Chapter 1 – Introduction

I have spent more than a dozen years working with companies to develop and manage customer loyalty programs.  Two things are clear to me.  First, companies have an appetite for guidelines on developing customer loyalty.  Second, developing customer loyalty is one of single most powerful ways to enhance a brand and create shareholder value. 

I’ve seen too many people over complicate the concept of customer loyalty.  I decided to demystify the concept in this book and remove all the complications.  I set out to tell the plain truth about customer loyalty: what it means and how to develop it.  That’s why I’ve called this book Loyalty Unplugged. 

I use the word loyalty to describe the essential principle this book will explore and demystify.  I use loyalty to describe the feeling among customers toward a brand.  It is the feeling that compels customers to turn left instead of right to visit a particular retail brand.  It’s the feeling that causes customers to think twice before accepting a competitive offer to switch to a competing Internet access service.  It’s the feeling that makes customers come back and test drive one new model vehicle over another.

Regardless of the industry you're in, loyalty is the tiebreaker that makes customers think twice about another brand.  Loyalty creates a reluctance to defect among customers.  Ultimately, loyalty delivers enormous economic value to your brand by increasing the lifetime value of customers.

I discuss loyalty at two levels: loyalty strategy and loyalty programs.  Loyalty strategy involves getting your company right for customers.  It’s the equivalent of getting your house in order.  It’s ensuring that your product, its value proposition, your service and your communication channels are conducive to developing loyalty.  It also involves assessing your culture as a company to ensure it creates an appropriate platform for developing loyalty.  Loyalty programs are the integrated marketing efforts that actively engage your customers in a dialogue and often deploy exclusive benefits and rewards that keep your best customers alert and attentive to your brand.

In a nutshell, loyalty strategy involves getting your company in shape to keep customers and loyalty programs are the proactive efforts to increase customer value through relationships and special benefits.  It’s important to keep the two levels of the loyalty discussion clear.  Loyalty strategy becomes the platform, loyalty programs become the active extension to key customer segments.

There are many other terms used to describe loyalty.  While many other authors and speakers will split hairs about the differences, I’ll be a lightning rod for controversy and declare that all these concepts are simply enablers for customer loyalty.  Each concept is a means to an end.  The end is loyalty.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an important enabling concept.  It represents the principle of creating a comprehensive view of the organization and its methods of collecting, consolidating and using customer information.  The aim of CRM is to be more intelligent about how to communicate with customers, how to prioritize customers within your customer service organization and how to create value propositions and offers that are more relevant to each customer. 

Simply put, CRM involves the construction of an information architecture that allows the organization to become a customer-centric learning machine.  But it is a means to an end.  It requires a loyalty strategy to actually leverage the infrastructure to create business results by increasing customer value. 

Don’t get me wrong, CRM is important.  But in my mind, CRM is a subset of loyalty strategy.  It’s the infrastructure and information systems component of getting your company ready to keep customers.

Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM)

This is what I call the big brother of CRM.  While CRM often looks at one channel or one division, ERM involves a comprehensive (and mammoth) review of the entire organization.  ERM also takes it a step further and examines the organizational structure, roles and responsibilities in executing loyalty activities.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM)

Whew!  Another one.  This is the on-line version of CRM.  It’s CRM on the Internet.

Relationship Marketing

A somewhat dated term, this describes the process of cultivating customer relationships by deploying targeted and relevant communication (by traditional mail or e-mail).  This is a means to an end.  The objective of Relationship Marketing is to create loyalty.

Relationship Management

The earlier term for CRM.

One to One Marketing

This is an important concept and one that propelled many marketers into action.  It is the theoretical concept of communication with each customer as if you were communicating solely with that customer.  This is a concept and a means to an end.  The end it seeks to create is loyalty.

Frequency Marketing

This concept originated in the travel business and originally focused on frequency of transaction.  It has been expanded to parallel loyalty but still gets misunderstood because of the literal interpretation.

Focus on Loyalty

Now that we have many of the related terms clarified, let’s discuss the loyalty concept itself.  Simply put, loyalty is about improving retention and increasing share of customer.  It’s about keeping customers longer than you otherwise would.  It’s about getting a greater share of a customer’s business than you otherwise would.  It’s that simple.  It’s that complicated.

I’ve heard many statements about the concept of loyalty.  Here are some of the concepts and my perspectives.

“Loyalty is Dead” … “There is no Such Thing as Loyalty”

I think these people are taking it too literally.  We’re not talking about German Shepherds lying at our feet.  We’re talking about customers.  We’re trying to create the difference between retention and defection.  Dog-like loyalty to a brand will rarely happen.  But we’re not talking about the tireless and unconditional loyalty that a dog exhibits toward its master.  We just want to influence customer behavior in subtle and effective ways to increase the likelihood they’ll stick with our brand.

“You Can’t Buy Loyalty”

True.  But this statement actually has a relationship with the one above.  We’re not trying to create a tireless dog-like loyalty.  We’re trying to create a reluctance to defect and a tendency to stick with our brand.  While we cannot buy this, we must spend money to earn it.  We’ll spend our money several ways.  We’ll spend our money implementing loyalty strategy and we’ll spend our money executing loyalty programs.  The investment – well planned – will create the equivalent (in terms of customer behavior) of loyalty.

The loyalty pursuit allegedly started with airline frequent traveler programs.  In fact, the pursuit of loyalty began much earlier.  Remember collecting Green Stamps?  Box tops?  Simple but effective ways to get customers to think about your brand and stick with it.  Welcome to loyalty.

The development of loyalty is a big thing.  It requires high level commitment –- from the top down.  It requires a vision and culture to support that vision.  It’s a way of doing business.  It’s an incredibly fun and rewarding way of doing business, but for some companies it’s a big shift.  It’s a big shift toward managing customers instead of managing products.  It’s in everything you do.

You’re about to take a journey.  A journey to build customer loyalty.  The journey will create a framework and a set of guidelines for developing loyalty in your business.  The journey will illustrate loyalty in action with examples from dozens of companies.

Don’t turn back.  You’ll enjoy the trip.