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 part of the Wiser Loyalty Series and is hosted by Bill Hanifin, Chief Executive Officer of The Wise Marketer Group.
Paula: The Wise Marketer Group is a media, education and advisory services company, providing resources for loyalty marketeers through the Wise Marketer Digital Publication and the Loyalty Academy Programme that offers the Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional or CLMP designation.
Paula: I hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV in partnership with The Wise Marketer Group.
Bill: Welcome everyone, I’m Bill Hanifin, I’m the Managing Editor of The Wise Marketer and we’re back for the Wiser Loyalty Series with Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Bill: My guest today is Dave Sims.
Bill: Dave is, I would say, a well-recognized, highly-experienced veteran of the Loyalty space.
Bill: I originally met him at a hotel chain, gosh Dave, probably 10, 12 years ago.
Bill: You’ve got a great story.
Bill: You most recently have been the Chief Marketing Officer with Orange Theory Fitness.
Bill: And so we got a lot to talk about, but welcome.
Bill: It’s great to have you.
Dave: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Dave: Yeah, I think it was a…
Dave: I always have to look at my resume to remember when I was and where I was, but it was with LaQuinta, the mid teens, somewhere along there.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: That sounds about right.
Bill: That sounds about right.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: In fact, it was.
Bill: You’re right.
Bill: We were working on a project there, and I remember talking to you about it at the time.
Bill: So, I mean, I think it’s always good to ground people on who you are.
Bill: I know a lot of people, everybody should know who you want to make.
Dave: I wish.
Bill: But just with your experience, you’ve been in the customer loyalty game, you’ve launched programs, managed them, now you’ve been in that CMO spot, but just maybe cover some background like your journey.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: I think, let’s do a Flash resume.
Dave: You started in the Navy, eight years, nuclear submarines, young, spent most of my 20s in Hawaii, young, single guy, not a bad way to go.
Dave: Came back, electrical engineering degree, University of Cincinnati, realized I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer, Proctor & Gamble, information technology.
Dave: Had a real career epiphany there.
Dave: We started a project, laundry services business down in Atlanta, and it was the first time P&G is usually twice removed from the consumer.
Dave: This was one degree from the consumer.
Dave: We come to your house, pick up your clothes, bring them back two days later, and I got to build a lot of order shipping, building the website, a lot of things.
Dave: But I was almost always apologetic.
Dave: I’m not really the business guy, not really the technology guy, but we built a little CRM program.
Dave: And so we, after two dry cleanings, the behavior that people understand, we give them a free wet cleaning, the stuff people put in their washer and dryer, because we knew the business wins when we get the full share of the laundry basket.
Dave: And so we tested this CRM program where up and to the right, up and to the right means we have the full share of the laundry basket, where we know we have that when we had, we knew that when we had the wife’s intimates, the bra and panties.
Dave: And we would move them up the laundry basket with the different offers.
Dave: And it truly was an epiphany of this left brain, right brain, what’s the creative look like?
Dave: How do we deliver it?
Dave: How do we measure it?
Dave: And it was this, maybe it’s, I don’t have to be apologetic that I’m not necessarily the business technology guy.
Dave: It’s this thing in the middle that I really like this measure today, what we did yesterday.
Dave: How do you change the creative?
Dave: How do you measure what you did?
Dave: And this being one step removed from the consumer is where my brain resonates.
Dave: Luckily, this data-driven marketing had legs back in the year 2000.
Dave: The irony there was we couldn’t really make that business work.
Dave: It was kind of the dot-com bubble bursting.
Dave: We built technology to go into six cities in six months and all these things.
Dave: Anyway, sold the business off, went back to P&G, and I decided retail is the place you can do that.
Dave: Found my way into DSW Shoes, spent time at DSW, went to Toys R Us, went to GNC, went to LaQuinta, where we met, went to Nordstrom, went to Proactive Skincare, ended up in Austin, where I am now, with Orange Theory, a franchise of Orange Theory, and that’s where we are today.
Dave: So kind of growing roles with, you know, heavy on the customer marketing and then into the, you know, with proactive more overall marketing and now the full, you know, funnel with Orange Theory.
Dave: So a lot of really cool stuff with all those companies, but just, you know, heavy, heavy, heavy on the, you know, the kind of customer growth marketing across all those different industries.
Bill: Right, right.
Bill: So remind me if I forget, but I want to ask you about the distributed sales environment.
Bill: So it’s so different when you work in maybe with Proactive versus a GNC versus the laundry business you talked about.
Bill: So we’ll get back around to that because there’s some complexities there that are interesting.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: But it sounds like you’re, I mean, our backgrounds are different, but our stories have a common element.
Bill: It’s that we like measurement.
Bill: I always tell people I wouldn’t have been a very good ad agency person because to put it out there and see the campaign, it’s beautiful.
Bill: But I really like to be able to look at the spreadsheet and see what my ROI is.
Bill: So it sounds like you’re a lot the same way.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: When I see people bragging about awards that they’ve won for ad campaigns when I know business is not doing well, it hurts.
Dave: It hurts.
Dave: Anyway, I’m with you.
Dave: And it just means a lot of times you suffer.
Dave: But I can quote the KPIs from all those businesses.
Dave: But that’s the first thing I look at, is what are the KPIs and what are we doing to grow them?
Dave: How do you break them down?
Dave: What are they?
Dave: But that’s the way the brain works.
Dave: Some people love it and you throw up and some people don’t.
Dave: And that’s just, it truly was, this is how my brain works really, really well.
Bill: So when did you, here’s interesting, when did you first use the word loyalty, the L word?
Bill: Because it sounds like when you were in the laundry business, it sounds to me like you discovered the trade, so to speak.
Bill: You just weren’t calling it loyalty.
Bill: You were trying to find the CRM system and trying to identify people and increase value, get increased wallet share.
Bill: But when did that become like in your consciousness that you were actually in the loyalty business?
Dave: Yeah, not until I went, when I left P&G and went up to, at the time it was a company that was DSW Value City Department Stores and Filings Basement.
Dave: So that’s when it was, DSW had a, you know, a bonafide loyalty program.
Dave: So we did work to, you know, the work then was to build, they each had outsourced programs.
Dave: The work was to build, you know, we built a Teradata data warehouse and all the, the email, the direct mail, all the stuff to run the stuff internally.
Dave: So it was actually, I had hands on running the DSW program from an internal kind of business intelligence.
Dave: So that’s what, that’s when I became a Loyalty Program Operator.
Bill: Okay.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: Okay.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: Okay.
Bill: So one of the, one of the things that we’ve noticed lately, we’ve been talking about, you’re familiar with the terms of Big L and the Small L.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: We kind of talk about it in terms of brand loyalty.
Bill: It’s important.
Bill: The loyalty program is kind of how we seem to connect in this business.
Bill: If you go to a conference and it’s a loyalty conference, almost everybody’s talking about their loyalty program.
Bill: The interesting thing is that there’s a little bit of a disconnect at times because the program can be siloed in the marketing department.
Bill: Then somehow you have the seemingly the important people up here in the CMO suite.
Bill: They say, listen, I have a lot of responsibility.
Bill: I’m responsible for brand loyalty, the enterprise level and you guys are running that program.
Bill: Keep it going.
Dave: Good job.
Bill: But we’re seeing a shift right now.
Bill: We’re seeing that to almost do better in the programmatic area, you have to find a way to elevate the whole conversation to the brand marketing.
Bill: There’s some real strong connections between the two.
Bill: But how are you seeing this shift going on today?
Bill: What’s your perspective on it to be successful?
Dave: I think I never knew if I’d become a CMO or if I’d stay in the loyalty CRM space.
Dave: I’ve always had a drive to grow.
Dave: I really like learning new businesses.
Dave: But my best partnerships inside all these companies were, and I would encourage everyone who’s in these roles is, certainly within the marketing department, you have to make friends, but it’s a role of influence.
Dave: The COO, the CFO, those are the people that you, and it’s not a phony make friends with, but it’s if you’ve got to convince someone the importance of these programs.
Dave: And you’re right on the big L, little l.
Dave: I’ve got to work DSW, Nordstrom, Orange Theory.
Dave: These are loyalty companies.
Dave: These people are, I quoted one time speaking at some, you know, like an email conference that was, you know, if you can’t run a loyalty program at DSW, you shouldn’t be in a loyalty business.
Dave: You know, people are loyal to these companies and that, you know, so even is it, should we even call it a loyalty program or just call it a, you know, a get people to shop more program to be blunt about, what’s the goal of the program?
Dave: You know, that’s why every place I’ve been talked about in that laundry business up and to the right, you figure out what up and to the right, what are your most valuable customers doing?
Dave: Are you trying to get another trip out of them or grow their basket or, you know, whatever it is that you’re trying to do.
Dave: These days, it’s, you know, through influencers or whatever else it is.
Dave: But, you know, at Orange Theory, we’ve got people to get the tattoo, you know, get our logo tattooed on them.
Dave: But people don’t get frustrated with this.
Dave: They still leave.
Dave: They still, you know, there’s still things that happen that they leave.
Dave: So I think it’s still a long-winded answer.
Dave: The loyalty is always fighting for dollars.
Dave: You know, in the hotel business, LaQuinta, you know, in the in the whether it’s a hotel, you know, or like airlines, there those are self-funded programs, as you know, you know that, you know, 5% at LaQuinta of every stay, if it’s a loyalty stay, is the top line of that program and you spend up to that.
Dave: So you’ve kind of got your own, your own budget for the program.
Dave: But still, the, you know, the CFO when you’re talking about aging the points and all those sort of things, they have to believe that the program is a positive part of the finances of the company.
Dave: You have to be, you’ve got to be a, you know, the truth teller of the program.
Dave: Always on, always talking about the program because I just, that, you know, I don’t think anything’s changed in the world where budgets are huge these days.
Dave: And, you know, if you’re doing direct mail, that always seems like the kiddie for the budget out there, where, you know, what can we cut this month?
Dave: And direct mail.
Dave: So I, you know, I just think there’s, I don’t believe that the retention side always feels like that’s going to get cut before the acquisition side.
Dave: I don’t think that’s changed.
Bill: Oh yeah, that’s, and that was the question I was going to ask you.
Bill: There’s always that tension because, you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading earnings called transcripts.
Bill: And sometimes I’ll just search for the ones that say they’re on a mission to be customer centric.
Bill: Great.
Bill: Then I’ll look through and I see a lot more talk about the acquisition programs and not as much talk about, a little dismissive talk about the loyalty program.
Bill: So I wonder, why is there that continual tension?
Bill: Because the economics prove out that loyalty works and it can create massive value.
Bill: But we tend to go back to acquisition all the time, don’t we?
Dave: Yeah, and it was real interesting being, I’ve been in the fitness business for three years now and it’s already the loyalty studies.
Dave: And it’s interesting that the fitness industry is really an industry that doesn’t play in the loyalty programs.
Dave: And we believe that our coaches provide these classes, certainly in the boutique industry, and we give the experience and that’s kind of the program.
Dave: But when I first got to Orange Theory, and I was looking at the retention attrition numbers, I was like, that’s per month?
Dave: I thought that should be the annual number.
Dave: But it’s a subscription, so it’s a pretty expensive thing, no surprise.
Dave: But I wasn’t very successful in trying to get a program launched.
Dave: We ran a program for a little bit, but as soon as it comes to annual budgets and stuff like that, it’s acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, because it’s a big, huge subscription, it’s a subscription program.
Dave: So you got to, you got to, you know, it’s never in all of my years have I talked more about keeping the bucket filled more than the buckets draining out.
Dave: That’s right.
Dave: That’s just, it’s just, and it’s, it’s just, there’s not a lot of places to play these days, other than the horrible, you know, social channels that we have to do that lead for.
Dave: But in, but in, in the, you know, kind of back to the other companies I’ve been with, they, there is investment.
Dave: And I think more, you know, talk about whether it’s Nordstrom or other places that are investing in experiential type things.
Dave: That’s really where you have to do the selling and the proving.
Dave: And that’s where the data comes into play.
Dave: That I think, you know, my biggest thing was you have to have good partners on the data side to prove out that these experiential things matter.
Dave: Because that’s where you really have to keep proving to the company that these things really matter.
Dave: Because it’s easy to perform out that if I, you know, if I know that you’re a name of brand, if you’re a Nike purist and at Nordstrom, I can tell you when a new drop is coming, that’s going to matter to you and you’re going to pick Nordstrom over everyone else.
Dave: That’s a lot of work in the store upside to make sure we can pull that off.
Dave: The data has to be there to prove that that’s changing your behavior.
Dave: You know, so the experiential police stuff I believe in, it’s just you’ve got to have the data in place to be able to prove it every single time, or else we can say, I think we’re going to back off on those things.
Bill: Yeah.
Bill: Well, so it’s interesting.
Bill: I have a theory about this because my theory is this, and test it out and you see what you think.
Bill: Acquisition campaigns don’t come with a lot of after action requirements like you run the acquisition campaign, and whatever the result is, new customer, first purchase, you hand them off to the stores effectively, and then maybe they’re just sustained by some mailers and discount email and things like that.
Bill: But when you run a loyalty program, it comes with massive overhead.
Bill: You’re making this giant commitment, right?
Bill: Put a big bet on the table and you’re saying, I’m enrolling you, now I’m making all these promises to you.
Bill: I’m going to give you value and communicate all of that.
Bill: Think about what you have to do even from a technology standpoint to run the loyalty program versus how much technology comparatively is required to run an acquisition program in ESP or in a good creative department.
Bill: So I don’t know, are you buying that or do you look at it differently?
Dave: I buy it and I think there’s a lot of, I agree with you and it feels like we set the precedent before that we’re both not necessarily on the brand acquisition side.
Dave: So we’re not the people out of conferences talking about all the people of conferences are talking about the, you know, there’s a lot of self-congratulations of people who are talking about the fancy things going on out there and there’s a lot.
Dave: It’s been an eye-opening.
Dave: But I think it’s not as complex as people make it out to be.
Dave: But I agree.
Dave: It’s like, you know, for dumbing it down to what I do in the fitness space, it’s, you know, here, 61 studios.
Dave: Here’s all the leads we drove today.
Dave: Studios, you know, it’s a different world in the fitness side, but it’s like, you know, we’ve got our lead funnel and we try and gall them up and we get them in to try their free intro and we try and get them to, you know, make the sale and we try and get them to buy the unlimited membership.
Dave: And we, you know, those are the KPIs.
Dave: It’s the lead.
Dave: It’s the book, the free intro.
Dave: Take the free intro, make the sale.
Dave: That’s it.
Dave: You know, and I, if I’m, if I’m not a team player, I can just say, hey, I got you the lead.
Dave: You didn’t make the sale.
Dave: But I’m looking at the whole intro.
Dave: But there’s a lot more that goes into it, what, you know, what the channel of the lead was, all those sort of things on the side.
Dave: You’re right.
Dave: There is, you know, on the, you know, if we look at the Nordstrom piece, you know, it’s really the, it’s not just did we retain them?
Dave: We’re trying to, you know, Nordstrom looks at Nordstrom, Nordstrom Rack, nordstrom.com, Nordstrom rack.com.
Dave: It used to be Trunk Club, Haute Look, all these different boxes.
Dave: And they had amazing data internally at Nordstrom that showed if people were in one box, there were two boxes, X plus Y.
Dave: Everything was additive, never did it take away if we got them to try a different box.
Dave: You know, so it was not just loyalty.
Dave: It was all about, you know, growing the behavior, which was, sounds easy, but which is the best way to get them into the company?
Dave: So it wasn’t just acquisition, but where is best to acquire them?
Dave: So I don’t know.
Dave: I agree with you.
Dave: But yes, the work of the loyalty was so much more complex, which meant more expensive.
Bill: More accountability, maybe?
Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave: More people.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Bill: So I talked earlier, you mentioned something about experiences a minute ago, and I talked to the founder of a company called Clickatel.
Bill: It’s a South African company, but they’re one of the leaders in these conversational commerce, these chatbots, so conversational chat.
Bill: Come a long way.
Bill: He, surprising to me, he had started this company much before I had even heard the term conversational commerce.
Bill: As a consumer, we were talking about what it was like.
Bill: But he made the comment in the course of the conversation that the customers are loyal to experiences, not as much to the brand.
Bill: I think what he went on to explain a little bit is, you could have lots of places to buy your fitness wear or your biking gear, whatever it is, online.
Bill: But it’s when you go to that chatbot and you’re asking about sizes or colors or availability or something.
Bill: That experience right there and what he’s able to do is, he has payment in the chat as well, so it takes you right through to purchase.
Bill: So it was pretty good, convenient time saving and all that.
Bill: But how do you feel that way too?
Bill: Because here’s another tension is customer experience, customer loyalty.
Bill: It’s always customer engagement.
Bill: We throw these terms around, but it seems like right now, the customer experience really is important.
Bill: That’s almost maybe the most important thing that leads to loyalty.
Bill: How do you feel about that?
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: I’ve been doing this a while and I think that if we were loyal to brands, Toys R Us would still be here, Radio Shack would still be here.
Dave: But I completely agree that people talk about the, I was reading again, talk about, I just saw another post about, someone ordered something for their dog and Chewy, their dog passed away and they said, oh, I don’t use it.
Dave: Oh, Chewy sent them a bouquet of flowers.
Dave: It’s the stuff that people do when something goes wrong, that people talk about.
Dave: It’s how brands like that.
Dave: There’s plenty of stories like that, that make you feel better.
Dave: And that’s not common.
Dave: I’ve worked for plenty of places where we wouldn’t have had the processes to allow people to do that.
Dave: You know, when I was at Proactive, we were trying to transition it from an old school infomercial where the call center was, no matter how good your experience was in clearing your skin up, the call center was designed to talk to you out of quitting.
Dave: You know, so you could have had the best experience ever, but your last experience, your last touch point was you’re so pissed off because we made it hard for you to quit.
Dave: So it was trying to transition.
Dave: We did a great customer experience touch point, how you know your death spiral, trying to first pick, you know, you’ve got acne.
Dave: So how do you pick your solution?
Dave: When you start with us, your skin is going to get worse before it gets better.
Dave: So and then, you know, it gets better.
Dave: So what do you do now?
Dave: You want to be done with it.
Dave: You should be happy.
Dave: We should celebrate that.
Dave: So that those are all the, you know, and where the touch points, how do we do that?
Dave: So how do we switch the call center to?
Dave: Should be a celebration.
Dave: That’s so great.
Dave: But it’s hard to get out of that.
Dave: You know, it’s it’s what legacy brands have so much trouble switching out of.
Dave: And I think that’s, you know, when you’re not the only game in town, when you go from proactive, which used to be the only game in town to now, every Tik Tok influencer starts their own skincare brand.
Dave: How do you get out of the way?
Dave: I’m agreeing with you.
Dave: It is about customer experience, but it’s just it’s just people figuring out how to do that.
Dave: I think that’s why startup brands, you know, I’m we talked earlier before we got on about, we’re both, you know, kind of endurance athletes.
Dave: I’m I’m a sucker for podcast.
Dave: You know, I’ve got Huell, I’ve got Elementee, I’ve got all these different things, but Elementee or Element, I’m not sure even how you say it.
Dave: They sent me hats.
Dave: They sent me new, you know, they sent me the cans when they started doing it.
Dave: The surprise and delight stuff, you know, someone asked me if you’re starting up your own direct-to-consumer brand, you need a loyalty program.
Dave: That’s like the common thing.
Dave: I said, you know, I don’t think you need a loyalty program, but you do need to show your best customers that you understand you’re their best customers and you appreciate them.
Dave: Some sort of surprise delight, some sort of, hey, we see you, we appreciate what you’re doing.
Dave: So I think the customer experience thing matters and it doesn’t have to be a loyalty, it doesn’t have to be something like that until you’re doing where you can afford it.
Dave: Because people who listen to this understand there’s a real cost to a loyalty program.
Bill: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah.
Bill: I know that it makes a lot of sense.
Bill: Let’s talk about gamification for a minute.
Bill: It’s one of those topics that it’s interesting that came up when I don’t know if the first time I really heard people talk about gamification, it was probably in the Badgeville days and so on.
Bill: So that’s probably six or eight years ago.
Bill: But in a lot of ways it didn’t transcend Badges and Leaderboards.
Bill: But I know in your special with Orange Theory, I know you’ve touched on it in a lot of your stops.
Bill: But I got to think that that whole exercise experience is gamified, isn’t it?
Bill: Because I remember going into an Orange Theory and it’s the data is on the boards up above.
Bill: If you’re super competitive, you feed off that.
Bill: If you’re a little bit more of a wallflower or beginner, you might look at it and wince, but at least it gives you motivation to do more.
Bill: But what’s your experience with gamification?
Bill: Like where would you see it applied really well?
Bill: And how does it work best to change consumer behavior?
Dave: Yeah, I go back and forth on it.
Dave: Certainly everyone tries to, in all those programs I’ve either launched or relaunched programs in all those places, everyone tries to pitch you on it.
Dave: And I’ve always been open to it.
Dave: But certainly at Orange Theory, that’s kind of what it’s built off of, you know, everyone’s name is up on the board.
Dave: And that scares the heck out of people.
Dave: It’s you know, when I, my girlfriend and her sister-in-law, I took them for a class there.
Dave: They took competitor workout classes.
Dave: And I watched them both on the treadmill, just staring at their thing the whole time.
Dave: And one of them was in the red, which is the highest.
Dave: And she was, and my daughter was coaching.
Dave: And she was in the red.
Dave: She thought she was going to get in trouble.
Dave: And she didn’t feel bad.
Dave: It’s just her heart rate was too high.
Dave: Not too high.
Dave: She had a naturally high heart rate.
Dave: My girlfriend was at green.
Dave: She wasn’t going high.
Dave: She thought she was going to get in trouble.
Dave: I’m like, stop looking at it.
Dave: Doesn’t matter.
Dave: It doesn’t matter.
Dave: It doesn’t matter.
Dave: It’s the first time.
Dave: It can work against you until you get used to it.
Dave: Everyone’s like, you know, it’s just, it takes a while till it comes into play.
Dave: It’s a great thing every time.
Dave: It’s a heart rate-based training.
Dave: That’s what it is.
Dave: But over time, what we do is we reward you for your 50th class, your 100th class.
Dave: The entire thing is based on data.
Dave: That’s the bread and butter of what Orange Theory Fitness is.
Dave: It’s gamification.
Dave: People love it.
Dave: The Reddit, Facebook groups, that’s all people talk about as we have milestones, we have benchmarks.
Dave: It’s supposed to be you versus you.
Dave: No one really is watching what other people are doing.
Dave: They really aren’t, except for a bunch of dudes in Orange Theory Fitness dudes because dudes watch what other dudes do.
Dave: But for loyalty programs, I’m a biker, so I’m on Strava, I’m on Zwift.
Dave: Those things are huge for gamification.
Dave: I’m not a bad gamification guy, but a lot of people are.
Dave: For retail hospitality programs, it’s not something that I’ve seen really…
Dave: I think in everything we do, certainly with experiences, I’ve always had to preach that it doesn’t have to work for everybody.
Dave: If it works for 10% of the people and it changes their behavior, if it does something to them, then it matters.
Dave: But it’s just like one of those things that you test, but it’s a technology bill.
Dave: It’s got to do something.
Dave: So I think one of these things, the peril is you put it in place and it’s only working for 10% of the people.
Dave: Someone else in the company who has a loud voice in the boardroom, you have to have the data to show that it matters if they have a differing opinion.
Dave: It’s always the boardroom bully who you have to be armed with data.
Dave: They have the discussion because for whatever reason, people who want to battle over things that, for whatever reason, they don’t like it, you just have to have the data.
Dave: The data might say, yeah, you’re right, it’s not working.
Dave: But you want to make sure when people are saying it’s not working, we have set up what working is and what is working or not working mean at the beginning.
Dave: That’s what drives me when we say something didn’t work versus we tested this thing.
Dave: Here’s what we learned.
Dave: That’s the thing that drives me the nuttiest after all these years of doing it, the working didn’t work piece.
Bill: Yeah.
Bill: Do you think that’s mostly cured?
Bill: Did you cure it by setting expectations upfront, like having a dashboard, having a model?
Bill: At least if somebody says this didn’t work, you can say, well, you agree to a budget based on that lift, and we actually got that lift, so.
Dave: I still have to, I still get worked up about it, but I.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bill: Well, that’s okay.
Dave: But I still work really hard on saying, let’s not say it worked or didn’t, let’s not say it didn’t work.
Dave: Let’s say we did a test and here’s what we learned.
Bill: There you go.
Bill: That’s a big difference.
Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bill: Instead of a zero sum game, it’s more like a learning game.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: I mean, it’s like an org chart.
Dave: Why do we say we’re just changing the org chart?
Dave: We don’t say it didn’t work, just like we’re changing the org chart.
Dave: We tested it, we’re going a different way.
Dave: Everything is a test.
Bill: Right.
Bill: Yeah, so true.
Bill: Let me ask you, we like to ask everybody a similar question, but curious through the course of years, your experience.
Bill: Is there one example, could it be from your personal life, but personal and professional life that just defines customer loyalty to you today?
Bill: I know you mentioned one example earlier, the chewy, rewarding, but is there anything that stands out in you?
Bill: Like, when I saw that brand do that, I realized there was an epiphany or I realized that that was something that would work.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: We talked about all the racing and everything.
Dave: I mean, I’ve been doing triathlons forever, and I’ve started doing Iron Man’s…
Dave: I’m always wary of saying what year I’ve been doing this stuff since it ages me.
Dave: So when I was 10 years old, I did my first Iron Man in 1990.
Dave: And there’s plenty of other triathlons out there.
Dave: I’m doing another Iron Man in April.
Dave: I am loyal to that brand.
Dave: It’s here in Texas.
Dave: I’m loyal to that brand.
Dave: It’s expensive.
Dave: And I could find other races at the same distance, at the same…
Dave: People bash it.
Dave: They’ve been through a lot of stuff.
Dave: But I just feel good about myself when I go do one of those races.
Dave: It’s the…
Dave: You know, they’re upstart brands right now.
Dave: That they’re, you know, they’re other things.
Dave: But I’ve stuck with them.
Dave: And it’s more of…
Dave: They’ve done…
Dave: They don’t…
Dave: I don’t know that they’ve done anything different for me.
Dave: It’s just, you know, when I…
Dave: The first time I did it, I was in the Navy.
Dave: I was on the Navy team.
Dave: We raced against the other…
Dave: It was the, you know, Hawaii Iron Man, the World Championship.
Dave: But I happened to be on the Navy team.
Dave: We raced against the other branches.
Dave: There were, you know, other…
Dave: We were sponsored by a bunch of people.
Dave: And I, you know, it wasn’t…
Dave: You’re not…
Dave: You’re typically not rewarded when you’re in the military for, you know, much.
Bill: Yeah.
Dave: I just…
Dave: My mom and sister came out and watched.
Dave: And I just…
Dave: I felt really good about myself.
Dave: And there was…
Dave: I’ve, you know, crossing that finish line and every Ironman finish line I’ve crossed since then is something that…
Dave: When I’m needing something, you can pull back to that.
Dave: So it’s a brand that I love.
Dave: When I’m ever asked to, you know, answer those questions, what brands do you love?
Dave: The brand that I look to.
Dave: So that’s…
Dave: They haven’t done anything.
Dave: They haven’t sent me any, you know, surprise delight.
Dave: But I’ll spend the, you know, I’ll spend the money to go do, you know, at least a year with them.
Dave: So I just, it’s a long-lasting brand that I, you know, I’m loyal to them.
Bill: It’s probably a good example of emotional loyalty.
Bill: If you want to grab another buzzword.
Bill: I mean, it’s people like, people will identify their values with the brand’s values.
Bill: And I’ve had the same experience, you know, just because you finished doesn’t mean they don’t discount the merch and the tent.
Bill: They don’t give you too much of a break on any future registrations, but you know what?
Bill: We show up again and again, don’t we?
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: And I don’t like even the one in April.
Dave: I think I, my daughter goes to Clemson and I think her ring ceremony is that same weekend.
Dave: I might not be able to do it and I probably won’t get my money back.
Dave: And I’m like, gosh darn it.
Dave: But I’ll just sign up for one in the fall.
Bill: You’ll be back again.
Dave: Yeah.
Bill: All right.
Bill: We’ll have to find one in the future where we can go together.
Dave: That’d be great.
Bill: That’d be fun.
Bill: Yeah.
Bill: So I can always catch a tailwind off you.
Bill: So all right, Dave Sims.
Bill: Thank you very much.
Bill: I really appreciate you being here.
Bill: I love your perspectives.
Bill: It’s like the long view of this business and I have a feeling there’s a lot more to come for you as well.
Bill: So thanks for your time, your insights and let’s stay in touch.
Dave: Yeah.
Dave: I’ll see you at the next, maybe CRMC this year.
Bill: Good.
Bill: I hope you plan on that.
Bill: Thanks for being part of this Wiser Loyalty Marketing series with Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Bill: We’ll see you here again next time.
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