Daniel Olson

Articles by Daniel All articles by Daniel

• Want Customer Loyalty? Be Loyal To Customers in MAD on 09/02/2015
  

  What's a good customer worth? Most people say it's the sum of what they spend with you. This might be one of the biggest myths in marketing. It's time to give acquisition-retention formulas a serious overhaul and shift strategies.

Comments by Daniel All comments by Daniel

• Loyalty Programs: Get Points For Thinking Beyond Points by Dave Andreadakis (Marketing Insider on 03/19/2019)
  

  Dave,Great Article, and I couldn't agree more. Having a points program as a loyalty prgram is just doing something tactical to try and engage your consumers. Great loyalty programs must have two things foundationally in them. One, to be a member of the program should be given the ability to experience the brand at its very best. Second the program should enhance and expand on the very reason you engaged with the brand in the first place. It all comes down to creating great customer experiences at every moment and being consistent in delievring on the brand meaning in an individual's relationship with that brand.Dan Olson

• Marketing To Gen Z: Death Of Brand Loyalty? by Vivek Sharma (Marketing Insider on 02/05/2019)
  

  Vivek,Great article, and I couldn't agree with you more. And while focusing on creating and managing great customer experiences works for Gen Z, honestly, it is the best strategy for any generation.Brands that are smart are the ones that have shifted their marketing around the customer exoerience, and this is not just UX or events. This is any experience that a customer has from a YouTube Video, to a post, to a in-store experience. Basically any maner in which a customer interacts with a brand is a customer experience that can be made better. And it is as you say, these expereinces when added up, builds a brand loyalty and brand love.

• What Marketers Can Learn From MoviePass' Struggle by Lou Jordano (Marketing Insider on 09/13/2018)
  

  Great article Lou. This scenario is like the old joke, "We lose money on every transaction but we will make it up in volume!". The real solution here is that they need to understand that they have two miilion users and all their behavioral data. In the movie business the pressure to win in the first two weekends is enormous, having lost a ton profit that used to be delivered in the DVD sales, forces a need to win big in the first release. Moviepass could offset their loss by monetizing their marketing engine to help movie makers promote presell the first weekend. Much the way Vegas used to offset the cost of hotels and food just to have people play the games. So in reality thier business model is not really to provide the undoable but to provide insights into creating better profits for the studios, which would bring us better movies, which would drive more movie goers to the theaters which would give them more insight. Dan Olson

• Discounting Loyalty: Lessons-A-Plenti by Patrick Reynolds (Marketing Insider on 08/16/2018)
  

  Patrick,You are on point with this. Customers choose a brand for a reason and while discounts are nice there is nothing more powerful than enhancing their experience with the brand they already love. Customers are getting weary of having to earn recognition, they think, and rightly so, that being a good and even great customer should come with even a better way to experience a brand. At The Loyalty Consultants, we believe that any loaylty or customer recognition program should simply be the ulitmate way to exoerience a product or brand. And if done right the value offered by the loyalty program should have customers joining your brand with the intention to be loyal. Dan Olson

• Digital Customers Less Loyal by Tanya Gazdik (Marketing Daily on 01/25/2017)
  

  Tonya, Great Article. I totally agree. I think a huge mistake being done by marketers today is to think that they can create great customer expereinces through an automated process only. Consumers are humans and no matter how savvy we become nothing replaces a legitimate human focused experience. This doesn't mean that technology is bad. No to the contrary it is great, it just isn't the only thing. Customer experiences have many dimensions, are they personalized, accessable and approachable, do they bring utility in my life, is there value to me. But most importantly are they meaningful to me. Until I have an emotional connection I cannot be truly loyal. Many times the technology driven programs can give you an observed loyalty behavior based on transactions, but it is when brands can create a culture that is focused on the customer's emotional connection that they can get to an emotionally given loyalty. Thanks again for these great thoughts.

• Is Your Loyalty Program Destroying Your Brand's Value? by Jamie Anderson (Marketing Daily on 12/06/2016)
  

  Jamie, you make some great points here. However, this is not just an issue with retailers. These points and rewards program have had a significant amount of success in several categories, but they can only deliver an observed behavior based loyalty. That is when they work and deliver up to their expectations. A truer loyalty is a behavior that is driven from an emotional connection. As you have pointed out in the two examples of Amazon and Under Armor, these brands have focused on creating better experiences. It is through these well-crafted experiences that customers and prospects both begin to build their opinions and affinities towards a brand, product or service.   The challenge today is how do brands create better experiences. This is the area ripe for disruption. If brands can begin to understand better as to what makes a great experience and how that great experience can lead to greater customer loyalty, then they will truly begin to build an emotional given loyalty.  Which then everybody wins.

• Free SVOD Services: Lots Of Ads, Less Demand by Wayne Friedman (Television News Daily on 11/18/2016)
  

  As the industry continues to change and the cost of providing entertainment continues to shift more and more to the consumer / viewer, there will become a need for the SVOD providors to compete on more than just the content they provide. The consumer / viewer if having to pay and pay increasiningly will require a better customer experience from the providors. The amount of competition that is here today and coming tomorow will change how we as consumer pick and chose. It is one thing to have a choice of any for no cost and a different thing to have decide what to pay for. This will change how entertainment is marketed and more inportantly how viewers / customers are treated. Loyalty will be built through a combination of great content and a differentiation in customer experience. The providor brands themselves will need to begin to develop their brands to stand for and mean something as well.

• A World Without Commercials? Contemplating The Future Of TV by Adam Buckman (TVBlog on 11/16/2016)
  

  Adam, I think you are correct on the point that viewers want the entertainment to come to them for free, but do not want to have to endure commercials. But the truth is the revenue to drive creative development of content must come from somewhere. I think consumers/viewers in the end will find themselves with a decision: How much am I willing to pay for my entertainment and this may be more than just money. As in app usage, I have 30 plus apps on my phone and I use 5 to 7 on a regular basis. Entertainment will most likely be the same. While there may be lots of choice, you end up engaging, (paying for), with just a few. So, the real challenge might be that the companies that have played the role of distribution and delivery will now also have to think about attracting and sustaining their viewer audiences based on more than just the content they provide. This will require a differentiation in the customer expereince between one app / network and another. So, the question is, how is the experience of watching TV going to change to focus on what and how cosnumers / viewers are wanting it to be. Because in the end they will be the ones paying for it.

• Want Customer Loyalty? Be Loyal To Customers by Dan Olson (MAD on 09/02/2015)
  

  James These are great questions. I would say that for any organizations to reach success on the loyalty front requires a commitment from not only top management but the company as a whole. Since customers will build their opinion and assessments of a brand based on the many expereinces they have with a brand, managing these expereinces becomes a company wide initiative. So it does come down to "little things count"  as you say remembering a name or even acknowledging their value as a customer. On the second question most programs are designed to grow the business and bring in more revenue, as they should be, but many times only effect around 30% of a customer base. So i agree with expanding programs to include non purchase engagement as an addition to purchase as a program focus. This allows for progams to be more customer centric and appeal to more customers than just a points earned for purchases type program.Dan

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