Rick Ferguson
Easy Rider: To be a great loyalty marketer, it helps to live your brand
Ralph "Benny" Suggs, General Manager of the Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) and Rider Services for Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Harley-Davidson Motor Company, is easy to underestimate. It's obvious that he loves working for Harley-Davidson, and he possesses the type of big, expansive, welcoming personality that puts...
The Oriental Crown: The world’s fastest-growing economy will embrace loyalty marketing–eventually
For a useful metaphor describing China's growing interest in loyalty marketing, look to the 2010 World Expo site, currently under construction in Shanghai. The Expo, which occupies over five square kilometers on both banks of the Huangpu River across from the city's historic...
The Reward Cardholders’ Bill of Rights: Why issuers should hold these truths to be...
The Consumerism movement, which began in the 1950s as a reaction against predatory business practices, reached its zenith in 1962, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to Congress in which he outlined four basic rights to which all consumers were entitled....
Siamese Dream: The fantasy of separating the inseparable
Let's just state right up front that what I know about running an airline could fit comfortably in a thimble. But since I have made a career of studying customer loyalty programs and their effect on the bottom line, I had to scratch my...
Diversity Training: In B2E incentive programs, the right reward mix can reduce budget pressure
When it comes to delivering hard benefits in a B2E loyalty program, you might be tempted to think that cash is king—after all, what employee couldn't use a little something extra in the pay envelope come Christmas time? But just as cash rewards offer...
The Power of the Network: Why loyalty marketing is essential to harnessing customer word-of-mouth
In 1995, Ethernet pioneer and 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe articulated Metcalfe's Law, which states that the usefulness or value of a networked system equals the square of the number of users of the system. The most common example used to illustrate Metcalfe's Law is...
COLLOQUY Releases 2009 Census
Membership in U.S. loyalty rewards programs has reached 1.808 billion. The adjusted total represents a 24% growth from the 1.3 billion tally in COLLOQUY's last loyalty marketing industry census, published two years ago in 2007. The 2009 census covers three industry segments not included...
Brain Atlas: The Loyalty Marketer’s Guide to Gray Matter
Not all of us have the time to complete four years of medical school and then four more years of neurological residency just to understand how brain architecture influences likelihood to respond to your loyalty marketing initiatives. After interviewing a number of neuroscientists and...
Put the Bunny Back in the Box
Because I'm shallow, when I search for a metaphor to wrap around whatever marketing concept we're discussing in COLLOQUY, I nearly always default to a movie or music reference. In a very real sense, I'm a frustrated Entertainment Weekly editor stuck in a loyalty...
Play Your Cards Right and Bet on Your Best Customers When the Economy Gets...
I'm a really lousy poker player for one simple reason: I can't divest myself emotionally from an economic downturn. All poker players go on bad runs. Pocket aces get cracked on the river. Nut flushes go down in flames because some maniac who never...
The iPhone: Angel or Demon Building Loyalty?
Quick—name another smart phone besides the iPhone. The Blackberry, maybe? Yesterday's news. In the smart phone industry, there is the Apple iPhone, and there is everyone else. Apple rightly gets all the buzz. But what about AT&T, the silent partner in this marriage? Nearly...
Leveraging the Power of Data: Savvy Companies Use Data to Change Customer Behavior
When looking at the future of loyalty marketing and the trends that will shape the space, we see boundaries that will continue to expand outward. The key to this next stage of evolution will be leveraging the power of customer data. Data-driven enterprises will...