the best loyalty programs are sometimes the ones that don’t have any formal structure.

Dayoán: You know, Apple doesn’t have a loyalty program, yet it has the Apple One subscription, which technically if you broke it down, you could call it a loyalty program.

Dayoán: It’s a series of services and offerings that you pay for on a monthly subscription.

Dayoán: And then the ones that I really, really enjoy are the ones that don’t surprise you.

Dayoán: Pret used to have a policy that they gave their employees at the till.

Dayoán: They could choose any day to comp a coffee to anybody that they thought, well, this person’s having a bad day or this person comes here often.

Dayoán: And they gave them that ability to surprise and delight.

Dayoán: And those were little moments of joy that cost very little, yet it created a sense of recognition.

Dayoán: So those kinds of things I really admire.

Charlie: Nice.

Charlie: So the programs that kind of mix things up and are really focusing on that emotional connection, or actually maybe the brands that aren’t having programs or such, but are actually creating that kind of emotional bond with consumers.

Charlie: That’s a controversial viewpoint, and I love having a controversial guest, so that’s absolutely brilliant.

Charlie: I think lots of loyalty professionals would share that view as well, and that’s certainly where programs are kind of moving towards in that emotional space as well.

Charlie: Are there any sort of brands out there that you think, I mean, you’ve talked about Apple, that’s obviously one of the most loved brands in the world.

Charlie: Is there anybody else out there you think people should be looking at who’s doing a really good job of building those emotional relationships?

Dayoán: Actually one of my favorite brands that has been in this space that has been doing loyalty really well is Marriott Bonvoy, and they did start as a points tier, as an accumulator, where the more you stayed, the more points you gathered.

Dayoán: However, some years ago, they started to introduce service and tools that were specific to their program, but had nothing to do with accumulation of points, that had to do with the enjoyment of the service.

Dayoán: So they added a digital key that allowed you to, and on your smartphone, that allowed you to check in without having to go to the front desk, and also go ahead and open the door of your room.

Dayoán: And those kinds of services, that kind of enhancement, are the things that I think are becoming much more significant to consumers as they engage with brands.

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: And it’s really what they recognize, I think, and remember, isn’t it?

Charlie: It’s those little details that really kind of change the experience overall.

Charlie: And I know that’s one of the things that you’re famous for looking at on all the different brands that you work for.

Charlie: Tell us a little bit more about your background, actually.

Charlie: It’d be really interesting to hear how you got into your current role and what’s going on at Ogilvy One at the moment.

Dayoán: So I started in advertising in the end of the 90s, early 2000s.

Dayoán: And as some of you may remember, that was the dot-com boom, as we called it, which was an insane amount of money being thrown at building websites.

Charlie: Yes, wherever at wealth.

Dayoán: Many of whom are no longer with us.

Dayoán: And that focus on building products and building things from the very beginning helped me understand that there was a human that I was building for.

Dayoán: And so I started as a digital producer, and then I became a strategist, and then eventually I started to get into brand strategy, and through that progression of different roles within interactive advertising and digital media, I started to keep a focus on the fact that there is a human on the other end.

Dayoán: There is a person on the other end.

Dayoán: So my focus has really progressed from what we used to call information architecture to UX, to CX, and now it’s a word of like they call it ecosystems and we call it CRM or we call it like there’s lots of words.

Dayoán: But the point is that I think we’ve come to a point where we recognize now, and this isn’t the focus that I have within Ogilvy and also in my career, is that there is a human at the core of what we’re doing.

Dayoán: And if we are in service of that human need, then commercial growth and commercial success comes from that.

Dayoán: So they’re not independent of each other.

Dayoán: They’re actually quite related.

Charlie: Nice.

Charlie: And I think that’s really interesting actually.

Charlie: And reflects really nicely and segues into the question I’m going to ask you next, which is obviously Ogilvy, you’ve worked on some really incredible brands that everybody knows and loves.

Charlie: Can you tell us about some of the brands and programs that you’ve worked on recently?

Dayoán: So recently, there is an insurance company that came to us looking to create an insurance program.

Dayoán: And I think when you think of loyalty programs, the last thing you would think of is an insurance company thinking that way.

Dayoán: It’s a product that typically has two interactions in its best scenario.

Dayoán: The first is when you actually buy the product, and the second is when you have to renew it.

Dayoán: The third time you have to use a product is when something has gone really wrong.

Dayoán: And so the types of interactions that you’re engaging with with a consumer are literally price sensitivity, and oh my god, my life is on fire, right?

Charlie: Yes, not great moments.

Dayoán: Not great moments.

Dayoán: So how do you create a program that creates an emotional connection, given that that’s your ecosystem, given that that’s your connection?

Dayoán: So I think that it challenged us as a group, challenged the client, and the focus became, how do we extend our services and our thinking based on the core of what we do?

Dayoán: So if the core of what we do is we like to keep people safe, and we like to keep people protected, how does that then translate to other things we could do?

Dayoán: And so little things became part of this, almost it was became an engagement program.

Dayoán: It was less about the transaction and much more about the engagement.

Dayoán: And so things like this weekend, there’s a hailstorm.

Dayoán: We’re going to send a warning to all our customers that have car protection with us and give them tips of how they keep their car safe during a storm.

Dayoán: And so little things like that became almost like the content creation matrix that they would use.

Dayoán: And it became less of a look, look, there’s a 20% discount on your house insurance that you may need.

Dayoán: And more of like, you have this with us, therefore we’re helping you with something useful and meaningful.

Charlie: Nice.

Charlie: And I can see how that links really nicely into what you were talking about earlier in terms of that focus on the emotional bond over the financial bonds.

Charlie: And there’s a huge difference between helping car drivers with hailstorms versus 20% off another product holding.

Charlie: That’s a really nice story.

Charlie: What kind of things, I mean, presumably, that’s one of the things that sets that program apart from its competitive set.

Charlie: Is there anything else that sort of stands out to you that the program should be thinking about differently to set themselves apart?

Dayoán: There’s a person that I work with that has become TikTok famous now.

Dayoán: His name is Rory Sutherland.

Dayoán: He’s a well-known behavioral scientist and he started that practice here in the UK.

Dayoán: But he has a thing that he says.

Dayoán: He says the way that you go into an organization and you can tell whether the organization is customer obsessed or not, is whether they allow their call center to call their customers.

Dayoán: That small little moment is the thing that makes you go, yeah, if you are customer obsessed, then you are obsessed with how they’re doing, not how easy it is for them to contact you, but how easy it is for you to contact them to solve their problem.

Dayoán: I think that that kind of behavior and mentality permeates the brands that are the most successful with creating loyalty over the long term.

Dayoán: There is a small example for example, Disney is an incredibly loved brand, has created loyalty, multi-generational loyalty for decades.

Dayoán: They don’t do that because they’ve created interesting and compelling IP.

Dayoán: That’s not the only reason.

Dayoán: The reason is that they’ve created a sense of magic.

Dayoán: That comes from the smallest of moments to the biggest theatrical releases.

Dayoán: A small moment is for example, they take all their employees that dress up as characters in the parks.

Dayoán: They’re trained that when a child hugs them, they don’t let go until the child lets go.

Dayoán: That small detail, it’s you don’t let that moment escape them until they’re ready to exit the moment.

Dayoán: That recognition of this is a magical moment, this is a moment of real meaning for them, is the kind of moments that most brands don’t ever create for their customers.

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: I’m not sure that would be in many brands.

Charlie: They actually would even have any policies on hugging their customers.

Charlie: I’m thinking about where probably the industries where most of our listeners are from, grocery, airlines, it would be a very different vibe, wouldn’t it, to a kind of different character.

Dayoán: Going in and hugging our Tesco employee would not be seen as a good thing.

Charlie: Get off me.

Charlie: I’m trying to get through the checkout.

Charlie: That would be brilliant.

Charlie: Are there any other big ideas or innovations you’ve seen recently that have really stood out to you, from our industry or from other brands that you’ve worked on?

Dayoán: I think industries I recognize of financial pressures and needs.

Dayoán: For example, I think that there are a couple of retail clothing brands that have taken it upon themselves to create repair centers within their stores.

Dayoán: The idea that it’s not about continually purchasing and continual consumption, but it’s about sometimes caring for something and they make it easy for them to repair an item rather than have to buy a new one.

Dayoán: Of course, Patagonia has probably one of the most famous brands for doing something extreme, which is turning the entire organization into a non-for-profit that all profits go to the core of what they stood for.

Dayoán: I think from the big to the small, there is always something that you can do that recognizes your consumer’s needs slightly beyond the core of what you’re doing.

Dayoán: If you’re a supermarket and your job is to try to sell as many products off the shelves as you can, the context of the consumer and how they come to your store and why they come to your store is as important as the price on the product.

Dayoán: I think sometimes we forget those recognitions.

Dayoán: There is a reason why Whole Foods has the look and feel they have.

Dayoán: It almost unconsciously justifies the price because you’re walking into an environment that feels welcoming.

Charlie: And it’s probably one of the few grocery environments where you wouldn’t actually mind getting a hug from some of the staff as well because you’d be so relaxed and excited by the selection of products on there as opposed to everyday kind of convenience retail.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I completely agree.

Charlie: There’s a lovely, lovely example.

Charlie: And those repair services are fantastic, actually.

Charlie: And that integration into loyalty marketing of that.

Charlie: It’s lovely because it works really well from a financial point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, which is so hard to address.

Charlie: And I love those things that kind of do two things at once.

Charlie: That brings us on really nicely, actually, to your amazing new research that has come out, The Four Dimensions of Loyalty.

Charlie: I’m hoping lots of our audience have already downloaded it.

Charlie: And we will absolutely provide all the links to the research that you can get fully hold of it.

Charlie: But it would be really useful to have an overview of the research, what drove you to commission it, and what was the methodology.

Charlie: And then we’ll get into the contents.

Charlie: But what started it, where did it come from, and how on earth did you do it?

Dayoán: Our team in the US recognize that, well, both in the UK and the US, we recognize that loyalty was going to be one of the big needs of our customers and our clients.

Dayoán: And we realized that the research that we were finding that was being commissioned across the board by many of the agencies that we either work with or are competitors of ours, really focused on either a single industry, a single country, really looked at consumption within media, within the program.

Dayoán: And so what we decided that we were missing was a psychographic analysis and understanding of how customers stay loyal to brands.

Dayoán: Why is it that they engage?

Dayoán: What are the meaningful things that they have that keep them coming?

Dayoán: And also, how do brand managers, how do loyalty managers within the businesses, how do they see it?

Dayoán: What are their most important things?

Dayoán: So we commissioned two studies, actually.

Dayoán: The one that you’re referencing is the one that we just released, but we did one last year on the side of the business, on the business side, looking at what businesses were looking for in terms of loyalty with customers.

Dayoán: And the one that we’re speaking about today was, as a global, across six nations, we had about 500 respondents per nation, and it was a quant survey in which when we received the data back, we started to analyze it against what we call the four dimensions of loyalty.

Dayoán: And those four dimensions are specific to the way that you stay loyal.

Dayoán: So we know that from previous research, we know that you become loyal to a brand through four bonds.

Dayoán: Those are the financial, structural, emotional, social.

Dayoán: Those are the things that make us be loyal, and not just to brands in general.

Dayoán: That’s just the psychology of bonding yourself to loyalty.

Dayoán: So what we thought was missing after the four bonds of loyalty was, how did then you stay connected?

Dayoán: How do you stay loyal from a brand perspective and from a customer perspective, right?

Dayoán: So we wanted to explore what was important to customers.

Dayoán: Why did they stay loyal to brands over long periods of time?

Dayoán: What we found was, four dimensions that actually aligned quite nicely to the bonds, and the dimensions were principle, community, potential, and culture.

Dayoán: What’s nice about them is that connected, principle is how brands must live their values, not just market them.

Dayoán: It’s the thing that you buy the product because it may be the most convenient for you to buy.

Dayoán: It’s in the right price point, and that’s the one that you get.

Dayoán: However, over long term, is that the product that is aligning with how you want to do things?

Dayoán: Is that, you know, some people care a lot about the environment, so the cheaper product may not be very good for it.

Dayoán: But the more expensive product is, yet maybe price wins at the end of the day in that moment, but over the long term, you’re gonna go with a product that aligns mostly with your values.

Dayoán: In terms of community, it’s about people remaining loyal to a brand that is part of their lives.

Dayoán: This is not about social media, which a lot of the times when we speak of community, everybody immediately thinks it’s a Facebook group, or it’s a WhatsApp chat, or it’s not.

Dayoán: Community is about the places where you are already connecting, and that could be your church groups, those could be your sports clubs, it could be hobby places, it could be your family, your friends, your neighborhood.

Dayoán: That’s your community.

Dayoán: Can the brand be part of that environment?

Dayoán: Can it make it better?

Dayoán: And so then we look at potential, and that’s where the experience being enjoyable, being optimized, reinforces brands in the fact that they’re part of my journey.

Dayoán: So if you enhance my journey, sometimes it’s not about frictionless, sometimes it’s about stopping and taking a second.

Dayoán: I mean, there are entire brands that wants you to stop and enjoy.

Dayoán: So it’s not necessarily frictionless, it’s always about the potential that that brand has with you.

Dayoán: And finally, culture, which is the…

Dayoán: We know that discounts get attention, but culture is a thing that keeps customers engaged.

Dayoán: Culture is a thing that affects us most.

Dayoán: It affects your parents, it affects your children, it affects you yourself, your family.

Dayoán: I think it’s a thing that we’re immersed in, and I think during geopolitical moments, like the ones that we’re living in, culture is really significant in our choice of what brands we stay connected with.

Charlie: That’s really interesting.

Charlie: Between those, was there a dimension that was dominant?

Charlie: Because I know whenever we do see research on the bonds, you see financial and structural dominance tends to be where the industry really focuses, and brands like Amazon and stuff have really played into that.

Charlie: But within the dimensions, is there a dominant dimension that people should be really focusing on first?

Dayoán: It’s interesting because what we found was there wasn’t one dimension wasn’t necessarily more important across sectors.

Dayoán: What we found was that we did look at a number of sectors, and what we found was that it was the collection of the principles that made the most impact.

Dayoán: So the ones brands that felt like principle, potential culture and community were being recognized as a collection that allowed me to feel the most connected to it.

Dayoán: So there are certain principles or certain dimensions that do over-index a little bit culturally, do over-index a little bit in certain verticals.

Dayoán: We didn’t necessarily see them being that far apart in terms of when a customer says, yes, this is the brand that I’m connected to, this is the brand that I’m loyal to, and all four principles are important to me.

Charlie: So everyone needs to have all four in their strategic hit list.

Charlie: It’s not actually you start with this one and then you move through.

Charlie: It’s actually about how you make them all work together.

Charlie: Everyone’s sighing now on the call.

Charlie: They’re like, oh no, but that’s really good to know.

Charlie: What about what directions that come out of the research, what loyalty market is across the globe?

Charlie: We’re really privileged here.

Charlie: We have a global audience.

Charlie: What are the key takeouts that you would say, actually, we should be thinking about this as an industry now?

Charlie: What did the research tell us?

Dayoán: Well, I think one of the interesting aspects that came out of the research that we did not expect, because that’s always the one that you were like, oh, was how loyalty is actually gender neutral.

Dayoán: We had no statistical differences between male or female in terms of how they approached and experience and actually thought of as loyalty, which I don’t think we had ever really noticed before.

Dayoán: We had never really looked at it.

Dayoán: But we did find certain countries having differences.

Dayoán: So you see countries like Germany and Brazil, those countries have a greater affinity to the four bonds, where maybe North America had less affinity with maybe the cultural one.

Dayoán: So you do see geographical differences, which is always interesting.

Dayoán: You do see slight generational differences.

Dayoán: But the ones that were interesting to us that stood out were Gen X, for example, or sorry, Millenniums and Gen X aligned really well with families, with children in terms of how they saw those principles coming to life.

Charlie: Interesting.

Charlie: It’s fascinating to see that there wasn’t a big gender divide because in loyalty program metrics, in terms of engagement and appeal and membership, we see huge variation, but actually long-term loyalty dimensions, we don’t, which is quite an interesting thing to think about in itself.

Charlie: What do you think the sort of the top three takeouts are from the research?

Charlie: I’m sure all of our audience will read the report cover to cover.

Charlie: But if you can highlight three key pieces of insight from the research, what would you share?

Dayoán: I think one thing is that suburban and urban environments do track differently in terms of their affinity to the bonds.

Dayoán: It’s unusual, we didn’t expect, but suburban environments tend to think of the bonds as a collection, as less important than urban environments.

Dayoán: I think that we didn’t dig deep into why that is.

Dayoán: I’m sure we could probably look at the data and explore that.

Dayoán: We found that millennials of the four generations that we were testing are the ones that value all four of the dimensions the most.

Dayoán: So I think that was very interesting.

Dayoán: Then Gen Z and Boomers are actually around the same range and how they view the bonds as important to them.

Dayoán: So it’s interesting that the generations that are at the extremes in terms of age are seeing those dimensions in very similar ways.

Charlie: Yeah.

Charlie: Again, that’s so different to program metrics and program research when we look at it again.

Charlie: So I really recommend our audience go check it out.

Charlie: I think that’s one of the things I really enjoyed about the research as well that actually you had the global view, but then you had all the deep dives at the back where actually you looked at it by specific markets.

Charlie: We found that really helpful already in our work with clients.

Charlie: So thank you ever so much for doing that.

Charlie: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Charlie: Anything else you think they should be thinking about?

Charlie: Anything else that should be top of their agenda at the moment?

Charlie: Yeah.

Dayoán: I think when you start to think of, if you’re representing a brand on this call today, if you’re here listening for yourself and your own brand and the customers that you are trying to serve, I would say that you should challenge yourself to find the edge of where you feel comfortable and then go over it a little bit.

Dayoán: The reason why is because you need to consider the fact that you’re not building a loyalty platform for now, you’re building a loyalty platform that should last and create lifetime value.

Dayoán: That lifetime value is not measured in quarters.

Dayoán: I think you really need to start to think further out than this quarter.

Dayoán: I know that’s really, really hard when budgets are shrinking, when tensions are high.

Dayoán: But we know from research over and over and again, that when things get tough economically, the brands that invest the most on customers actually come out of it stronger.

Charlie: Nice, and I think that comes out very strongly in the research as well, that long-term view and the importance, not just thinking about tomorrow, but thinking years out.

Charlie: So that’s brilliant.

Charlie: Well, look, thank you so much for sharing this research.

Charlie: It’s brilliant.

Charlie: Everyone, do please download it and give it a really good read.

Charlie: It’s well worth it.

Charlie: I’m sure some people like I did will have questions for you.

Charlie: What’s the best way of reaching out to you if they do have questions on the research?

Dayoán: Email is perfect.

Charlie: Great.

Charlie: Well, we’ll put that and then we’ll also put your LinkedIn details in the show notes along with all the full downloads for the white paper.

Charlie: All that’s left for me to say is thank you so much from Let’s Talk Loyalty.

Charlie: That was a really unique and interesting perspective on our industry.

Charlie: Thank you so much for your time today.

Dayoán: Thank you, Charlie.

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

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