00:00 – Majid Al Futtaim's vision, 'SHARE' loyalty • 02:40 – 'SHARE' benefits: convenience, unified experience • 07:40 – Co-branded credit cards • 13:36 – Loyalty linked with sustainability • 18:28- Partnerships, global expansion relevance. • 22:09 – Catering to Dubai tourists • 24:24 – Innovation: AI, NFTs, digital wallets • 26:18 – Future: payment-loyalty convergence • 27:10 – 1'000'000 points question • 28:10 – Magic wand question • 29:43 – Advice: customer focus, data-driven decisions.
GLO
00:00 – On Majid Al Futtaim’s vision and loyalty program ‘Share’.
02:40 – On ‘SHARE’ loyalty benefits, emphasizing customer convenience, ease of use, and a unified experience through a single loyalty currency and app.
07:40 – Expansion of ‘SHARE’ loyalty with the co-branded credit card (Majid Al Futtaim, Visa, First Abu Dhabi Bank), meeting post-pandemic needs, and adapting to customer preferences for a seamless experience from groceries to entertainment.
13:36 – Transactional to experiential loyalty models nd how they can be achieved through relevancy, recognition and emotional engagement with customers through initiatives like through SHARE Tiers.
18:28 – Importance of partnerships, considering global expansion, collaborating with local and international brands to extend loyalty benefits, and enhancing customer relevance.
22:09 – Addressing the unique Dubai transit tourism market by ensuring ‘SHARE’ caters to transient customers through instant earn and burn loyalty.
24:24 – Innovation and technology in loyalty, with a focus on AI, NFTs, and digital wallets to enhance personalization and customer experience.
26:18 – Future loyalty industry prediction: convergence of payment and loyalty to enhance customer value and experience.
27:10 – Personal question on spending 1 million points.
28:10 – The future of SHARE Loyalty programme: Individualized loyalty programme through enhanced personalization and increasing the presence of customers voices in the advancement of SHARE
29:43 – Advice to young professionals in loyalty: prioritize customer needs and leverage data for optimal decision-making.
Transcript:
00:30
GLO: Dear Kashmira, thank you so much for welcoming the Global Loyalty Organization in Dubai at the headquarters of Majid Al Futtaim .
Kashmira Motiwalla: Thank you for being here and it’s our pleasure to host you here.
0:40
GLO: We are excited to learn more about Majid Al Futtaim , one of the largest retail holdings in the UAE and across the Middle East, with an impressive global presence across 16 countries. Can you tell us a little bit about the marketing and loyalty approach at Majid Al Futtaim , and what are your vision and strategic priorities?
Kashmira Motiwalla: I think the most important thing is to lay the foundation of what we believe in. It all started with one man’s vision in 1992 – Majid Al Futtaim , who believed in changing the way people transacted, customers shopped, and customers experienced entertainment and leisure by creating great moments for everyone every day. Everything that all of us do at Majid Al Futtaim is very much focused on bringing that vision to life, and the loyalty program is no different. We have a loyalty program predominantly in the UAE, which brings all of the Majid Al Futtaim real estate together in one loyalty program. We’re talking about everything from grocery (Carrefour) to our cinemas (Vox) and children’s entertainment (Magic Planet). We’ve got a vast number of shopping malls. We’ve got the largest number of shopping malls in the UAE – Mall of the Emirates and City Center Malls, plus we’ve got lifestyle brands such as Crate & Barrel, Lululemon, etc. All of these different brands come together in one loyalty ecosystem called ‘Share’.
In addition to that, we also have partnerships. The rationale for our loyalty program, more than anything else, is how we create an ecosystem for our customers that they can live within and conduct their everyday lives with us. How do we become core to what they do on an everyday basis? That’s the philosophy that we’ve looked at in terms of what we’ve built for the loyalty program.
02:40
GLO: That’s quite impressive. What is unique about your program, Share, is that it’s not only a single food retail brand or shopping mall loyalty program but it’s a customer journey from the moment he or she enters the mall and then spends the time through grocery shopping or entertainment, as you said. Can you give us your insights on the benefits of having this one brand of loyalty ‘Share” rewards, which encompasses all of the underlying separate brands? It’s quite a difficult task.
Kashmira Motiwalla: It’s quite a difficult task because what you’re doing is bringing together brands and, most importantly, different business models. Each business model has different requirements. So it is quite complex in that regard, but I think the first thing when we talked about why we were doing this, or what we would do, was to unite and unify the Majid Al Futtaim real estate from a customer experience perspective. Each brand has a different way of dealing with the customers. But how do you create that layer above that says, “Okay, this is a unified ecosystem”? Also, when we were looking at creating ‘Share” Rewards, we understood from our customers that they were fed up with having multiple loyalty programs. So we thought, “How can we make this journey easier for the customer? How can we create ease of use but bring them value?” We felt that if we unified our ecosystem under one currency and gave them everything in the palm of their hand (e.g. a digital-first loyalty program), everything that the customer experiences they experience through that app. I think that was one of the key things we did when we launched it.
Also when we launched ‘Share’ we tried to look at it from a slightly different perspective. Loyalty programs have a reputation for being a little more rigid and not as flexible, not always thinking from the customers’ perspective, so we turned it on its head.
There were three pillars that we identified. First, we wanted it to be about ‘We, not me”. What do I mean by that? We want it to be sociable; we want it to be sharable. So, if you look at our program, it’s got a family program because, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a very large ecosystem, and you and your family live in it together. We have family accounts; we allow customers to share their points with their families and people they feel they want to share their points with.
The second part is that we wanted to make it truly social and flexible more than anything else – give them a choice because the rigidity of programs comes in because they’re not always flexible. For example, sometimes, I want to transfer my points to you, and I have to pay to transfer my points. So we made a conscious decision not to do that, not to put hurdles right at the very front so that you have to collect, and collect, and collect before you can get value back from it. By doing that, we created a currency that was flexible, and that the customer could use whenever they wanted – whether you want to use your currency, your points to buy groceries, or you want to use your points to buy the next best handbag that has come out, that’s entirely up to the customer.
Then the third one was ‘Being smarter than smart’, and what I mean by that is what I said earlier about technology. We used technology to lead us from the very beginning. We’re not slaves to technology; we just want to make sure that we use technology to give customers the most seamless experience we possibly can. All of those elements came into creating something unique for the customer – it allowed them to carry on with their daily life while still getting value out of it.
It meant a lot of work in the background with each of our business units. What was very important was that all of them had bought into that idea and all of the business units worked to make it happen. We had to bear in mind that our grocery business may have different margins from our luxury business and therefore the value back to the customer had to be modified based on which business unit they were participating in.
‘Share’ is not just within the Majid Al Futtaim ecosystem which is already very vast. What we tend to do is expand it so the program is expansive – we have a co-branded loyalty credit card card by which customers can earn anywhere in the world, it doesn’t matter, but they bring it back into the ecosystem. We have other partnerships e.g. travel or health, etc. We constantly look for different ways in which we can become a bigger and bigger part of our customers’ lives.
07:40
GLO: It’s very inspiring what you are saying because effectively not only did you manage to create a ‘superbrand’ with the ‘Share’ program, which effectively stands above as an umbrella for all of your underlying brands, but you also ventured into different sectors – you mentioned co-brand and I think the recent co-branded card between Majid Al Futtaim , Visa and First Abu Dhabi Bank is a quite a good indication on how you tap into new technologies. Can I ask you about the customer’s needs and wants? Since the pandemic and with access to the co-brand card and through different retailers in your ecosystem, how do you see customers’ demands towards loyalty changing, and how are you able to satisfy the changing needs of the customer as he/she grows from pure groceries and F&B, to let’s say entertainment and maybe health care services?
Kashmira Motiwalla: A couple of things to mention. If we look at what customers want today, I think ease, convenience, and speed are paramount. I think that the need for those has grown quite dramatically, especially since COVID and also the ability to be able to engage on a digital platform. There are other elements around sustainability and social responsibility. So, if we look at those different elements from our perspective, what we do with technology, we are very fortunate to have within Majid Al Futtaim , a fintech lab. So, we partner with that fintech lab to create payment solutions that make life much easier for our customers. For example, we have something called ‘SHARE Pay’, a technology, e.g., a digital wallet with a tokenised card – that allows customers to link their credit card, any credit card, or multiple credit cards if they wish to that digital wallet. Then it sits in a mobile’s digital wallet; whether it’s an Apple wallet or it’s a Google Wallet, it sits in the wallet. When the customer goes to a store and they pay, they instantly earn. So you use that wallet for instant earn & burn and for payment.
We’re very focused on bringing payment and loyalty together – we think we see that as a new frontier, and I’ve seen more and more convergence between payment and loyalty. We’re also bringing into the UAE BNPL very shortly; we’re going to be allowing our customers or helping our customers benefit from BNPL (buy now pay later) through the app, the ‘Share” app, through what we call ‘SHARE pay’, e.g. our digital wallet. That will make our malls the biggest physical ecosystem where a customer can use BNPL across the board. That one part that’s very important to us.
Today we don’t effectively take that corporate vision and translate it into a customer vision. How do we get our customers to conserve more water? How do we get them to leave a smaller footprint? We’re working on that, but we do things with our malls and our brands. For example, in Carrefour, we’re stopping plastic, so we encourage our members to give up plastic use, e.g. not using single-use plastic, and we incentivise them with points.
Social responsibility – we get our members to donate their points to various causes. There’s a lot that’s happened in this region – we allow our members to choose which cause they want to be able to donate to. More importantly, for example, we always had a mechanism whereby somebody could donate or share their points with their family members. When COVID happened, what we realised was that our members were keen on giving to anyone that they felt had a need, so we opened it up to everyone so you could donate it to a friend who was in need or anybody who saw and we don’t charge a transfer fee. We haven’t shut it down we continue to do that. So, there are different ways to bring social responsibility and sustainability.
The final thing, when you look at loyalty programs, is about being transparent and forthright with your customers. We try and do that very consciously because that’s really about creating trust. We focus on that. You rightfully said ‘Share’ is a brand; ‘Share’ is almost a public brand for Majid Al Futtaim . We are a retail conglomerate at the end of the day, so it is imperative that we do things right to be able to build trust in the ‘parent’ brand that we have.
13:36
GLO: It’s quite interesting and inspiring to see that you are trying to find a way of pairing loyalty and sustainability. Loyalty can help a large conglomerate to achieve sustainability goals and vice versa. This year’s Arabian Travel Market topic that we covered at the Global Loyalty Organisation panel was an evolution of loyalty from transactional (pure earning points models) to experiential loyalty, as according to the latest research, customers want more experiences, more “wow factor”. You can observe all generations of customers, from the older people who are used more to savings and discounts to the younger generations, Gen Z, who are constantly on social media and online. What is a magic formula to keep the attention and loyalty of these younger generations?
Kashmira Motiwalla: Good question. I think, at the end of the day, it’s really about relevance. How do you ensure you’re relevant to the customer? How do you give them what they need? How do you personalise? What do we do to ensure that we cater to both sides of the equation? I have a colleague who talks about “real loyalty”, not “deal loyalty”. I firmly believe that you need both aspects because customers expect value back. No matter where on the economic scale you are, nobody can do away without saying, “I won’t take points for that” or “I won’t take value back for that”. There’s always that aspect of earning. But then there is the element of recognition. Then, there is the element of building emotional engagement with our members. One of the things we did recently is we co-created our tiers. We decided that we, as you’ve rightfully said, we’re a complex organisation, e.g. we have everything from groceries to luxury, and those are our two bookends and everything else in the middle. So how do you create a program, a tiered membership that resonates with all the customers and is meaningful to all the customers? Rather than trying to do it ourselves and thinking about it ourselves, we decided to co-create with our members, so we ran a beta version for about nine months, where we trialed different benefits. We constantly checked in with our members to see whether those benefits resonated with them or didn’t resonate with them, what was working, what was not working, and then we launched our tiers in November. Now, most of the benefits of those tiers are engagement models. For example, if you’re a top member, you have access to two luxurious lounges in our malls, or you get VIP parking. You’d be surprised how much our members want VIP parking more than anything else. It was really about creating that emotional connection beyond just the transaction – e.g. inviting them to key events, a lot of work with our tenants, whether it’s movie premieres, or being able to come and experience fine dining. We focus on those added benefits, which are a recognition of who they are for us.
We’re called ‘Share’ for a reason. We could have been called Majid Al Futtaim Rewards, but we’re called ‘Share’ because we believe in creating great moments for everyone every day by sharing them with the people you love. So we create opportunities to make sure that when our members engage with us, they’re able to engage with the people that they love, too. So we find different ways and means of bringing that into it.
We’re also looking at gamification – how we use gamification and personalisation to cater to the customer’s needs.
There’s so much in the space of loyalty, and I think people sometimes think of loyalty just as airline or hotel loyalty programs. Hotel loyalty and airline loyalty programs are also very emotive, but they tend to have a fairly standard structure, though more and more are trying to become lifestyle programs, too. But I think when you think of a conglomerate like us or an ecosystem of brands like us, there are no limits.
18:28
GLO: That’s quite interesting, and I would love to probe your insights a little bit more on that because at Global Loyalty Organisation and our latest study, Global Loyalty Predictions 2024, the expansion and rise of partnerships was one of the key trends that we saw. A lot of companies that were much more ‘territorial’ before or traditional, now, post-pandemic, definitely are opening up and offering the customers this flexibility. You are uniquely positioned because you have enough brands within your holding to give the customer the flexibility of spending from retail shopping to entertainment, and by this, you satisfy the lifestyle and experientiality component. What is your view of partnerships with brands outside the Majid al-Futtaim group? Also, now you’re present in more than 16 countries – what about the big players in other countries, where do you have a presence?
Kashmira Motiwalla: First and foremost, I think partnerships are core to any loyalty program. I think you use partnerships to expand the scope of your ecosystem; you use partnerships to make sure that you are relevant to the customer because you want to be in verticals that mean something to the customer and where they’re going to get value. So I think that they’re critical. If we look typically at airline loyalty programs they are becoming a little more expansive; they are getting into more retail. But what is critical is that it has to be a mutually beneficial relationship. You tend to still see some airlines that tend to want retail partners, but they want the redemptions only towards the airline. And I think, if anything, COVID has taught us that it needs to be a little more expansive than that. Because if you are only focused on what it means to the company but not what it means to your customer, then you’re always going to lag. Most airline loyalty programs have a very thin sliver of customers at the very top that are driving it, and that is in the tiers, but they’ve got a huge long tail in their base tier. What is most relevant and meaningful to them to keep them coming back, too? So I think that there is a huge opportunity in that space, and I think we’ve all got to find a way of making it work.
In terms of other countries, our large markets where we have bigger ecosystems are typically Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and Egypt. What we are looking at over there, first and foremost, is how we, Majid Al Futtaim , maximise usage of our ecosystem and then again tie with different players in that space to create an ecosystem relevant to our customers. Financial partners are core to any loyalty program. But how do you take a little further? Is it just about co-branded credit cards? Or do you want to look at other opportunities around? If you look at the GCC market, remittances are a huge part. Is that something that you could bring in now that we’ve got digital banking? What do you do around that space? So there are lots of opportunities. It doesn’t have to just be a pure ‘points-to-points’ play but also collaboration on data, collaboration on personalisation, collaboration on tiered benefits, and various other benefits. There are ways and means of finding that collaboration and making it work.
22:09
GLO: Another major factor that you have to face is that Dubai has become one of the top three hubs for global travel and tourism, and the customers that you have here are different, slightly different, from the other large cities because there is such a large proportion of transit tourism. What is your approach and magic formula for actually tapping into those customers who are at your malls and are shopping with your brands, staying in some of your hotels, and visiting Ski Dubai? How do you keep them happy and attracted while they don’t reside here?
Kashmira Motiwalla: That’s a good question and is one of the key things, first and foremost, from a core program perspective because there is a fair amount of transiency in this market. What we’ve got to do is make sure that we are constantly acquiring and trying to retain as many customers as possible. As far as visitors to the market, I think this part of the world has a lot of repeat visitors. So getting them to become part of the program is something that we focus on. Also those who are one-time visitors, I would say that one of the benefits of the ‘Share’ program is that our currency is ‘instant earn and instant burn’, so I can collect if I’m here for 5 days only while I’m shopping in the mall I can collect points in one place and then go and spend it in another. You don’t have to wait; you don’t have to accumulate a lot of points before you can use them. What we tend to see is that there are two different types of customers – one is a customer that uses it as a currency; we tend to see a lot of that customers just go instead of paying they’ll burn their points, and then they’ll go on again, and they’ll burn their points. Then, others will hold it for something massive. So I think we’ve got the mechanisms to be able to bring that customer and provide that customer with value, but we also tie up with organisations like the economic department or our telecommunications partner at Etisalat to look at how we can bring some more value to our customers through different initiatives and different incentives.
24:24
GLO: You touched upon this in your previous answer on fintech and that you are a leader in innovation in the UAE. On our side, at Global Loyalty Organisation we saw some of the large players tapping their fingers into OpenAI and ChatGPT, blockchain, personalisation, gamification, and NFTs. What technology makes you excited in the field of loyalty?
Kashmira Motiwalla: Technology and innovation are a core part of Majid Al Futtaim ’s DNA, so we are trialing various things. We have done something in the NFT space with our ‘Lifestyle’ brand. We are also focusing a lot on AI and how we use AI as a means to an end, not AI, for the sake of AI. How do we use AI to drive personalisation? It would be ideal to be able to say to a customer sometime in the future: “You know ‘SHARE is very different from you than it is for you’. So what I get out of SHARE is not simply through the offers but the actual construct of the program. If we could ever get to that world where it’s relevant to you and only to you and get it to the segment of one, that would be amazing – to be able to use AI in that capacity – to use AI, to scale AI, to understand AI. We are focused on AI because we believe it will allow us to do things quicker and make many more payments. We’ve already talked about it, but more importantly, we just believe in using technology to constantly innovate to improve the experience for the customer, no matter what that might be. We’re a pretty open-minded company we’ll go where we need to go to get the best customer experience out to our customers.
26:18
GLO: If we look into the future, what will be your one prediction for the loyalty industry globally and potentially for Majid Al Futtaim ?
Kashmira Motiwalla: That’s quite easy for me- I would say it’s around payment. It’s about the convergence of payment and loyalty because what I have seen in the last year to two years in everything that we’ve been doing is that payment allows by combining those two elements through our technology platforms allows us to create value for our customers it allows us to create a superior experience, a seamless experience, ease of use. I believe that’s where it will continue to go because it is ultimately about creating an experience that the customers love and the value they get back. So, payment and loyalty are what I’m going to go with.
27:10
GLO: It is a tradition at Global Loyalty Organisation to ask three personal questions as we would love to know more about our global loyalty leaders and how they operate and think. If you had 1 million points of Miles, where would you spend them?
Kashmira Motiwalla: For me, it’s not so much about where I would spend it. It’s more about who I would spend it for or with. I have two amazing godsons. I have an amazing family, and I would want to use that to give them what they would like. It could be very much a million miles or points – it is a great thing, so whether they want to travel, whether they want it for their education, depending on where you could spend it, but it would be for them.
28:10
GLO: You are the head of one of the largest UAE loyalty programs. If you had a magic wand and, in one instance, you could add any feature or technology to ‘Share’ rewards – what would that be?
Kashmira Motiwalla: I’m going to be cheeky and say two things. The first one was what I mentioned a little bit earlier, and that was I’d like to be able to create an individualised loyalty program for each one of our customers to be able to say to them here are the benefits only you get because it is about everything you want and it’s about everything you do. I’d like to do that. We’ve got 4 million members, and to be able to say to each customer this is just for you, I’d love to be able to do that. Not exactly sure how I’ll do that, but I’d love to be able to do that.
And then there’s a pet project that I have had at the back of my mind for a very long time I would like to give loyalty members a bigger say in their loyalty program so I would love to create a loyalty shareholding – create a loyalty program that members get shares in and have a voice in. I think there’s a way there are ways and means of doing it because then what it means is the customers are vested in you and they can get benefit from it not just when they’re with you but if they have to move on and they go to another country they can pass those shares on to somebody else so they still get value out.
29:43
GLO: I think that something is interesting and unique, and it’s the first time we’re hearing it. GLO is a network of loyalty and customer experience professionals globally. Some of our members are quite experienced, with 20-30 years of experience, and some of them are quite young. If you could advise the young Kashmira just starting in the industry of loyalty and customer relations, what would that advice be?
Kashmira Motiwalla: Two things. One is customer, customer, customer. We all go in thinking we know what the customer wants but we need to ask the customer. So for me asking the customer I think that’s been one of my biggest learnings, especially in Majid Al Futtaim . Putting the customer at the core and then trying different benefits, experimenting before you launch. I think that is something that I would have done better if I was telling my younger self. Then, the power of data. I think that most companies have data if not, it could be more about the data they have a very broad ecosystem, data but I still don’t think we use it well to make the right decisions. I don’t think we use it enough in decision-making. I would say just be conscious of the power of data and use it optimally.
GLO: Thank you so much. It was insightful and we really appreciate your time hopefully we can see you next year and see what innovations Majid Al Futtaim brought in.
Kashmira Motiwalla: We look forward to that and thank you so much for your time.
Source: GLO
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