Loyalty case study: the coffee cart
Back in the late 1990s, certainly in the UK, there was an obsession among retail outlets over loyalty cards and associated schemes. Working for a Direct Marketing agency at the time, I was involved quite heavily in various such schemes, helping in the launch of the Boots Advantage card.
In essence, instead of promoting loyalty, they merely reward it, the reward usually just about outweighing the effort required to carry the associated card around with you and swipe it whenever necessary. There were news stories at the time about people who carried around a ‘loyalty’ card for every shop under the sun, often carrying competing cards due to their own fickleness.
True loyalty can only be earned, through consistently performing above and beyond the competition on one or more fronts: service, product, environment, convenience and price, arguably with a decreasing ability to engender loyalty as you run through the list.
Whenever I’m working in the Wall Street office, I walk to work. On my route in, I must see about ten coffee carts on Broadway alone. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, this is an example. I stop off at one (the first on the west side of Broadway as you walk south from Cedar Street), for a large coffee, milk no sugar, with the possibility of an accompanying bran muffin, occasionally adorned with raisins.
Every such morning, there is some lighthearted banter between the owner and myself, usually questioning my abstinence from sugar, which seems somewhat bizarre to him. This occupies the estimated 20 seconds between my semi-predictable order (which is already being prepared) and our respective valedictions.
Despite their almost identical menus, some carts (including the one I frequent) have relatively long queues while others are bereft of customers. Although the net benefits are probably wholly intangible, I wouldn’t consider going to another cart of a morning, and I even panicked slightly a few weeks back when his cart had been moved due to longterm construction work – fortunately, he was only a block away.
Loyalty runs much deeper than a card, and is worth so much more than the associated rewards.
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5 Responses to “Loyalty case study: the coffee cart”
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so how do you promote loyalty without rewarding it then?
You promote loyalty by providing excellent, memorable service, high quality produce and an experience that you want to go back for, all at a competitive price.
Pottery Barn offers good products with good service at a reasonable (not cheap, but reasonable) price. They don’t reward my loyalty, but I go back.
My coffee stand offers good coffee at a cheap price with memorable service. I go back, despite not having a buy-one-get-one-free voucher.
This should be sufficient reward in itself.
Ok, but when most stores sell the same branded crap, how do you get loyalty when the product isn’t the differentiator?
How does Boots, Walmart or Auchan get loyalty, when price is the deciding factor?
Service, service, service. I prefer going to a Boots than a Superdrug because of the customer experience.
Thanks for your comments
“helping with boots advantage”? could have sworn your CV said that you were solely responsible for everything from concept to launch. that’s why i hired you.