Carlson Marketing & Loyalty 4.0

Carlson Marketing is one of the worlds largest marketing companies. Some of its clients include Coca-Cola, Nestle, Ford, Visa, and Hallmark, among others. They call themselves “The Relationship Building Company,” and strive to develop loyalty among consumers and employees. Early this month Carlson and Hallmark revealed that they would be revitalizing Hallmark’s customer loyalty program and, “...moving from transaction loyalty to relationship-based interactions,” (Carlson Marketing, 2011).

Hallmark Cards is an extremely well known card and accessories company and has been around for over 100 years. Since 1994 they have held the same customer loyalty program, “Crown Rewards” store loyalty program where you buy a greeting card, get your reward card stamped, and one day get a free greeting card (assuming you haven’t lost your stamp card by that time). Now, 17 years later, there is nothing especially innovative about this program; in fact, this “loyalty program” may not really even be considered a loyalty program: are the cusotmers buying the greeting card because they are loyal to the store, or because they just want that free card in the end? This type of loyalty program acts like a bribe to the customers, “We’ll give you

a free card if you continue to buy from us.”

As stated above, Carlson Marketing and Hallmark are now introducing a new way to go about Hallmark’s customer loyalty program, and although currently there is only limited information on their plans, they will be revealing more information at the 2011 Loyalty Expo March 20 - 22 in Orlando, Florida.

While there is no specific information on Hallmark’s new program, Carlson Marketing has released a pamphlet entitled, “Loyalty 4.0: The New World Order for Customer Strategy,” (Carlson Marketing, 2010). This pamphlet sums up previous models of loyalty programs, and shows the evolution of loyalty marketing. As well, it prophesies what the near future will look like as far as loyalty marketing, what they call Loyalty 4.0. They state that all loyalty programs build on the loyalty 1.0 model, where you spend some money, earn a point, and redeem the accumulated points for a benefit, however, this is not enough to inspire loyalty in customers on it own. Without creating any sort of relationship with the customer, and only bribing them to buy more, you risk the chance of them becoming a liability, since you owe them something for all of their investment.

Loyalty 4.0 is focused on marketing networks, instead of points and prizes. It will build relationships with customers based on each one’s unique needs and wants. Instead of targeting segments of customers, it can target “segments of one,” (Carlson Marketing, 2010). It is easy to come up with something that every customer will like, such as points or prizes, but what Loyalty 4.0 is concerned with, at least in part, is finding out what each customer specifically wants from the company.

This expected evolution of loyalty programs is at the same time innovative and rather basic. The idea of creating a customer loyalty program, by instilling loyalty towards a brand in customers (and not just providing them with an incentive to buy, such as points cards) is not a very difficult concept, but coming up with an efficient means to do this on a large scale is a more difficult. While their pamphlet give no specific details as to how they plan to go about Loyalty 4.0, it does state that, “...with more efficient and effective technology,” what was only a theoretical goal is now possible.

References:

http://www.carlsonmarketing.com/

http://www.jerishallmark.com/WebPages.cfm?action=viewCat&BIZ_UNL_id=502

http://loyalty.carlsonmarketing.com/Download.aspx?FileName=Loyalty4_0.pdf

http://carlsonmarketing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=164

http://corporate.hallmark.com/Company/Hallmark-Gold-Crown-stores