00:00 – Intro • 00:41 – on new content in 2nd edition of ‘Loyalty Programs' • 02:22 – on 2 key new trends in loyalty post COVID • 04:35 – on Loyalty&Reward Co. essential 8 principles’ • 06:32 – on 2 loyalty case studies that standout – Rib Curl Club and Australian Venue Co. 'The Pass'.
GLO
00:00 – Intro
00:41 – on new content in 2nd edition of ‘Loyalty Programs”
02:22 – on 2 key new trends in loyalty post COVID
04:35 – on Loyalty&Reward Co. essential 8 principles’
06:32 – on 2 loyalty case studies that standout – Rib Curl Club and Australian Venue Co. Pass
Read full transcript below.
0:00
GLO: Dear Philip, it’s a pleasure to have you with us at GLO, and congratulations on the publication of the 2nd edition of your book “Loyalty Programs”. Your first edition became a manual for anybody interested in loyalty, rewards, and customer experience and we’re looking forward to hearing your insights and details about your second edition.
Philip Shelper, Loyalty & Reward Co.: I’m Philip Shelper, the CEO of Loyalty&Reward Co. – we’re based in New York, London, Sydney, and Melbourne and we design the world’s best loyalty programs for the world’s best brands.
00:41
GLO: Your company is very well known and you became one of the pillars of the academic research about loyalty programs, KPIs and among our members at the Global Loyalty Organization we know that the heads of loyalty and the teams look at your books as the manuals for structuring and for analyzing their programs. How is the second edition different from your first edition and what new insights you have come up with?
Philip Shelper, Loyalty & Reward Co.: We had always planned to write a 2nd edition so when we wrote the 1st edition we said every two years let’s write another edition and always keep it fresh. So as we progressed post the launch of the 1st edition we were collecting lots of additional materials, case studies, academic research, and new loyalty psychology studies, so we had a lot of material to put into the 2nd edition. But when we came to start writing, we thought that we were really busy as an organization, so let’s just make a small number of changes, e.g. we’ll update some of the case studies, we’ll put in a little bit of additional content, but let’s get it launched just so that we can say we’ve launched a 2nd edition. But we got a bit carried away and we ended up spending 10 months writing 2nd edition. The new edition has about 25% more content, it’s also got two new chapters in it. We completely rewrote two chapters so there’s a lot more there. We also did a complete refresh of all of the case studies so there are now 170 case studies in there as well.
02:22
GLO: Your 1st edition was written during the COVID period and the second edition as you mentioned you started to write in the beginning of 2023. Was there anything in the last year and a half that significantly changed your views or your approach to analyzing loyalty or thinking about loyalty?
Philip Shelper, Loyalty & Reward Co.: Yes, there were two things. The first one – we realized during COVID and the more recent economic downturn how important loyalty programs are for the survival of some companies. If you think about the US airlines for instance many of them only survived because they could draw on the enormous resources of their loyalty programs. Supermarkets are having a massive upswing at the moment which also includes a really big flight for customers to their loyalty programs as well. The programs support the businesses but also the programs tend to fluctuate based on what the economic conditions are at the time. We are fascinated by this phenomenon happening in the world – loyalty programs have such a big impact.
The other thing that annoys us I guess is what we call “a marketing assault” and that is where companies get their customers to sign up for a loyalty program purely as a way to build out a marketing database. Then they just smash customers with emails. I’ll give you a great example – I just did a post on LinkedIn where a supermarket program that I belong to has sent me 13 emails in four days. It’s crazy! I don’t want to hear from them that often and the offers that they’re putting forward a lot of them just aren’t relevant to me at all.
We did a big review of the loyalty marketing chapter within the book with an additional focus on life cycle strategies and personalization of content as a way to try to explain to companies how they should be doing marketing and not just hitting the base every time they need additional revenue.
04:35
GLO: In your second addition you disclosed ‘Loyalty&Reward essential eight principles’ which was previously a proprietary IP of your company and was quite valuable. What did motivate you to release it to the market and can you talk a little bit more in detail about what exactly these principles are?
Philip Shelper, Loyalty & Reward Co.: It’s a good question – we actually wrote a chapter with the ‘essential eight principles’ for the 1st edition of the book and then my team advised me not to publish it because there is so much IP in it. We developed the eight essential principles through a combination of an extensive study of academic research. It indicates the principles that make a loyalty program successful, a lot of loyalty psychology exploration, and of course, joining hundreds of loyalty programs and exploring all of the principles that we feel are essential and continue to be replicated in in best practice loyalty programs.
We’ve been using these principles for quite a few years whenever we’re running a health check or review of an existing loyalty program. We’ll use that as a framework to explore how a program might be performing as well – so it’s a very, very useful tool. Why did we include it in the second edition? It’s a really good question and it’s probably a really dumb idea. We probably shouldn’t be sharing that type of information. To be honest, I think we want the book to be something that can be used by loyalty practitioners all around the world and we feel that one of the big challenges in the world for loyalty practitioners is the absence of access to enough good quality information that they can use to be better at what they do.
So I like the idea that people can use the essential principles to think more constructively about what makes for a good loyalty program and have a framework that they can use to influence their thinking so it’s out there now and I hope people have the opportunity to make good use of it.
06:42
GLO: Can’t agree more with you – at GLO, while we are bombarded with a lot of marketing and CX information the quality insights on loyalty and rewards are very few and rare. I can assure you that we heard from our Global Loyalty Organization members that your book is on the table of lots of the heads of loyalty – so thank you for publishing a second edition. You mentioned that you’ve added two chapters and included a lot of the case studies were there any that stand out to you and that you think are worth mentioning for people to take a closer look?
Philip Shelper, Loyalty & Reward Co.: There are two case studies that I love in the book – both are examples from Australia, although we do look globally in terms of everything that we include in the book.
The first one is Rip Curl – Club Rip Curl, which launched late last year. It’s a fantastic program. Members can join and can spend at Rip Curl and earn points which they can redeem on future transactions – a very straightforward points-based program. But it has this incredibly unique beautiful feature – a GPS-linked watch, which when you go surfing actually counts the number of waves that you surf. Rip Curl introduced a genius element within the program which is that members can earn points for surfing waves and then they can also redeem their points for a donation to the local surf lives saving club. I think it’s just so clever because it’s quintessentially Rip Curl and it stands for everything that their brand stands for and it’s something that no other brand would possibly be able to replicate. It’s what we call an ‘X-factor’ in loyalty programs and we wish that more loyalty programs out there had an ‘X’ or something like that that makes them sing and pop and make people want to talk about them.
The other one is a program that we designed with one of our clients – Australian Venue Co. They’ve got 210 bars and pubs across Australia and we worked with them to design an app-based program called ‘The Pass”. Members can download ‘The Pass’, they can register a debit or credit card and when they go to any Australian venue they scan a QR code that opens up the app and they can order food and drink to be delivered to their table and pay through the app. When they do that they earn points, which they can redeem for vouchers to be spent on future transactions but also they can buy and redeem gift cards within the app and they can nominate their local community Sports Club to be involved in the program so that when they spend a percentage of what they spend gets donated as a rebate every 3 months. So once again a nice X- factor element within the program that ties the bar or the pub to the local community.
Source: GLO
