Now, today I want to talk about teamwork. This is a very fundamental part of retail, business, and life in general. Chances are you have used and currently use teamwork in about everything you do. As much as we would like to sometimes, we can't do it all ourselves. Take our loyalty program for example. It takes multiple with people with different skill set to get things built. Perhaps just one of us could do it, but the time to learn skills, the time to develop them to an acceptable level, and then the time to build stuff would extent the process by years. Just like with building software, working together makes sense. That might seem trite, but there isn't nearly as much collaboration between businesses and customers as we (customers) would all like to think.
Conventional loyalty programs are a great example of this. The business offers you something (usually a discount or something free) for a certain level of usage. Maybe its 10 purchases or $100 spent. It often gets framed as a way to show customers they are valuable, but thats not the whole truth. In previous posts we have gotten into the math behind these programs so we won't rehash that again, in general, loyalty programs are intended to make customers spend more than they normally would or shop more frequently then normal. They have all done the math (hopefully) and figured out that they actually make more if they give you the 10th coffee free because to get to that free one (the only one that costs them anything), you had to buy 9 at full price. If you would normally have only bought 2 or 3, they just created a big jump in your spending.
That sounds a little nefarious and to be honest, I think it is a bit unethical. It seems unfair to trick customers into buying patterns with the goal of creating, dare I say, dependent consumers. This isn't to say that businesses are the bad guys our to rob you blind, but there is definitely an imbalance. Right now the power balance between customers and business is about 75%:25% businesses:customers. We are advocating shifting this balance back to square.
What does that balance look like? Without any examples in the market today, how do we reach that balance? The answer is (as you might have guessed) is teamwork. We need to increase collaboration between customers and businesses.
Customers and businesses create all this great information that is very useful. Think of it like a puzzle and each party creates different pieces. Customers create the highly detailed transaction data points that create the bigger picture while businesses create the macro trends based on these data points. When you think about it though, each business is building a small picture based only on the transactions made with them. This result in lots of consumers creating lots of information that no one can fully leverage. Our goal is to help everyone leverage it.
Imagine a world where you could get rewarded from any business on a purchase from any other business without any spammy nonsense. Image a world where all your rewards and loyalty were earned and collected without you having to lift a finger and all you had to do was use the rewards. We want everyone to have their own automatically generating bank of rewards right on their phone. By sharing just basic information about where you shop and how much you spent, people can create their own rewards that better match what they care about. Handling rewards and loyalty this way is great for businesses too.
One of the biggest challenges for marketers in conversion. They have a very difficult time getting the right things to the right people. If you are a business owner, imagine a world where you could market only to people who shopped at specific businesses. Imagine if every single dollar you sent out actually when to a customer who cares. This results in saving money on marketing while getting much better engagement from potential customers. It would help you drive new, highly qualified traffic which is exactly what every business needs.
The moral of the story is that working together helps both businesses and customers. Rather than trying to control the customers, lets let the customers have more control over themselves. At the end of the day, the only sustainable way to make a change is to have something that is mutually beneficial. We are extremely excited to be hearing that this is exactly what we are accomplishing with our new approach. Get in touch is you are interested in learning more!
Thank you for reading!
