Category: Research Insight

Research Focus: Gamify Your Loyalty Program

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Author’s note: With this post, I am restarting a previous tradition on my blog to report from time to time the findings from a single research paper. Now named “Research Focus”, these slightly shorter posts will summarize each research paper in accessible and practically relevant lingo. The focus is on what the research findings mean to practice. The research papers featured will be chosen from recently published or soon-to-be-published work as well as significant working papers that I consider to be highly relevant to loyalty marketing practice. The goal is to facilitate the dissemination of scientific research, build practice knowledge, and speed up the scientific discovery to practice cycle time. I hope you will enjoy the feature!

Loyalty program is everywhere, yet engaging consumers in a loyalty program remains elusive to businesses. Look at your own wallet or key ring, and you are likely to see at least a few loyalty cards that you no longer use. You are not alone. The 2017 Colloquy Loyalty Census reports that as many as 54% of loyalty program memberships in the US are inactive. A more recent loyalty program engagement survey of 1000+ consumers by CodeBroker shows that 65% of those surveyed are engaged with less than half of their loyalty programs.

The loyalty program (dis)engagement problem has various possible solutions. One solution is gamification, that is, introducing gaming into a loyalty program. Examples of this approach abound in practice, offered by familiar brands such as Victorial’s Secret, Domino’s Pizza, and Starbucks (see the picture at the beginning of this post for a screenshot of the currently running Starbucks Bonus Star Hopscotch game). In today’s Research Focus paper, to be published in Journal of Business Research, Professor Jiyoung Hwang and her colleague studied when and how gamification helps in a loyalty program context. Continue reading “Research Focus: Gamify Your Loyalty Program”

Earn Back the Love of Demoted Customers

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If your business offers a tiered loyalty program with an annual cycle, beginning of the year may be a “heartbreaking” time for customers who failed to earn enough and was demoted from their previous premium tier status. Some argue that this is one of the downsides of a hierarchical loyalty program. What can you expect from these customers? What can you possibly do to earn back the love (or at least not lose the respect) of these demoted customers? I looked into research in this area to find some answers.

Negative Impact from Demotion

Just like anyone who have flown first class may feel quite miserable going back to the economy cabin, losing one’s premier tier status in a loyalty program is likely to have some damaging impact. This negative impact can have a more “rational” source and a more emotional source. On the rational side, getting demoted means the loss of important benefits such as higher point earning ratio and free perks. So objectively speaking, consumers lose something concrete when they get demoted. But that objective loss is only part of the story. The most important impact comes from the emotional effect of demotion. It is common for demoted customers to feel frustrated, disappointed, uncomfortable, or even angry.

Whether the demoted customer is driven by rational loss or by an emotional response, the ultimate outcome is higher dissatisfaction, lower loyalty toward the company, and a higher likelihood to switch brands. Not surprising? Here comes the kicker. Not only is demotion bad, the damage from demotion (e.g., silver to base tier) is much stronger than the positive effect from an equivalent promotion in the opposite direction (e.g., base tier to silver). In one study, researchers found that even after a demoted customer is restored to the lost premier tier at a later point, the overall loyalty level is still lower than before the customer was demoted. This is quite a serious issue. Unless most of your customers are on an upward trajectory in terms of how much they spend with your business, your gain from rewarding customers with premium tiers may never quite compensate for the loss you will suffer when consumers lose their premium tiers.

Who Suffer the Most?

The negative impact from demotion is not the same across customers though. Knowing which customers tend to respond more strongly can help you take proactive measures to avoid really negative consequences, e.g., keeping some customers in the old tier even if they have not quite spent that much last year. Below are some factors suggested by previous research, many of which should be fairly intuitive. Continue reading “Earn Back the Love of Demoted Customers”

Expressing Gratitude to Loyal Customers

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My favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, is just around the corner. This is a great time of the year for companies to send out words or gifts of appreciation to their loyal customers. The insurance company AMICA sends out artistic Thanksgiving cards to their customers every year; many real estate agents send out fresh calendars for the next year to their clients; and I once even received a BIG can of popcorns as a customer appreciation gift during this time of the year. Are such gestures beneficial for companies? How should such thank-you’s be conveyed? In this week’s post, I pull academic research on gratitude to shed some light on these questions.

Feelings of Gratitude

According to philosophy and social psychology research, gratitude is an important emotional foundation for sustained reciprocity in human relationships. When an individual feels gratitude, he or she is motivated to repay the favor by conducting an act of kindness in return. Many of us probably still remember the paying it forward story at a Starbucks in Florida a few years ago. It started with a woman offering to pay coffee for the customer behind her, who then passed on the kindness by paying for the next customer. This chain continued unbroken for a total of 378 customers. That is the power of gratitude. In a bilateral relationship between a customer and a company or brand, feelings of gratitude can provide the drive to sustain a trusted and committed relationship and increase customer loyalty.

Gratitude Needs to be Expressed

The feeling of gratitude has a unique social component that prompts it to be expressed. In an eloquent essay written by Dr. James W. Ceasar, he describes gratitude as having developed into an objective standard of behavior. In his words, “Gratitude has a social aspect and is incomplete if it does not include the act of acknowledgment”. Or in more plain words, not saying “thank you” when someone has done something nice for you is just rude. Although much of Dr. Ceasar’s arguments relate to political and social domains, they are just as relevant to customer relationships. It is not quite enough for a company to claim its commitment to its customers when it does not properly express its gratitude to customers. Continue reading “Expressing Gratitude to Loyal Customers”