What Pickled Onions Taught Me About Loyalty Programmes
There’s a small dairy on Williamson Avenue that sells the best pickled onions I’ve ever tasted. A chunky glass jar, no brand, hand-written price tag. The kind of thing that crackles with vinegar-soaked nostalgia. I started going every Thursday to stock up (yes, it became a habit), and somewhere between onions and idle chit-chat, I noticed something quietly genius.
They don’t have a loyalty card. No scan, no QR code, no ‘spend $100 get five dollars back’. Just Marj behind the counter who remembers I like the spicy ones. And somehow, that’s far more powerful than the gamified glitter of most corporate ‘loyalty ecosystems’.
Marketers have overcomplicated what should be a simple equation. Be generous. Be consistent. And, for the love of salted vinegar, be human. Instead, what we usually get is points we forget, rankings we can’t decipher, or worse, reward tiers named after precious metals we’ll never touch. You are not going to make me feel ‘elite’ with silver status. Sorry.
The lesson? Emotional memory eats transactional bait for breakfast. If you're building a loyalty programme in 2024, start in a dairy. Ask what keeps people coming back when there’s no app, no personalisation engine, and no discount. The answer probably isn’t scalable or slick. It might be spicy. But it will work.
They don’t have a loyalty card. No scan, no QR code, no ‘spend $100 get five dollars back’. Just Marj behind the counter who remembers I like the spicy ones. And somehow, that’s far more powerful than the gamified glitter of most corporate ‘loyalty ecosystems’.
Marketers have overcomplicated what should be a simple equation. Be generous. Be consistent. And, for the love of salted vinegar, be human. Instead, what we usually get is points we forget, rankings we can’t decipher, or worse, reward tiers named after precious metals we’ll never touch. You are not going to make me feel ‘elite’ with silver status. Sorry.
The lesson? Emotional memory eats transactional bait for breakfast. If you're building a loyalty programme in 2024, start in a dairy. Ask what keeps people coming back when there’s no app, no personalisation engine, and no discount. The answer probably isn’t scalable or slick. It might be spicy. But it will work.