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Abstract
Purpose - As loyalty marketing programs have reached a state of maturity, the aim of this paper is to outline the key loyalty-marketing trends for the twenty-first century that can serve as guideposts as marketers create, expand and revamp their loyalty and customer relationship management (CRM) strategies.
Design/methodology/approach - The paper uses data and statistics from numerous loyalty-marketing programs to support its conclusions.
Findings - Five key loyalty-marketing trends are identified and explored in detail: ubiquity; technology enables but imagination wins; coalition lite; customer analytics; and the Wow! factor
Practical implications - The challenge for marketers is to reinvigorate the market with new strategies, tactics, and technologies backed by imagination, innovation and sound program design. The five key loyalty-marketing trends for the twenty-first century identified in this paper can serve as guideposts as marketers create, expand and revamp their loyalty and CRM strategies in the new century.
Originality/value - Provides a view point based on the authors' opinion or interpretation of the key loyalty-marketing trends for the twenty-first century.
Keywords Customer loyalty, Marketing strategy, Coalitions
Paper type Research paper
The mid-life crisis of loyalty marketing
loy-al-ty mar-ket-ing
n. phrase. The business process of identifying, maintaining and increasing the yield from best customers through interactive, value-added relationships.
Loyalty programs are everywhere. In virtually every vertical market and in every region of the globe, loyalty marketers have adopted the tactics of recognition and reward to identify, maintain and increase the yield from their best customers. As a result, the loyalty-marketing industry has begun to encounter the telltale characteristics of a mature market. After decades of double-digit growth, the loyalty market has shown signs of fatigue from both consumers and practitioners. Some of this fatigue is self-inflicted; loyalty programs based on flawed designs with weak value propositions, and those operated as marketing afterthoughts, have gone by the wayside. Some pundits have blamed these failures on the concept of loyalty marketing itself. Is loyalty marketing overrated and ineffective? Is it merely an expensive boondoggle?
We would argue that those pundits who ask these questions do not have a solid understanding of loyalty strategies to begin with. Born in the consolidation and expansion of the travel industry in the 1980s and raised to maturity in the technology boom...