Bond Brand Loyalty (formerly Maritz Canada and Maritz Loyalty Marketing), North America’s leading Brand Loyalty agency, recently announced the addition of Rob Daniel as Executive Vice President of Client Services and head of Consumer Loyalty Solutions.
Formerly the Vice President of Enterprise Loyalty and Customer Insights at Bank of Montreal (BMO), Daniel will lead Bond Brand Loyalty’s North American growth with a focus on all client services teams, major accounts, and loyalty solutions.
Bond Brand Loyalty has practiced brand loyalty for more than 100 years for some of the world’s most influential and valuable brands. The company builds measurable, authentic, and long-lasting relationships between client brands and their customers through a combination of services, including loyalty strategy, customer experience, market research, insights and analytics, live events, experiential marketing, and proprietary loyalty technology platforms.
Daniel participated in an engaging Q&A with Loyalty360 to talk about his new position.
With your new position, what are your main goals as far as helping brands better connect with customers?
The time has come to expand loyalty thinking beyond traditional “do this, get that” combinations and offerings. For Bond, this will come through our diverse brand loyalty offerings, including the coming together of data and analytics, digital platforms, creative and strategy, customer experience, and employee engagement solutions.
How do you see customer loyalty today, and how does engagement and experience fit into that picture?
Loyalty is driven by market factors like product and price, individual differences, customer experiences, and brand perceptions. Most loyalty companies can address one or two of these levers. Bond Brand Loyalty is set up to address all of them. The days of paying for loyal customers exclusively through value-add pricing war-style loyalty programs are behind us.
What trends do you see now or foresee occurring in the loyalty industry that will have an impact on customer experience and engagement?
Aligned with your previous question, companies are making a concerted effort to link their brand work with their customer experience endeavors. Creating alignment within their customer experience, loyalty program, and their brand is a competitive differentiator and is critical in the age of the empowered customer. As a result, branding is completely different and the role of a brand agency needs to become much more holistic.
Here's a loyalty program example: Our Loyalty Report shows the exponential strength of a program when it’s aligned with the brand. In fact, our Loyalty Report findings reveal that members in brand aligned programs had 3X higher customer satisfaction, 6X higher likelihood to recommend, and 8X higher propensity to purchase again.
What role does technology play in all of this?
A critical role, digital and mobile enables the entire solution. This Includes data capture and synthesis, omnichannel communications and management, tailored, personalize experiences and offers, and true 1-to-1 relationships with customers.
What do you see as loyalty marketers’ biggest challenges moving forward?
Defining their space and influence as something much bigger than the original pigeonhole that they operated in.