The most effective way to run a loyalty campaign to generate strong business growth might well be to target communication that’s designed to woo existing customers towards the mass market – acquisition goes smoother when people expect great treatment and experiences as a customer.
If customers are loyal, it’s for mechanical reasons – contractual lock-in, unique features, extreme switching costs. Customers don’t care about brands – they care about their family and friends, maybe their career, and sometimes where the next meal is going to come from – not brands. Build a market share so extreme there’s nowhere else to go, and you’ve got loyalty on lock.
In marketing, it’s difficult to grasp the scale of things, and once you grasp the scale it’s difficult to know where to aim. It’s possible to build a life long business around 1000 true fans as originally outlined by Kevin Kelly – but it’d be completely impossible to build a business with any reasonable economies of scale at that size, and businesses like Coca Cola count their users in the billions – and they’re still aiming for more....
Context – At the time of writing, I lead a team that’s gone from 3 people to 15 and growing in less than 2 years. We’ve gone from a fully flat hierarchy to the creation of 4 distinct units with separate responsibilities and contributions to the delivery of our strategy. It’s amazing for so many reasons, but we’ve also started to experience the teething problems that accompany team expansions. Projects get stalled out, it’s unclear who should run with what, units deliver some of the same work twice, things fall between chairs, and it’s hard for team members to deeply understand the contributions from other units....
The two scariest parts of flying are when you’re closest to the ground. That’s strange enough all by itself – but what’s even weirder is how well it maps to the rest of life. The scariest parts of anything tends to be the start and the end. Kicking off a new project requires such bravery – and calling something finished, final, complete, is terrifying. But it’s the only way to go anywhere!...