Successful Workplace

In case you missed 60 Minutes on CBS last night, there’s a new challenge to privacy that is coming faster than people realize and was made more urgent by the terror attack in Boston a month ago. The 60 Minutes piece started with the following: The ability of computers to recognize faces has gotten a […]

There are two things we can expect every morning when we wake up. The first is that the sun has returned from the other side of the world and the second is a queue of loyalty program emails waiting in our inboxes, screaming of discounts and one-day sales. According to The Colloquy 2011 Loyalty Census, the […]

Indoor mapping of consumer location is the latest arrow in the quiver of the retail marketer. When marketers know where things are happening, they can develop interesting patterns for where to put resources like people, signage and information technology. Geolocation also provides the remarkable ability to spot the patterns that predict what to expect from […]

Travel and other loyalty programs are going through challenging times. Programs that floated along for decades, blissfully counting up points based on spend, transactions, nights or miles are suddenly finding themselves in an increasingly mobile, connected world that allows for something more. The problem isn’t that traditional loyalty programs haven’t answered the call. The real […]

Predictive analytics is big business now. Hand in hand with Big Data they represent one of the only ways to get to know your consumer market and understand how they’ll behave under conditions, respond to marketing and react to incentives. But the problem with all of this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse chase, consumers are […]

Everyone wants to categorize and define the increasingly fast evolution of how businesses sell and their customers buy. Getting ahead of the trend is everyone’s goal, but we know intuitively that some will prosper and others will be in their shadow. The prosperous will turn their customers into fans. So many acronyms A recent post talked about […]

What if the biggest fans of your brand are able to step outside the shopping experience simply because they follow their passions? That’s exactly what The North Face offers to its customers when they give PeakPoints for every dollar spent—for sharing on social media like Facebook and participating in local sporting events like the San […]

The following is a guest post by David Rosen. This is the beginning of our blog series on loyalty for SMBs. We spend a tremendous amount of time with owners of small to medium sized businesses – restaurants, pharmacies, retailers – discussing how to build loyalty. One of their most basic challenges, hard as it […]

This is a guest post by Ted Rubin. Personalization is the new black. The marketing and selling story of today involves knowing and seeing your customer the moment they arrive on your physical or virtual doorstep, and being able to provide differentiated service based on their preferences, history and loyalty. Knowing who they are, listening […]

Our parents’ marketing was a one to many game involving segmentation and messages. Better segmentation and better messages were the constant goal. Forget that. It all just changed. Marketing going one-to-one In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a significant shift in how, where and when consumers buy combined with an ability to know exactly what […]

Loyalty benefits are often thought of as offers that kick in before the shopping trip and discounts which are taken at the register. Rarely are they thought of as being delivered in the midst of the shopping experience. These days, there’s no reason why it has to be that way. Consumers are gradually being asked […]

As technology expands rapidly to manage customer experience, a subtle shift is under way in who gathers and uses loyalty and other data to manage the customer relationship. No one needs to remind us how quickly the nature of shopping and customer experience is changing. We see signs of it everywhere and need look no […]

Customer experience management is a very hot topic because so much is in flux at the same moment. Before recent times, we managed customers as demographic segments and used focus groups and segmented lists to design and deliver the best message at the best time based on a great deal of pre-planning. And we were […]

Within a week three big and well established UK retail chains will more than likely disappear for good. For Jessops that’s already happened, for HMV and now Blockbuster it’s about to. It continues the trend from the last couple of years that the High Street is dying and dying fast, for goods that can be […]

Just today PayPal announced that they added more retailers to their in-store payments application and are now at 18,000 retail outlets in the US. Amazing how technology that everyone expected would help break us free from brick and mortar is now squarely (pun intended) on making mobile payments to local stores much easier. If you’re […]

So we’ve survived the Mayan Apocalypse and a passion-filled election here in the U.S. only to face the “Fiscal Cliff”…will our troubles never end? New years are a chance for new starts so it would be great to start the year looking forward to something other than disaster. For us, there are many reasons to […]