One of the key pieces to what makes Scannibal different from anything you might be using today is what we call "Dynamic Earning". This means you re able to earn rewards to places you are not shopping and you can earn rewards to multiple businesses with one transaction. By allowing rewards to be earned in a totally new way, we are trying to provide customers with a single, effective, and most importantly, seamless way to earn and redeem their rewards with almost no effort. Think about all the benefits of being able to earn rewards dynamically:
1. You can earn rewards while shopping at businesses that do not offer a rewards program.
2. You can earn rewards to multiple businesses with a single transaction
3. You are expanding your horizons by generating valuable incentives that encourage you to try new businesses.
4. You have the ability to earn a new gain on a purchase transaction.
While these are important, the last is possibly the most exciting. While I cannot get into details yet on exactly how, we are building a model that lets you earn more in total rewards that you spend on the transaction to generate these rewards. Imagine you spent $20 and earned a total of $30 in rewards. This new rewards value equation will change the way you view retail. This model means you save far more than any other couponing or rewards method short of someone giving you a product for free. This is part of strategy to create the world's first "Coalition Anti-Loyalty Platform". Below I'll discuss some of the current methods being used.
In-House Loyalty
These are the most common and growing quickly. These are the programs businesses put together and run under themselves. The problem with these is simple. Customers must spend and get rewards all within the confines of a single business. This makes sense for the business as they want to keep you coming back, but does it make sense from a user standpoint? We would argue that customer actually lose out when using these programs because they end up spending more money at the business even if the "rewards" make the consumer feel like they are spending less and because consumers lose choice. They begin to feel like they need the rewards to afford the goods they buy and get into a rut of buying the same things at the same places.
Coalition Loyalty
Another concept that just emerging in loyalty in the US is "Coalition Loyalty". These are programs where multiple businesses in different, and often strategically aligned industries allow users to earn rewards by shopping at one and redeem than at any of the members. While this is still far better than the completely silo'ed, one-dimensional, internal loyalty most companies use, it still have strict limitations. For example, these programs can only support one business per industry. They would never want multiple businesses within an industry in one coalition group because now those companies have to compete. Despite a potential bad connotation, competition is actually very good for business and for customers. Competition creates value and innovation. While these type of programs are just launching in the US, they are widely available elsewhere. They are still not getting it quite right.
In conclusion, there are plenty of options out there but none of them have been actually designed to optimize the "reward" concept until now. Using a new model, we will save every consumer, both users and non-users, money by creating a new and competitive retail environment in which each transaction is view as a valuable and sought-after commodity. We envision a world in which customers drive retail, not retailers dictating to customers.
What do you think? Leave a comment or follow on twitter @ScannibalApp.
Thanks and happy bargain hunting!
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