Consider this: You’re part of a loyalty programme of a hotel, airline or a retail chain, and you spend like there’s no tomorrow, thinking you might be rewarded. But in the end, you end up with only a huge hole in your pocket. This has, in all likelihood, happened to everyone who’s been a part of reward programmes.
Ostensibly, loyalty programmes are meant to engage the marketer better with the customer, and good, loyal customers get rewarded. But, in reality, rewards are very low due to the way loyalty programmes are structured. For instance, if one were to spend Rs 10,000 at a retail store, one would garner points that would give you rewards of only Rs 100, which is certainly not high enough to warrant continued spending. In fact, with Shoppers’ Stop and Lifestyle cutting their rewards by 30%, the net reward is smaller still.
The next generation of loyalty programmes in India is the coalition loyalty programme. It’s a programme in which many different companies get together to offer a single loyalty programme and collectively reward their customers. Coalition loyalty programmes have been hugely popular in the UK, where Nectar, one such programme, has signed up nearly 55% of the UK residents.
Most of the major British retailers now partner with Nectar for their reward programmes as well. This August saw the launch of i-mint, India’s first coalition loyalty programme, by Bangalore-based Loyalty Solutions and Research. Currently, it has six companies partnering it — ICICI Bank, HPCL, Airtel, Lifestyle, makemytrip.com and Indian. So how does a coalition loyalty differentiate itself from a plain-vanilla programme or even co-branded cards?
Consider the case of i-mint. Everytime you pay your Airtel bill, fly by Indian and fill petrol from an HPCL pump, you get reward points. Now, if per-chance you book an Indian ticket on makemytrip.com using your ICICI Bank credit card, you get points from all three partners, even though it’s just a single activity.
Contrast this with what you’d get by spending individually — a few hundred points in retail or in credit card spends, but none significant enough to gather substantial rewards. The essence of coalition loyalty is that the whole sum is greater than the sum in parts. All the rewards from spends involving these six companies will be aggregated with i-mint.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1956805.cms
:SugarwareZ-229:
Ostensibly, loyalty programmes are meant to engage the marketer better with the customer, and good, loyal customers get rewarded. But, in reality, rewards are very low due to the way loyalty programmes are structured. For instance, if one were to spend Rs 10,000 at a retail store, one would garner points that would give you rewards of only Rs 100, which is certainly not high enough to warrant continued spending. In fact, with Shoppers’ Stop and Lifestyle cutting their rewards by 30%, the net reward is smaller still.
The next generation of loyalty programmes in India is the coalition loyalty programme. It’s a programme in which many different companies get together to offer a single loyalty programme and collectively reward their customers. Coalition loyalty programmes have been hugely popular in the UK, where Nectar, one such programme, has signed up nearly 55% of the UK residents.
Most of the major British retailers now partner with Nectar for their reward programmes as well. This August saw the launch of i-mint, India’s first coalition loyalty programme, by Bangalore-based Loyalty Solutions and Research. Currently, it has six companies partnering it — ICICI Bank, HPCL, Airtel, Lifestyle, makemytrip.com and Indian. So how does a coalition loyalty differentiate itself from a plain-vanilla programme or even co-branded cards?
Consider the case of i-mint. Everytime you pay your Airtel bill, fly by Indian and fill petrol from an HPCL pump, you get reward points. Now, if per-chance you book an Indian ticket on makemytrip.com using your ICICI Bank credit card, you get points from all three partners, even though it’s just a single activity.
Contrast this with what you’d get by spending individually — a few hundred points in retail or in credit card spends, but none significant enough to gather substantial rewards. The essence of coalition loyalty is that the whole sum is greater than the sum in parts. All the rewards from spends involving these six companies will be aggregated with i-mint.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1956805.cms
:SugarwareZ-229: