Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and also Loyalty TV. If you work in loyalty marketing, you can watch our video interviews every Thursday on www. loyalty. tv. And of course, you can listen to our podcasts, every Tuesday, every Wednesday, and every Thursday to learn the latest ideas from loyalty experts around the world.
Today’s episode is part of The Wiser Loyalty series, which is hosted by our partners, The Wise Marketer Group. The Wise Marketer Group is a media, education and advisory services company providing resources for loyalty marketers through The Wise marketer digital publication and The Loyalty Academy program that offers the certified loyalty marketing professional or CLMP designation. I hope you enjoy this weekly podcast, The Wiser Loyalty Series brought to you by Let’s Talk Loyalty and The Wise marketer Group.
Aaron: Hi everyone welcome back this week for The Wiser Loyalty Podcast series from Let’s Talk Loyalty. I’m here myself as Aaron Dauphinee and of course with my partner in crime, Bill Hanifin, our CEO of The Wise Marketer Group. And this week we’re excited to bring you a new course as we head into a new month of October.
And this particular month’s course that we’re covering in terms of content is our analytics course which is course 107. And for those of you who don’t really follow us all that much the way to understand this podcast is easiest is the fact that we take along our curriculum and digest it down into bits and bytes, of course, across the course of the month in this course,
case this month would be four segments that we put together around analytics. It’s not the entire curriculum, but it’s a portion of it that we find interesting and, and of curiosity to ourselves. And so, let’s dive in bill this week where we’re kind of taking a little bit of a step out of diving into the content of the particular course of analytics.
To, because we’ve come across some life experiences in the last couple of weeks in the engagements that we’ve had to say we should clarify this, so we’re going to do a quick pause, but know that we’ll come back around and some of the things we’ll talk about actually relate into how the course will unveil over the course of the next couple of weeks.
So, Bill, welcome and dive right in.
Bill: Good to see you. So. I think what everybody wants to hear. Yeah, we want to cover these courses and we will do analytics, but I think it’s great when we happen on something in the moment with clients and we have multiple conversations that are all pointing towards the same topic.
I think it’s something that we ought to share with this audience. So hopefully everybody really enjoys this. But I think so. Let’s set the stage. So, you know, that I’m a fan of language and words and yes, for sure. I guess since we’re content creators, you have to be and I think that words matter. Yeah.
And so I was working on something recently, which we talked about and I said, gosh, I’m I’ve got all these words and I realized that, you know, if I really ask myself synonyms, different things that I know what they mean, obviously, but I didn’t really know the origin of the words or why I use a particular word for a particular thing.
And so it kind of stumped me and I started looking things up and I asked a few friends. They didn’t know either. And so we were, we were at a client event just last week and we kind of shared this whole idea with them. And it leads into a topic about how we’re confusing words and loyalty marketing.
Like, we’re, we’ve got a whole word cloud. If you could see a graphic, a word cloud, imagine 1 full of all sorts of the familiar words that we talk about everything from customer centricity to customer experience, loyalty, you know, all of it. And a lot of people are still kind of blending those words together and confusing definitions and so on.
So, I don’t know. Do you want to play a little word game just to get started? Can I?
Aaron: Yeah, let’s try. Yeah. All right. All
Bill: right. All right. So, at the risk of maybe publicly stumping Aaron in front of the entire world. I’m going to ask him do you know the difference between cement and concrete?
Aaron: Oh, gosh. I, I have to break this down a little bit.
I think you have a cement mixture and like a concrete slab. So cement is the components of what go into the concrete as the end product. Is that right? Very
Bill: good. Okay. All right. I owe you a coffee. So, all right. I’m going to, let me try to get something a little bit tougher. Not a tough word, but what’s, how about attorney and lawyer?
Are they the same? Are they different? If so, how are they different?
Aaron: Oh my gosh. I think the good wife is going to save me here on this one. I think I think a lawyer is someone who has passed the bar and so they’re licensed or approved to practice. Or maybe I’ve got that backwards. In fact, an attorney might be someone who’s licensed to practice and pass the bar, but a lawyer, someone who just went to law school and they may be doing other things in life.
Is that correct?
Bill: You’re, you’re, you’re on the right track. Yeah. So essentially all attorneys are lawyers because attorneys have passed the bar and they can represent people in court, but the opposite is not true because some lawyers have just passed it, but. Okay. So this is kind of fun. Here’s the last one and then we’ll move on to some loyalty terms, but you fly all the time.
And what do they say that the airplane is sitting on the tarmac? Right. But then if you were at home, and you looked at your driveway in your home, you might have something you’d call asphalt. And if you lived in the UK, they might call it macadam there. All these 3 things, asphalt, macadam and tarmac are all very closely related.
I’m not even going to maybe I shouldn’t even ask you if you know the difference. You might have been an engineer to know the difference. But do you do you happen to know?
Aaron: I feel like the asphalt and tarmac are similar to the cement and concrete, potentially maybe just built out of a different substance.
But I’ll be candid, like Mc McAdam is, is a surname to me. , it’s not a product. I’ve never heard that term before. I, I know McAdams, but I don’t know know. For everybody listening, you’re,
Bill: you’re suddenly realizing that if, that, if Aaron were invited to go on Jeopardy, that he would probably win because he’s doing pretty well.
So, just suffice it to say that asphalt is the a component of McAdam is actually a brand name. Tarmac is a product name and there’s other intricacies that we won’t waste time with here, but pretty good Aaron. So, yeah,
Aaron: well, hey, let me, let me turn the tables on you here as we try to transition into something that is always bugged me as I, as I taught you know, a university marketing 101 at 1 of the colleges here in Canada.
Yeah. 1 of the things that always came up was students always intermingling. And I found that even in the, in our work world, in our, in our industry, the difference between segment and segmentation, do you know how to break those down?
Bill: Well, you know, at the risk of being a wise guy, I’d say that if I don’t, I’d have to give back my CLMP designation to you.
So, segmentation is a process that when you’re through going through a segmentation exercise, you create segments cells and all sorts of other. Individual breakdowns of customer data. Is that right?
Aaron: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Like the segment is the group that’s the out product, right? Like we’re talking about here.
And then the segmentation is typically typically along four different lines whether it’s psychographic, behavioral, demographic, or, or needs based. And there’s a couple other profiles that have evolved as well too, but those are the main four. It’s about going through the exercise of creating segments.
So you’re absolutely on point there. And, and you, you brought up some earlier parts in this conversation around. A ton of terms that we use that are difference and one of the ones that rise or one of one of the sets of terms that rise for me, where there’s some subtle nuance to it. Maybe you can offer a thought and perspective for our listeners here is the difference between customer experience and customer engagement.
Bill: Okay, so let’s just say. What if we were looking at a word cloud that had those 2 terms and it also had customer centric, had data driven marketing, it had digital transformation and maybe had a CRM. So, all these terms that they somehow or another, we get them into our language, and we think they’re mutually exclusive, or maybe they’re complimentary, but 1, they seem to compete with each other a little bit.
So, customer experience, customer engagement are 2 of those that when they 1st became very, very popular, I felt as many people were asking us. Should I not worry about having a loyalty strategy or loyalty program more specifically, because I have a really good customer engagement strategy, or I’m going to focus on my customer experience.
So can I do that in lieu of a customer loyalty program? So, those are the kind of questions that really pause and make you think. And so the 1 thing that I would say is that, because we read a lot of publicly reported information from, you know, from publicly traded companies, the quarterly reporting. And if you were to just control F those documents, the transcripts of those calls, you, you find customer centric oftentimes being spoken by one of the leadership team that’s presenting on the call.
So, it seems like the C suite talks about customer centric. That’s what that’s that when they want to communicate what we’re all about in this industry to their shareholders and the components of that can take, you know, individually. Yes, you’re going to have a customer loyalty strategy. Even components of that might be.
Focusing on experience, focusing on engagement, you know, there can be other elements of it. But at the same time, you know, we were talking about the, the large consulting firms, the global consulting firms, their top line term might be something like digital transformation. And maybe loyalty is part of that, and I’ve actually seen that in some methodology.
So, yeah, it’s, it can be. Quite confusing, and it’s really behooves people to understand and kind of sort out the differences if they’re going to clearly talk to their leadership about what they’re trying to accomplish.
Aaron: Yeah, I think syntax and jargon is very, very important in our industry. And then oftentimes it’s, you know, as marketers, we like to and the consultants or the advisors that are in it like to.
You know, a couple of these shiny new terms to be novel and new, and that’s not helpful in some, some regards because it’s just, just jargon at the end of the day. But so when, when we look at our certified loyalty marketing professional or CLP designation, we try to distill down into some of these terms to be more baseline and understanding for everybody so that there’s a commonality and understanding around them.
And that’s actually true because As you said, you kind of alluded to the fact of, you know, customer experience is good for me. Customer engagement strategy is going strong. Do I need loyalty? Well, that’s the question of we have a definitional problem even at a higher level around loyalty, right? Like big L loyalty versus little L loyalty.
Little L loyalty being much more oriented towards the actual transactional components of an operational program in mindset of delivery. Well, that can go coexist as you, as you mentioned, alongside the other components of a customer experience. Platform or, or, or plan as well as customer engagement strategies versus big LLT.
When we think about that, that encompasses all of these terms, like you threw out a bunch more that didn’t start with a C just a little bit earlier, even argue, you know, when you think about a digital transformation, if you’re putting a customer centric mindset on it, like a C. CEO, that in fact is large L loyalty, right?
Like how do we get members to come into our stores on our buy and purchase through, through the different mediums that we have as an organization, whether it’s products or services, how do we get them to stick around and, and actually purchase on a longer term basis, a tenured basis with us? And increase the basket size as well as then talk about it.
So advocacy, right? And, and refer their friends and then even in subtle conversations that they might have about the particular brand and hierarchy and engage with us on interactions, right? That’s really what we’re talking about if we distill it down. And so that big LLULTY construct. At which you and I have always been advocates of in houses, all of these different constructs and concepts.
So I think it’s interesting. We’ve got a good conversation here about terminology that we just from a colloquialism perspective came out with, you know, at the start, but brought it into the terminology. And I think that’s what. You know, my, if I have to sum it up for, for us as, as our goal with the CLMP and, and doing these podcasts is to start to get people to have a commonality in terms of base understanding, so that we’re all talking the same language and we’re not getting confundled or confused.
Bill: Absolutely, and maybe what we should do, too, is not not allow ourselves to be dug in and defensive 1 particular term over another, because they actually do all. Relate to 1 another, right? And so I think that’s 1 of the greatest observations we’ve had talking to clients lately is. There’s a shifting focus towards that big L brand loyalty and everything that we do within this business can bring value to brand loyalty, right?
It creates brand loyalty. It creates value in the enterprise. So, we need to be accepting of the fact that you can have a loyalty program, but you should also probably have a big investment in your customer experience. Right? I mean, they’re all these things work together for good. And so we have to think of it that way.
Aaron: Yeah, I agree. And, and, and, you know, and my, my time in work when I was working with bond, with the customer, with the multi report, pardon me, you know, one of the key questions we always ask is if you want to know what Aaron’s loyal to, like ask him and, and we started to decipher that down into, are you loyal to the program, Aaron, are you loyal to the brand, Aaron, and those are two different questions, but they, they work in simpatico together.
Like you can’t delineate between the two because they both work as pistons as a collective to the type of. Relationship and stickiness that I have to a particular brand and the products and services that they’re, they’re, they’re providing for me. So, anyway, that’s kind of a good thought. Maybe we should leave it there.
That’s a good wrap. Yeah, yeah. For those of you who, I know I did a bit of a different intro today because we’re trying to do something a little bit different. So it’s not so static, but for those of you who are tuning in for the first time when we talk about the certified loyalty marketing professional designation, what we’re talking about is our, you know, at the loyalty Academy, our, our.
Our designation that we provide to the audience of about a thousand CLMPs worldwide in 54 countries. We have many more joining through a variety of different means, but we encourage you, if that’s of interest to you, to check out our website at loyaltyacademy. org. And if you’re wanting to find out what we talk about in the Wiser Loyalty Series ongoing basis, Please check back with let’s talk loyalty and dig into some of the archives of the podcast that we produce, because we cover off every month, a different topic from our core curriculum.
And on occasion, we do episodes like this where we kind of deviate a little bit, but, but next month we’ll come back and we’ll specifically tone in on some of the terminology and the ideas that we have around our analytics course, of course, one Oh seven. And we hope you stay tuned. So other than that, I wish everyone well, they’ll leave you final thoughts.
Bill: No, everybody. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. And we’ll be back with some analytics talk next week. Stay well, everyone.
Paula: This show is sponsored by Wise Marketer Group, publisher of the Wise Marketer, the premier digital customer loyalty marketing resource for industry relevant news, insights, and research. Wise Marketer Group also offers loyalty education and training globally through its Loyalty Academy, which has certified nearly 900 marketers and executives in 49 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals.
For global coverage of customer engagement and loyalty, check out thewisemarketer.com and become a wiser marketer or subscriber. Learn more about global loyalty education for individuals or corporate training programs at loyaltyacademy.org.
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