I’ve been brewing and stewing on this article for a while as it’s the focus of my favourite subject: Loyalty.
With the ongoing saga surrounding the British Airways Executive Club changing where they are literally turning wine to water and now the news that Easyjet might be joining the loyalty clubbers it’s an apt time to share a musing on loyalty.
A year ago this month, I wrote an article for The Caterer on loyalty in the hospitality industry, and while the article focused on the role of technology and benefits to users it’s been good to have a re-read and spark a few new thoughts.
Loyalty in itself is an emotional concept and ‘buy in’ from customer to business. That no matter what, your brand is the favoured brand a customer wants to have a relationship with, whether they buy something or not. A loyal customer is one that shares and talks about your brand and actually becomes an advocate, even an ambassador for your business. It therefore works way beyond the transactional and enters into brand championing. Building and praising your business either through personal experience or just plain old solid relationship building. For me, I don’t believe it should ever have solely focused on frequency.
I had a strong allegiance to British Airways for many years, no matter what, my loyalty was unwavering, forget the number of times I flew with them, it was about choosing them over their competitor. I now find myself questioning if that loyalty was misplaced or times are just changing and that the loyalty programme is just too hard and too expensive to deliver in such a cost conscious and fickle world. In fact the article I wrote for our website a year ago spotlighted a couple of brands who really delivered on encouraging engagement and relationships with their customers, but in the last three months they’ve now disappeared and remain silent, never interacting with me or incentivising or rewarding me. Maybe its just my spend has reduced and I haven’t noticed that I’ve strayed from their brand, but historically it was never about the transaction but the exchange of information, providing relevant insight or just flagging a birthday or two. Clever, simple, exchanges.
So then if loyalty and the ‘loyalty club’ is dwindling. What are we left with and what was loyalty ever doing anyway? For me, I believe we have to go back to the origins of loyalty and that’s trust. It was about working out who you trusted and you wanted to trust you. During the pandemic that was the key word for businesses, demonstrating that you could trust them, that hotels were taking precautions and protecting their guests. That hasn’t changed. Guests want to trust the brand they engage with and know that they will have a great stay, that their escape will be truly that and they will have the most wonderful experience, whether its for work or leisure.
So if we need to go back to trust and the criteria and framework to building trust, we need to move way beyond loyalty systems and points. We have to understand what a customer needs to know and believe in to establish trust and what a hotel can do to cement that trust and build a strong relationship with the customer. In fact you can apply this to building a team and demonstrating the same method to build a strong brand and impactful positioning. The conversation needs to change direction and revert back to the core principles of trust before we can even consider the evolution of loyalty. Here are a few parameters PR uses to develop trust from building a brand to protecting a business.
-
- Transparency
- Authenticity
- Consistency
- Personalisation
- Privacy/Security
- ESG
- Recognition
