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It’s been an exciting journey for Farrah Shultz to become Senior Director of Business Development for Kobie Marketing.
Starting as a music major trained in classical opera and shifting to a retail-heavy career for 15 years, Shultz found herself making a “natural progression” into the loyalty industry, one that she has fallen completely in love with.
Shultz, who is responsible for ensuring brands are equipped with the right solutions to create a positive business impact, is the latest loyalty leader to talk with Loyalty360 CEO Mark Johnson as part of the ongoing “Loyalty Live” series. She speaks at length about Kobie’s presentation on “Building Enterprise Loyalty through Building an Emotional Connection,” Kobie’s emotional loyalty strategies, and hopes to see an increased focus on the customer-brand relationships.
Kobie Excels at Loyalty Expo
As most have responded, Shultz also found the Loyalty Expo to be an immense success.
“Oh my gosh, it was just a breath of fresh air,” exclaims Shultz, clearly happy with the experience. “It felt so nice to be among other loyalty professionals again.”
From hearing about personalization, engagement, and partnerships, Shultz saw the significant potential still up for grabs in brand loyalty. Her own company helped contribute to this narrative with their presentation on Day 2.
Adeline Heymann, Kobie Associate Vice President of Strategy and Insights, led the workshop, helping attendees understand key motivations for customers when making purchases. Listeners learned about the three emotional motivators: status, habit, and reciprocity. Heymann illustrated how unique each customer is, with some being a blend of all three motivators, while others lean heavily on only one motivator.
“Kobie has a tool called ‘Emotional Loyalty Scoring’ – we feel so passionately about this, and we developed this proprietary methodology and process,” says Shultz. “It is intended to really put a quantifiable measurement behind an emotional motivator.”
This proved to be a huge success, with brands asking for advice on utilizing emotional motivators with their respective customer base.
Emotional Loyalty Done Right
For Shultz, it’s not enough to be complicit with a loyalty program alone.
She advises brands to create strong relationships with customers via these programs, further elevating customer lifetime value throughout the customer journey.
Looking through the lens of the steps in the journey, Shultz says it is critical to realize how to affect micro-moments and change customer perception of the brand for the better.
She also recommends implementing personalization to develop emotional relationships, which shows that the brand cares about the customers’ lives.
“I’m not dismissing transactions – they’re important,” Shultz clarifies. “But really, how [do] you start to make a relationship and understand that you’re giving choice and optionality and understanding preferences and putting them in to work across channels?”
Strengthening Relationships
While the expo was an enormous success for Kobie and Shultz, she noted that brands would do well to focus on a principle in the future: it’s not enough to establish a relationship, but brands must take appropriate actions based on the relationship.
“[It’s about] that balance of rewards,” Shultz explains. “Your best highest value member, you might want to treat differently with softer benefits, or for those less frequent one-timers, you might want to start looking at partnership types of offers.”
She also stresses that the “movable middle” is a key demographic to target, and with the proper budget, the influence your brand has on them can shift them into regular customers.
Ultimately, Kobie and Shultz are setting out to help brands foster positive and symbiotic relationships with their customers and find success from there.
“We’re looking at what will truly make an impact for [clients] and putting those right puzzle pieces into place,” remarks Shultz. “It’s been really exciting and a fun ride!”