Promos Face a 'Push' or 'Pull' Future
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Hanifin Loyalty blog.
At the Retailer Roundtable in Portland, ME last month, Alex Rampell, CEO TrialPay, questioned how 'offers' should be driven and insisted the model has to change from "push" to "pull" to build sustainable economic models in the future.
Examples of 'push' offers are demonstrated by the full frontal approach of Groupon, LivingSocial and Amazon Daily Deals. Offers are also delivered in more 'mysterious' ways through card-linked offers from the likes of Cardlytics, Edo and Swipely. Add to this the favorite tool of search networks Google and Yahoo, stalker ads known as re-targeting, and you have the full picture.
TrialPay is an alternative e-commerce payment system in which a consumer gets an item for free from a participating merchant in exchange for buying or trying out another product or service from a TrialPay advertiser. Based on a CrunchBase profile, the company has raised about $55 million in investor funding.
As Mr. Rampell explained, his opinions are influenced by a growing acknowledgement that consumers are aware of the value of their personal data and won't opt-in as easily for offers unless value is detected.
At the same event, Mark Bonchek, founder of ORBIT, a digital marketing consultancy, advocated for "purposeful data collection." Brands adopting this practice would more intelligently use data to predict "not just what I do like, but what I might like" as a means of organizing and executing promotional offers. The legacy language of "targeting customers," Mr. Bonchek argued, makes the average consumer feel threatened, as if they were a deer wandering the woods during hunting season. That's not the feeling you want to impart to your customers each time they type in a Google search, or flip on a smartphone while walking the mall.
Mr. Bonchek also talked about how marketers can create a branded currency through the combination of coupons, gift cards and loyalty points to create a valuable asset for consumers. The concept of branded currency combines purchasing power and brand preference in a highly liquid and available means of transacting commerce, and is described more thoroughly in recent article in Harvard Business Review.
Creation of effective offer strategies in the future will leverage latent data to expose assumptions about current understanding. Offer creation will be grounded in predictive models and will acknowledge the personality as well as personal lifestyle of the consumer. The execution journey will reinforce each step of the personalized customer journey in real time, provide (near) instant feedback, and reinforce valuable behaviors for the brand.