Eye on the Future (Loyalty Expo 2009)

The Loyalty 360 Expo in Hollywood, Florida, offered yet another chance for our association to show the industry how far we’ve come in one scant year. We’ve partnered with the International Marketing Association, the Motivation Show, the Petroleum Convenience Alliance for Technology Standards, and the National Restaurant Association.

We’ve just rolled out an innovative best practices database on the newly launched website. Look for us to roll out councils, offer more webinar series and focus on innovations in the time of economic uncertainty.

In short, our goal is to find the answer to today’s vital questions on how to retain loyalty, how to engage consumers and how to measure effectively.

But we can’t drag the baggage of our past along on this journey if we intend to get to our destination, as Timothy Keiningham, global chief strategy officer and executive vice president of IPSOS Loyalty , made clear in his keynote address. “We see with our brains, not our eyes, so we accept the myths in this industry,” he told the audience of 300-plus. “That’s a problem.”

Unfortunately, our brains are wired to see things consistent with our normal world — we do not see things we think are impossible. And as marketers, there’s a second twist: Our brains see patterns in everything. As a result, Keiningham says, we think that correlations are the cause, which means we buy into myths such as customers become more profitable the longer they stay with the company. (Wrong. Buyers fall into either profitable, break-even or unprofitable buckets.

You simply want to encourage the profitables to stay, not everyone in a blanket statement.) Or we believe loyal customers pay higher prices. (Just the opposite: they are quite price sensitive because they’ve learned how we tick.)

“There is no magic bullet, no simple solution to loyalty,” Keiningham said. “We have to satisfy customer needs and wants at a sustainable profit. It’s the last part marketers forget.”

Coming soon: a glimpse of how other loyalty marketing players are using what we know today to reshape our future as seen at the Loyalty Expo.

(Written by By Julie Sturgeon)