Baesman Executive Addresses State of Customer Loyalty

Over the last few months, we’ve seen more changes in the loyalty landscape—potential anti-trust lawsuits, the launch of Libra, the creation of GDPR and CCPA—than ever before. What do these topics to mean to the loyalty space? What is the industry thinking about these potentially pivotal changes? 
 
Loyalty360 regularly checks in with various industry organizations and their representatives to gain insight and learn how they’re addressing the ever-changing environment. We spoke to Evan Magliocca, Director of Marketing at Baesman Insights & Marketing, to gain his perspective. 
 
What is the biggest opportunity you are seeing in the market today?
 
Marketers are making a major shift in the way we’re thinking about loyalty. It’s becoming much less about technology or a points engine and much more about the experiences and branding they’re giving customers. That means multiple worlds within brands are colliding. Loyalty, CRM, CX, analytics, and channel marketers are all converging. Because with customers nothing is separate, it must be seamless, and loyalty doesn’t live within a program. It’s diffusive and spreads across every interaction and every touchpoint. 
 
So, the biggest opportunity we see is for brands to put someone in charge of the customer through a chief customer officer. That person can build a team that lives at that confluence of events and departments and help make sure the customer remains at the center of every decision to ensure they build loyalty. 
 
How are you responding to this opportunity?
 
Baesman is well-positioned to help brands through the paradigm shifts we’re seeing. We are built at that confluence of events and changes that brands are trying to navigate. By organizing our agency into a great analytics team, a highly adaptable loyalty technology, and a cross-functional marketing strategy and execution team, we’re helping our clients make those transitions.
 
We’re so much more than a technology provider or consultancy, and brands really need more these days. They need to understand their customer at a much deeper level, not just demographics, but what really generates behavior. And from there, technology needs to be highly flexible—no two programs are the same—and so many platforms are built for the agency, not the brand. So, Baesman has created our technology for the future of loyalty.
 
We see loyalty becoming much more than a program in the future. Branding, lifecycle, customer service, and even operational logistics have a part to play. We’re helping brands get there first, because in such a tight competitive market, even the slightest edge can have outsized impact.
 
What is the future of retail?
 
Retail’s future will be based on three key factors driven by intense competition and a level playing field. These are agility, data excellence, and chief customer officers. 
 
Agility
 
Where the past favored large store footprints, the future will favor adaptability. Stores can’t just be stores anymore. They must be utilized to their full potential to gain a competitive advantage.  Smaller formats are already becoming logistics hubs or rich customer experiences. Nordstrom’s is even opening small-scale shops that are solely focused on making returns convenient. They’re also buying into omnichannel with BOPIS-only dressing rooms so that customers can quickly try products on without having to go return them later.   
 
Data Excellence
 
Data is already a key cog and will be an even larger part of the next five to 10 years. Having sound, fundamental data is the primary goal for today, but tomorrow will be won because certain brands and agencies will master personalization. Most brands today are experimenting, and many have only started to understand the possibilities. But as personalization becomes easier to perform at scale, brands that understand their customers on a deeper level will be able to drive triggered behavior through promotions, but also through content and experiences that can really drive impact. More importantly, it will help brands reduce their overexposure to heavy, globalized promotional activity and retain higher margin rates.
 
Chief Customer Officers
 
They’re already starting to become mainstream in many retail brands. As they fall into place, their goal will be to break down barriers throughout the organization and create a seamless, customer-focused experience without the in-fighting of departmental goals and divisions. With a CCO in place, brands will enable themselves to create exceptional experiences, service, and convenience for the customer.
 
How do you think the potential anti-trust suits against Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple impact customer loyalty?
 
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google need internal solutions to the myriad problems they’ve created. While regulation is appropriate, I’m not sure the government will be able to move fast enough to keep up with the speed of change in tech.  Any one of those companies’ business models could change tomorrow with a new idea, technology, or acquisition. Meanwhile, government agencies will be quite far behind. For example, Facebook’s Libra could completely own the cryptocurrency market within a year while the government will probably still be baffled over trying to understand Facebook’s very well-known ad model from the past five years.
 
If tech had any goodwill, they’d take it upon themselves to get ahead of it all. I don’t see that happening though. So, for brands, honestly the best approach is just business as usual for the immediate future. Brand’s will continue to see great returns from their advertising through Google, Facebook, and even Amazon. Keep going until someone tells you to stop, because I don’t think they will. 
 
Facebook’s Libra—what are your thoughts?
 
I think it’s a little too early to make a call on Libra. But blockchain has some interesting applications for brands. There are some potential co-op possibilities utilizing blockchain to share currency across multiple brands so customers are not stuck in a single point structure for a single brand. There are a lot of barriers to making that happen, but blockchain does have some interesting and creative use cases to bring to the marketing mix. As of now though, there are much bigger opportunities for brands to focus on and blockchain will come into focus over the next three years. There isn’t a major sense of urgency for brands to get into that arena right now.
 
What do you think of the future of marketing, which is so heavily weighted to those who have actionable and permission-based data sets?
 
Data regulation is a good thing, not just for customers, but for brands. We all need a common standard because right now it’s the wild west. A common standard will help brands demarcate what they can and can’t do. Most of us would like to know where that line is without having to run it through our own, subjective gut check. 
 
The real issue is that the feds are moving too slow and some states are eager to see movement.  As states take it upon themselves to create change, we could see an even more fragmented data standard state-by-state that could make GDPR look like a walk through the park. 
 
Our guidance to brands is to get as organized and hygiened as you possibly can. As the lines become more convoluted, having a clear data structure is going to be important to prevent making errors or ruining your personalization efforts. If you can get organized now, the payoff will be a very clear path forward once new regulations start to come in.
 

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