Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m your host, Paula Thomas, and if you work in loyalty marketing, join me every week to learn the latest ideas from loyalty specialists around the world.
I’m delighted to announce Capillary Technologies as the new title sponsor for Loyalty TV. Capillary’s mission is to bring the loyalty market out of the 1980s and into the present, ditching the slow, chunky manual services of the past. Capillary’s all about making loyalty management easy, with scalable AI powered tech that turns loyalty managers into superheroes. Say goodbye to outdated methods and check out the exciting new way to achieve loyalty excellence in 2024.
Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV. I’m delighted to be today exploring some of the key concepts that underpin how we as human beings behave with brands through the academic insights and wisdom of Alex Brown, whose work I have followed on LinkedIn for the last few years.
Alex has an incredible career teaching digital marketing and digital strategy in top tier business schools including London Business School and Wharton University. I was thrilled when Alex started binge listening to our show a couple of years ago as part of his preparations to teach his students about the power of emotional loyalty. And I know he still recommends our podcast to his students. Alex is fascinating to follow, given his career focus and pioneering the use of social media through his teaching and industry work. And he joins me today to talk about loyalty through the lens of Taylor Swift and also the really important concept of trust.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
So Alex Brown, welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.
Alex: Thank you very much for having me.
Paula: It’s incredible. I think you might be one of our most loyal listeners, Alex. So I feel it’s very long overdue and I’m utterly thrilled to have this conversation with you given your long and inspiring career, more on the academic side. Although of course in industry as well. So I think our audience are going to be fascinated by the conversation we’re going to have today.
Before we get into talking all about you. As you know, of course, we need to start the show with the usual opening question. So will you kick us off please and tell our audience, what is your favorite loyalty program?
Alex: Probably it would be an outdoors wear company and I admire that sector across the board and probably I would pick Patagonia and I’m a big fan of companies that really understand the values of their customers and sort of had that, have that sort of shared approach in terms of sort of sharing those values and designing in this case a loyalty program that truly does sort of highlight the importance in this case of sustainability, the planet, etc.
Paula: Yes. Well, it’s a key point that I know we’re actually going to get into a little bit more, even behind that, Alex, as we go through the conversation. And I know what you’re teaching your students about right now is particularly this huge topic of trust. And as you said, a brand that lives and breeds the values that they’re obviously hearing from the consumers, but actually also leading with those values as well so that their consumers can learn from them. I think that’s absolutely a virtuous circle. So I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with you. Patagonia is definitely one we can all look up to.
Alex: I agree with you.
Paula: Amazing. Amazing. So listen, as I said in the introduction, I have been following you and connecting with you, I guess, through the power of social media with our, I think our mutual favorite social media platform. Although you’re on so many, you probably have quite a few others. I’m just I think addicted to LinkedIn at this stage. But listen, would you mind just talking us through your background, Alex, because you’ve been in this space a lot longer than most of our audience and some very diverse experience.
And to me, that’s what I love is that I can always find an interesting perspective in what you talk about on LinkedIn with your posts and papers. So talk us through you know, what you’ve been doing in your career.
Alex: Thank you very much for that nice introduction, Paula. Basically, I’ve taught digital marketing since 1997, and in fact, it was maybe four or five years prior to that, that I started really getting excited about the internet, but it was using that news groups at the time it was before the mosaic browser, et cetera.
So my whole career in terms of teaching and even in consulting and my work has centered on the evolution of digital marketing and the internet and so forth. I was fortunate to work at the Wharton School for a good period of time. That was actually more in academic admissions, the MBA program than it was teaching. I did teach one class there, but I taught mostly at the University of Delaware for lots of years.
And I can find that activity actually with my passion for horse racing and one way those two passions collided was when I ultimately built a really strong online community of folks following the progress of a racehorse who’d gotten injured was, it was in an animal hospital. We built a huge following for that horse online and ultimately raised about 1.5 million for animal rescue efforts, horse rescue. I was very involved in the whole slaughter issue in the United States as a result. But that experience gave me a lot of insight into the notion of fandom.
And since that time, I’ve been really interested in fandom and how that sort of connects with sort of, loyalty, business loyalty, connecting with your customers, turning your customers into fans in digital marketing. Now we’re talking about how to nurture raving fans, et cetera, to help hotel brands, promoting them organically rather than promoting them through paid media, et cetera, et cetera, influencer marketing and so forth. So yeah.
Paula: Amazing.
Alex: I’m back in the UK, lots of stuff.
Paula: Yeah. And it would be remiss if I didn’t, I suppose first of all, that extraordinary community that you mentioned I think the horse’s name was Barbara. Am I right? Am I getting that right, Alex?
Alex: He won the Kentucky Derby 2006 undefeated. And yeah, I mean, the tragic circumstance that built the fan base was awful but the experience of the fan base and stuff really altered the trajectory of my career in my life, basically.
Paula: And it is unexpected. And again, that’s why I like following your content. When you started the community, like what was your purpose? I mean, I hear where it got to in terms of that incredible I suppose, charity perspective. And as you said, building for whole horse welfare, but did you start with that in mind? Was it an experiment? Was it intentional to create something? What was the kind of insight behind that community? Because for me, like talking about community is absolutely topical. It feels very recent and very relevant, but I’m hearing that you’ve been doing this for a very long time.
Alex: Yeah, even prior to the Barbara incident, I built quite a strong online community of MBA admissions, candidates, applicants, right on the Walton School website, which was very innovative in the very early 2000s.
But yeah, this community wasn’t deliberate. I was teaching a class. I’ll try to keep this short, but I was teaching a class at the University of Delaware. Barbara had just won the Kentucky Derby. I said to the class, let’s run some Google ads. I’ll write a blog each day, a Barbaro’s training regime, getting ready for the Preakness. We’ll run some Google ads and we’ll see if we can drive traffic to the sites. It’s like a class demonstration of how Google ads worked back again in 2006. We built up a bit of traffic, maybe got 120 visits a day. etc.
Barbara then unfortunately had the tragic accident in the Preakness and I planned to stop the blog like I didn’t want to exploit the situation or anything sort of nefarious like that but it was clear to me within a day or so that there was this real need for information out there on the status of this, you know, this horse. So I made some phone calls. The owners were very gracious to allow me to become like a spokesperson for the horse effectively. And the hospital gave me access to his status. And we very quickly built this huge community. Folks that could sort of, you know, get these daily updates on his progress, his ups and downs, et cetera.
Unfortunately, six months later, he passed away. I assume then the community would dissipate, but it didn’t, it actually strengthened and we sort of morphed from being a site where we were simply providing updates to a site that talked about horse racing issues, talked about horse welfare issues, got involved in the horse slaughter issue, raised a lot of money in that regard. We did public events, so it wasn’t just all online.
And even today, so we’re in 2024, I’m still in touch with some of those folks. I mean, the site itself is long, long past now, but still in touch with some of those folks. Each year we, they do a fundraiser for the Barbara’s Memorial statue at Churchill Downs, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it’s been a really incredible experience.
Paula: Well, thank you for explaining the detail, Alex, and well done for creating something first of all, so early. I mean, clearly that’s nearly 20 years ago and something so meaningful, like as I think about community now, the obvious starting point is to find a common passion, a common interest, and then of course be of service to that audience.
And of course, as we think about our own show, that’s obviously the direction I would love to take. You know, Let’s Talk Loyalty because I think we all have that shared passion, of course, for a professional topic. So less emotive, of course, than what you did with Barbara. But yeah, I think it deserves to be acknowledged.
And I don’t think I’ve talked to maybe anyone else who has single-handedly initiated a community of that scale and harnessed people around a cause. And then as you said it changed the whole trajectory of your career.
Alex: I was fortunate at the time I got featured in like knowledge at war and various other media because really we learned a lot about community building through this particular experience and letting the community sort of lead the direction whilst providing some basic rules and obviously now we’re in a world where freedom of speech is such a political issue et cetera, et cetera.
But even in an online community, you do have to have some rules of decorum and so forth. So I have a little bit of empathy for the light, you know, the folks that run these social media platforms, cause it’s very difficult.
Paula: So given all of that incredible experience, Alex you then I suppose found the power of fandom, as you said, and the one that caught my attention recently that you were commenting on was, of course, the incredible Taylor Swift and looking for lessons in loyalty for our audience, and of course, your own students, most importantly, in terms of how to drive loyalty, particularly for somebody with a profile as extraordinary as Taylor Swift.
So I know you’ve written an amazing essay which hopefully our audience can all get access to. But will you talk to us about how Taylor Swift has nurtured loyalty from her fans I think we all know they’re called Swifties. I’m not one, but I do know that they are absolutely everywhere. So what kind of lessons do you think this audience can get from a superstar like Taylor Swift?
Alex: I’m not swifty either, but you can tell that just by looking at me, right? I’m a bold, nearly 60 year old man. So I’m not part of her demographic clearly. And again, for businesses, that’s an important lesson to learn, right? Focus on your audiences. Don’t get distracted with trying to appeal to everybody because that just doesn’t work. We know that we’re marketers and loyalty sort of professionals.
So, so Tay has a certain demographic, absolutely fantastic. She’s been doing this for 18 years, so maybe that demographic has evolved, but oddly enough, they now have daughters who they’re taking to concerts, et cetera. So she’s done a really good job of sort of renewing some of that anyway.
So why is she so successful in building this real vibrant fandom, the Swifties? I think the number one aspect. And the most important aspect is her degree of authenticity and transparency, which again, a fundamental to business success. Right. And we know that more so now in the digital era.
And what do I mean by that? She writes all her own music. These are her looks. She’s. Telling us about her life, the highlights, the low lights, et cetera, et cetera. So the Swifties can relate to that. So she’s really relatable. She’s almost vulnerable in that regard too, which again is a real good sort of way to. Really develop trust trust with your fans, et cetera, et cetera. So that willingness to be vulnerable, I think is really important. So I think the number one reason for her success is this all her own content. I mean, you can think of some other fandoms like K pop or whatever, which is fantastic, but you can’t say those folks wrote their music, right? They’re manufactured boy bands or whatever it might be, but Taylor Swift, very different, very authentic, et cetera. So that’s number one, being really authentic, evolving, being relatable, et cetera.
Number two she does these things called Easter eggs, right? Or whatever you want to call them. They comes from the idea of Easter egg hunts and seeking things out. It came from the online gaming industry from some person maybe took 20 or 30 years ago, created this hidden Easter egg in some Atari game or whatever it might be. But so Taylor has done this right from her first album creating these sort of cryptic notes using sort of, you know, this sort of stuff to tease out stuff for her fans.
And what it does also is it allows her fans or makes her fans really scrutinize her lyrics her costumes when she’s on tour any action that she takes so it creates a whole another level of scrutiny on the lyrics that she writes everything that she does and a lot of conversation online to help build that fandom to help drive the sort of the subreddits that are data dedicated to Taylor Swift, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that sort of use of sort of, whatever you call it, the Easter eggs.
Paula: Gamification. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: Absolutely. Absolutely fantastic. I think Taylor has done really well with social media. And again, as businesses, social media is super, super important on the one hand. She’s done it again in a very authentic way.
I think as businesses, we then hire a social media team. That’s a little bit disconnected to the business and we don’t truly get engaged with our customers. Directly on social media to the extent that we should, we do a little bit of social listening and, you know, hire someone to do some sentiment analysis or whatever, but Taylor Swift, at least in her earlier career would deliberately do all this herself, rather than hire a team now, she’s got Taylor nation supporting her and so forth as a sort of social media group.
But what is Taylor nation? They were a group of families originally. So even the team that she does hire out and use now, sort of organically developed. These are Swifties working for Swift or the management team or whatever it might be.
Taylor got her first album deal by showing the folks down in Nashville the following she had on MySpace. So she’s been doing this stuff for a long time. When she started on Tumblr, which is a great platform, or at least was a great platform for building fandoms. She didn’t do it through a social media team at all. She did it personally herself and what she also did, she still does this to some extent, I think, but in, in prior years before she got really huge, she would engage directly on these social media platforms, not just on her posts, but on her fans’ posts and you can imagine then the surprise and delight that causes to those things that then share that etc.
And I think Taylor Swift has got a habit of this sort of surprise and delight, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s giving a hat away during her birthday, concert tour or whatever it might be that again, we as businesses and loyalty professionals, we can learn from how can you surprise and delight your customers, your most passionate and loyal customers.
With the Era’s tour, absolutely fantastic. It’s a huge vibe. It’s a three hour, behemoth of a show. I mean, I could go on and on, but I do think there are really strong parallels with what she does deliberately, even though she’s authentic. I believe what she does deliberately to really cultivate this fan base and really understand that driving loyalty.
And this is a key point I think is a 360 degree proposition you want your fans to be loyal to you. You want your customers to be loyal to you, but your fans, your customers want you to be loyal to them. And I think Taylor really sort of embodies that approach.
Paula: You’ve totally nailed it, Alex. And, you know, as I reflect on, you know, five years of broadcasting, five years of interviews about loyalty, I do remember that’s the point that landed the most the first time I’ve heard it. And we still don’t hear it that often. And it is absolutely that principle. You know, I think it has to start with the brand, with the business, how can we demonstrate the loyalty before we expect, you know, the upsell, the cross sell and all of those wonderful benefits that a loyalty program does offer.
And I think that’s, you know, when I think about the loyalty managers who have to convince perhaps senior management about investing in programs, I think that can be the challenge to say, actually, we do have to step first. We do have to demonstrate this. And it takes, I suppose, a very brave leadership team to really look to a brand like Taylor Swift and her personality and actually apply it because it sounds easy for somebody like Taylor Swift to ultimately has, as you said, full control of her product, her distribution, whatever.
And whatever risks come, you know, she’s the starting point and the end point. Brands, I think, are just so nervous about initiating that level of authenticity, vulnerability, and connection. And yet we can see it work. So it’s almost ironic that we do have to wait for, you know, a relatively young person like Taylor to embody what digital natives, I guess, expect from online connection.
Alex: I completely agree, but I will also add one more point. She doesn’t really have a loyalty program, but I think she should. I think there’s a bit of a misstep here because you can imagine if she had a loyalty program where she could really track who these Swifties are and who are the most passionate Swifties based on their activity, maybe online, what they do, et cetera, et cetera.
And we haven’t even talked about friendship bracelets and various other things that are going on in that community that she’s basically inspired. But if she could track all that behavior, and then when she has her next concert tour, she could ensure through the loyalty program that the real passionate Swifties all have access to the concert rather than having to hunt tickets down in secondary markets because other folks who aren’t really Swifties get access because of X, Y, and Z, I think she could solve the problem with the loyalty program, but what does that do?
I, so, so this to me, if you think, what is the purpose of a business, right? It’s to create value. But you know, so that’s just the same as a brand. It’s just the same as a pop star or whatever, they’re creating value, right? So, so how would Taylor Swift go about creating the. Maximizing, let’s say, that shared value she can create at a, let’s say, one of these concert venues. It’s by getting the folks that value the SWIFT experience the most. To attend and therefore you’re creating more shared value, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there’s a little bit of a miss there. If you think about everything that you do as a business is creating value and understanding what is the shared value thinking more long term versus short term, et cetera, et cetera. I’m a huge fan. Let’s get a proper loyalty program going.
Paula: Okay. Well, you heard it here first. And if Taylor Swift does listen to the episode, hopefully she’ll be super grateful for your advice and insights. So we will make sure, of course, that essay on lessons and loyalty from Taylor Swift is available for all audience, Alex.
So thank you very much for highlighting absolutely what we can learn from her. And for sure I did reflect on our own business. As I said, as we look to the future in terms of what is she doing well and what is it that we need to do better from a Let’s Talk Loyalty perspective. So I’ve already been been learning from you, Alex.
So listen, the second big topic I know you’re very passionate about at the moment, and I know we won’t get to do justice to it today, but I definitely want to hear, you know, this idea that you’re, I know, still working on a massive piece of work by all accounts, but really lasering in on trust as one core principle.
That is absolutely like non negotiable in terms of creating, I guess, emotional loyalty as the ultimate goal for every business. So I think there are so many reasons that we are probably talking about that, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth. So will you talk to us about why is it that you think trust is that single most important thing that brands should be thinking about?
Alex: Yeah, I, a huge sort of sidetrack in my life lately is to going down the rabbit hole of trust. And why do I think it’s important? I think the better trust that you can develop between you and your customer and vice versa the more glue you’ve got effectively to connect with your customer it just makes so much sense.
I mean, anytime that I, you know, I do a webinar for, I do some work at London Business School and I do a webinar for them on loyalty and personalization. And you know as I’m researching and reading about this stuff i’m reading books, you know on trust I’m reading books by Peter Fader on Customer Centricity. I’m reading books by whomever on this, I mean I’m a geek reading it all but I would say if I did some kind of word cloud on the key terms that would keep popping up, trust would be the number one term, right? So, so I think, yeah, anytime you’re trying to build loyalty, you can’t really do it without trust.
Now, maybe you can build transactional loyalty without so much trust. You could build sort of, you know, loyalty by customer inertia without having so much trust. But as you pointed out, you really want to try to, you know, get to that emotional loyalty. That’s the loyalty that’s meaningful, that has real value for the business and I think also for the customer.
Paula: Amazing. Yeah. And thank you for mentioning Peter Fader. We will make sure to link back to the episode we did with Peter, actually in the show notes because he really is a mastermind. I know from your Wharton days. And so we’ll make sure that people have access to Pete’s work and that conversation.
And then, yeah, we’ve got actually a lot of, I suppose, academic friends in common that we admire. I think Robbie Kellman Baxter is another one that you’ve talked about her books. So you’ve come up with a framework, and again, we won’t do justice to it, Alex, so, so I feel bad, but I do want you to talk us through I suppose just in high level detail, this hierarchy of trust you’ve identified. I think it’s four different principles that brands need to be thinking about in terms of nurturing that trust. So would you give us a sense of what’s involved in achieving this?
Alex: Absolutely. And I’m really passionate about this, so I might just keep rambling on. So just cut me off when you want but yeah, so he spent a lot of time thinking about trust, reading a lot of books about it and, you know, various other folks work.
And I would say yeah, Peter Fader, I’m probably his number one fan too, although his stuff is more about customer centricity and identifying your best customers, and then figuring out how to find more customers that look like your best customers, just to sort of clarify the difference there between that and just hardcore trust.
So with trust, I came up with this hierarchy with four levels. On level one is basically you have to provide a great customer experience. It doesn’t matter what else you do. If you don’t provide a great customer experience, you’ll never build trust with your customers. Yeah, you might get some transactions in the short run, et cetera, et cetera. But you’re really not going to build any kind of trust. And you have to provide a great customer experience in a fair exchange. And what I mean by that is what your folks, your customers are effectively paying for that experience, right? So, yeah, you could provide something absolutely fantastic. But if the price point is completely out of whack and there’s no value for the customer based on the price point, that’s not gonna build trust. So it has to be in a fair exchange. So that’s level one trust.
Level two is what do you do with all this data that you gather through the exchange with your customers? So, as part of that, you need to protect the data, make sure you’re compliant legally. Make sure you don’t suffer from nefarious activism and various other things. And we see lots of these examples occurring on a weekly basis where some business has been hacked, et cetera. And what happens on trust evaporates, you know, could have taken you years to build up the trust and you lose it in a day.
A very different example would be CrowdStrike. That wasn’t hacktivism. That was just really silly deployment of a new technology or an update that wasn’t handled correctly, right? Boom. The trust dissolved very quickly, but also as part of that level two is how do you personalize the experience with your customers based on the data that you gather? So I go into a lot of detail on that. But the idea here is with in human relationships, the folks that you trust the most are the folks that you have the more personal relationships with. You don’t treat all your best mates exactly the same. You don’t treat all your work colleagues exactly the same as your best mates, et cetera, et cetera.
So personalization, done really well really helps develop trust so level one is fundamental. Level two in terms of the data and protecting and personalization is all what I would call as part of the value exchange, right? Level one two part of the value exchange and there are businesses like Amazon and Apple etc that do so well on these primary levels of trust that nothing else really matters which is good for them because they’re not really good at the rest of the trust hierarchy I would argue.
But level three focuses on, okay, so how did you create that experience, that product, that service you’re providing your customers. And this gets into the notion of people in the planet. How do you treat your employees? How do you treat the planets in a sustainable way? You asked earlier about my favorite, some of loyalty programs, Patagonia, et cetera, et cetera, really good at level three trust.
Now you can be great at level three trust, but if you’re not great at level one, it doesn’t matter, right? That’s why it’s a hierarchy. One is most important. Two is next most important. Then three, be a good steward of the planet, be a good care, caretaker of the people that work for you. But then you’ve also got to think about your supply chain, the whole value chain.
In terms of the planet, what are your customers doing with your product once they’ve used it, disposability, secondhand markets, reselling, et cetera, et cetera, all that’s level three trust. And then level four just focuses more on what’s the role in society that your business has more broadly. So does the business have a specific foundation that it focuses on to do some good things that are important again, to the values of the customers initially. So leaving that sort of value alignment with the customer and the business really important in all this regard.
So, you know, that’s a quick summary, but it is a hierarchy of trust i.e. level one is more important than level two. They’re more important to levels three and four, and levels three and four are more about broader values. Levels one and two are about the value exchange.
Paula: Got it.
Alex: So that’s, in summary, what the hierarchy of trust is about.
Paula: Amazing. And Again, the essay that you’ve written on this, Alex, is probably still a work in progress, actually, first and foremost. So I know you’re still thinking this through. But I know you’re going to create a version for our audience, and no doubt your own students as well. So we’ll make sure to to get that from you. So people can at least access some of your work as they’re thinking about their own needs. And again, I think everybody’s kind of planning ahead for 2025 and I think it would serve them very well to have those kinds of basic frameworks just to, to reflect on as they’re looking for their strategy for next year.
Alex: I’m absolutely fascinated by it, so I’m happy absolutely to, to fine tune an intro to this particular framework and make sure you get it before ahead of this being published. So it’ll be available. So it is not available outside.
Paula: Okay. Amazing. Okay. So listen, one final topic, Alex and I suppose we’re almost coming full circle. And again, I’m thinking about this and even learning from again, your LinkedIn posts for our own business. And it’s just back to the online community piece. Because again, I feel like so many loyalty programs are looking for new levers that they can pull, ourselves included even though clearly we’re not a loyalty program, but I know there is also you know, a massive concern globally about online disinformation and that there’s a role that communities can provide, I suppose, to protect, identify and really give us all a sense of, you know, how can we learn to even trust what we find online? And to me, certainly there are communities that I trust.
And I know that the information that I will get there will be, you know, something that I can actually really trust. So would you just maybe talk about any insights that we should keep in mind about either online community or disinformation? And I think the one thing actually, again, just that I, you know, thought about today as you were sharing your kind of knowledge with me was the idea that there is also risk in online communities.
So while there’s incredible upsides, and I keep thinking about it as a massive opportunity. You also flagged that there’s also this potential to just become an echo chamber. So I think that really kind of opened my eyes because I hadn’t thought about that side. So I want to be careful as we look to our community how we can support them.
So would you mind just commenting on that, Alex? Because I thought it was very, very clear and very important that, you know, both the pros and cons be considered by our audience.
Alex: This information is a huge topic in of itself which again, I’ve written a 20, 000 word essay on it, oddly enough. And yeah it’s super, super interesting.
Echo chamber’s really important. Where do you get your information? Really understanding the biases within your communities? And so forth so that you can then do a much better job to critically assess what you’re reading, what you’re learning, et cetera, et cetera.
So, so critical thing thinking is an issue, right? We need to be able to have the time to critically assess what we’re viewing and what we’re reading, we’ve seen the adverse outcomes of disinformation with impacts on, you know, with nefarious actors doing bad things during election times and stuff. I mean, I know that’s happened. It’s caused huge problems et cetera.
A couple of quick points though, I would make, um, for a business, I would really push to develop an online community for your customers to the extent that you can, but I would only do it if you’re being authentic and you’re being transparent about your business. You cannot do this if you’ve got something to hide.
So, so, you know, the old status quo before the internet, we could do stuff. We could, we could mislead folks in our ad campaigns. We could say extraordinary things about our product that were pretty meaningless because there was no recourse. Now you just can’t. The recourse is loud and clear all online.
So we have to be really authentic with our marketing and our content marketing programs. But customers will have conversations about you, your brand, your industry. Whether you host it as a community or whether it’s on a subreddit or on a discord thing or whatever it might be, those conversations will happen.
When I was at the Wharton School, like in the early 2000s, I had to convince the folks there that we needed to put a discussion board directly on our website. And one of the arguments I used was they’re already discussing us on Business Week’s forum and on Peterson’s forum. So let’s have the conversation when we can see it firsthand and et cetera, et cetera. So, so I would get into that.
The one final point that I’ll make slightly different is this notion of faction. So even within your community where everyone’s there for a common purpose, oftentimes factions evolve and in our Barbara community, that was the case. We had the horse racing faction versus the horse rescue faction, within horse rescue, there were different ways to do it, not to reward the kill by et cetera, et cetera.
So factions will evolve and how you manage that. And even in the Swiftie fandom group. There are fictions there. There’s not one subreddit for Taylor Swift. There are several. Why is that? Because not everybody, even as a Swiftie, can get along because they’re part of different factions. So just be prepared to manage that effort, effort too. Don’t think I answered your question, Paul, but I had a few things to ramble out there.
Paula: Well, you know, I always want to make sure that our guests get to say whatever’s on their mind before we do wrap up any conversation, Alex. So, so I’m really, you know, I feel like we could have a second hour of the conversation, but unfortunately we are up on time. All of it is very inspiring to me.
My final thought, and this is quite a selfish one is in an age of disinformation, I somehow feel actually that podcasts as a format have a level of authenticity because of the human voice that’s behind them. So I often feel like that’s something that people are increasingly aware of when they are looking for information is particularly, you know, how are people expressing themselves? And I do love audio for that particular reason. But as I said, that’s just a selfish aside, but you’re absolutely right.
And I know when we spoke the last time, when you mentioned misinformation, you know, there really are potentially devastating consequences. We only need to look, to the likes of Brexit, for example obviously so many election issues that do arise. So I think your point is absolutely valid to be aware of the factions, to be aware of the echo chamber, and to challenge ourselves to keep learning from from trusted sources.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brave to bring up Brexit front and center like that. I was about to say it, but I thought you might’ve muted that out.
Paula: Not at all. This is a very very mature and loyal audience, and I think they trust us to say what’s on our mind. Alex. So, listen to me and that is the extent of our time today, unfortunately, and I’m certainly going to make sure that we link to your profile, of course, on LinkedIn, my favorite social media platform for anyone who does want to listen to you.
So on that note, I want to say Alex Brown, friend of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV. Thank you so much from our side.
Alex: Great pleasure, Paula. Thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you for getting me up to speed on loyalty as I’ve been binge watched loads of episodes.
Paula: Thanks for your loyalty, Alex. Take care.
Alex: Cheers!
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.
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