Mobile A Key Growth Component  in Building Brand Loyalty

During last month’s 9th annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Association for Customer Loyalty, Dunkin’ Donuts presented a session titled, “Mobile as an Accelerator of Loyalty, Evolving the Customer Experience.”

Paul Murray, Senior Manager Digital Marketing and Innovation, Dunkin’ Donuts, said that mobile + loyalty + payments couldn’t be treated as separate entities, but all part of one entire customer experience. He said company officials began to rethink their mobile strategy in 2013. After Dunkin’ Donuts launched its mobile app in 2012, the attendant success from that formed the basis for the DD Perks loyalty program that began in 2014. The challenge was to evolve through mobile.

Speaking at last week’s Deutsche Bank dbAccess Global Consumer Conference, Brett Biggs, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Walmart Stores, talked about how company growth toward brand loyalty is discussed differently today than years ago.

“We are going through another transformation today along with our customer and we are excited about where it’s going to take us,” Biggs said. “We talked a lot about growth and change and our company has been about both of those throughout its history. Growth used to be just about building stores or growing comp sales and it looks different today. It’s still about comp sales and it’s still about building stores, but now it’s about mobile ecommerce, it’s about world-class fulfillment capabilities, and it’s about developing new services all with the customer in mind.”

From its humble beginnings 54 years ago, Walmart today generates nearly half a trillion dollars in annual revenue.

“Our first store opening in 1962 in rural Arkansas and we’ve had tremendous growth as you know since then primarily started in rural America, but we knew our customers wanted more from us,” Biggs said. “So the next part of our evolution was into our membership clubs.”

In the early 1980s, Walmart launched its membership club business and opened its first Sam’s Club. Today, the company has more than 650 clubs in the U.S. and revenue of about $57 billion.

“Then began a real transformation for the company and that was with the supercenter,” Biggs noted. “Our first supercenter opened in 1988 and was probably the greatest invention in retail history and certainly changed the retail landscape in the United States. Not shortly after that, we started our international expansion and it started in Mexico just over 25 years ago. Today, our international business is comprised of over 6,200 stores, 27 countries, and revenue of just over $123 billion outside the U.S.”

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