Welcome to the electrifying world of CES 2024, where the latest in tech innovation takes center stage! But it's not just about gadgets and gizmos; it's a deeper tale of loyalty. The tech giants, our Goliaths, use their legacy, innovation, and integrated ecosystems to maintain a firm grip on consumer loyalty ahead of the start-up David’s.

Uncover insights from Motivforce's latest research on channel partner loyalty programs. Learn strategies to navigate mixed feelings, foster genuine gratitude, and boost overall program ROI.

Dive into the intricacies of loyalty and incentive marketing, and discover the importance of personalised strategies, analytics, and the evolving nature of loyalty programs.

Part 1 of our cost of loyalty trilogy. We start with costs to consider when running a loyalty program. Firms have to navigate very choppy business waters these days. Markets seem to be caught in a broadening whirlwind of parallel crises that are systemically impacting business-as-usual. Covid, the War in Ukraine, the energy crisis, inflation, stagflation, the interest rate crisis, the soon-to-arrive mortgage crisis and, overall, a huge cost-of-living crisis.

Facebook’s latest re-branding to Meta has created both excitement and puzzlement in the global world of business. But what does this mean for loyalty marketing? Should loyalty marketing embrace this ecosystem and does it hold a strategic promise for corporate brands?

Renewable loyalty still has a way to go to find all the pieces in the puzzle. At Motivforce R&D we are dedicated to helping clients, thought-piece by thought-piece. We are happy to share four of our thoughts:

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are a metaverse landmark and something that program managers need to know about as they offer intriguing and real opportunities to future-proof loyalty programmes. Before we dive into the relevance for loyalty marketers, it is good to create some clarity around NFTs.

Facebook’s latest re-branding to Meta has created both excitement and puzzlement in the global world of business. But what does this mean for loyalty marketing? Should loyalty marketing embrace this ecosystem and does it hold a strategic promise for corporate brands?

B2B rewards programs are customer retention solutions with specific features and loyalty logic designed to help the companies to establish brand loyalty with the businesses that they sell to. Organisations in this vertical aim at growing their market share, by ensuring that the existing clients or contacts stay loyal, satisfied, and engaged.

It’s important to realise that habits are developed and maintained through two mechanisms: nudging and gratification. To help you kick the habit of just focusing on true loyalty, we suggest you reflect on three key issues, and one caveat as follows:

Gamification is the use of game-play mechanics for non-game applications and it has grown in popularity as a loyalty program tactic. Indeed, when used effectively digital games have achieved fantastic results.

 Equally, there have been numerous examples where the gamification execution has failed to deliver. This can be extremely problematic for businesses as the financial investment and staff resources required to design and deploy gamification can be considerable.

 The top three reasons why gamification tactics and campaigns failing to deliver the desired ROI have been identified as:

Internal misalignment often begins with a lack of a strategic vision, while clarity starts with a clear sales, marketing and loyalty strategy. Developing a cohesive strategy educates the entire company on the expectations. A clear and complete vision of the program will pre-empt a “let’s-slash-the-loyalty-budget” attitude. Educating company stakeholders is an ongoing process. Like anything else, if they don’t understand its value, you are not going to get their buy-in.

A GOOD PLACE TO START IS TO IDENTIFY A NUMBER OF COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS;

Gamification is the use of game-play mechanics for non-game applications and there are many case studies illustrating the increased motivation when game elements are incorporated into work activities. The closed nature of the audience and our access to detailed analytics allows us to precisely manage the effectiveness of the use of games in our programmes.  

‘Social Loyalty’ has been gaining momentum over the past five years as an effective strategy to drive engagement, enablement and sales performance. Interestingly, many companies are still slow to embrace social media into their loyalty programs due to concerns that  they cannot control the conversation. However,  it is now apparent that participation,  as opposed to control, is the most effective way to drive participant behavior.

Loyalty and incentive programs attract, motivate and reward your best customers and there is no doubt that they can be very powerful marketing tools – their success has been well documented in industry case studies, academic literature and loyalty marketing awards programs.

Your best customers are the ones that listen to and respond to your loyalty promise.  But delivering on that promise is highly dependent on structuring an effective program. All too often loyalty programs fail to deliver their promise not only to participants; they also fail to meet the high expectations of senior management.

Thus, to deliver on the ‘spectacle’ of a loyalty program, it’s vital we work on the ‘science’ behind it. Here are 8 key elements to applying this science.

Whilst a lot of time and money is spent creating brand and positioning, little effort is spent on developing the “loyalty avatar” that will be used to communicate to  program participants, both formally and informally.

Motivforce is in line for a host of accolades over the next few months as we’ve been shortlisted for three high profile awards programs with our clients IBM, Lenovo and Celebrity Cruises.

The future of loyalty programs is mobile. This mantra has been reiterated across many loyalty marketing industry trend reports. It is a mantra that clearly has face value. In fact, it is a no-brainer, as much of our life now revolves around our little handhelds. Most loyalty programs are migrating to mobile platforms, allowing their members instant access any place, any time. Being able to check your points balance, the latest reward additions or quickly swiping through a learning module in a client’s parking lot definitely ups the convenience factor. But, it does not guarantee an engaging mobile program experience. That is why a number of forward-looking brands have started to engage their members by inviting them to share their ‘must-share-moments’ with the brand and explore the face value of the mobile camera.

In our conversations with organizations that are assessing B2B loyalty and incentive programs, a number of negative perceptions inevitably surface.

Here are the top 5 myths about loyalty programs and our evidence as to why they simply aren’t true. 

Our research has shown greater loyalty (measured by sales and other valued added behaviours) amongst program participants who are active in enablement tasks, compared to those who are not.  In looking at correlations between those participants who have undertaken enablement tasks, versus those who have not, we have observed three traits....