This is the first entry in my blog that it is basically 99% opinions and almost no facts. It does not intend to be anything else than a point of view. I am also aware that I am not the first one to express similar opinions.

To my experience a lot of data in marketing is collected and used with the purpose of increasing retention and profitability of existing customers rather than improving processes around acquisition.

There aren’t universally accepted definitions, but it is commonly accepted that the discipline of using data in the best commercially viable way to increase retention is LOYALTY MARKETING.

It is also true that some marketers and entrepreneurs find this exercise a waste of money and the ROI of loyalty initiatives is quite evasive.

In general I believe there are two types of individuals:

• Those who believe experience tells us about the future
• Those who don’t

This distinction is non-trivial and there is a lot of people that think, in their hearts, that each fact of life is always so new that past experience are practically useless, better go with intuition with gut feelings. Nevertheless it is my experience (no irony here) that those individuals always approach different problems in the same way. If you have a marketer or someone at board level with this inclination, loyalty marketing and anything data driven will be difficult to implement.

The second category loves to use previous data and information to see the future in an almost magical fashion.

The data lovers will then resort to an arsenal of techniques and, going back to the main theme, will shape loyalty marketing quite like the famous behavioural psychologist B.S. Skinner conditioned the subjects of his experiments:

Reward a certain behaviour and that behaviour will, in the long run, become hard coded in the subject.

Loyalty marketers are slightly more sophisticated and permissive and seem to work like:

Find what the customer need from the brand and push the lever all the way up rewarding any interaction that satisfies the customer need.

This usually involves some research to find out which customers are actually in need of the service and product the brand provide over a long period of time and what rewards they would really appreciate. After that though, it’s Skinner all the way. The relationship dies there and an “exchange of this for that” keeps happening (buy 10 coffees and I give you one free).

This is boring, and while I am not saying at all that the work of Skinner is boring (he made a duck play foot ball!), this static way of doing marketing is definitely boring.

Unfortunately there are at least two human reasons why it is diffused:

• The data lovers love to find the needs and rewards and apply this mechanical method. It seem to make sense.
• The “gut feeling” tribe see this as pretty unsatisfactory, but also something they can understand and they might think the masses will buy into it, in other words this is a trick for the morons, the “gut feeling” individual is superior to this. But, let’s do this while the next spell of genius comes (after all everyone is doing it).

And then we have Led Zeppelin. I don’t hide the fact that I am a huge Led Zeppelin fan, but this is beside the point.The point is that Led Zeppelin have incredibly loyal fans and yet they have not given them more of the same throughout their career and that’s, to my opinion, why most Led Zeppelin fans love Bonzo, Jones, Page and Plant as much as the music they created.

I am also fond of data analytics, yet I don’t find experience (that song sold so much, let’s do another one similar) as the uniquely defining aspect of analysis; a lot of it depends on the overall strategy that precedes the analysis itself.

I believe that transactional data doesn’t need to become a prison and we are far from a world where creativity can be automated.

In loyalty marketing we miss a bit of Zeppelin attitude. I just dispose of the “gut feeling” people as a bunch of lucky individuals who are at a loss when trying to grasp complexity but arrogant enough to think they don’t need to.

To all the data lovers though, I would say: take more risks and allow for an element of surprise. Reward the right behaviour but also show your customers that this is not the end, that there is an evolving relationship.

Might be true that that Hotel is the best for me and I will go back there since I get discounts anytime I go but, my desire for novity will ultimately prevail unless, like with the Zep, the element of surprise is part of the deal.

How to use data to surprise customers?

This would be another long chain of thoughts but, it might be the case that the whole process should be a function of the brand identity. The core of the identity.