In January 2016 we predicted the top 10 trends that B2B loyalty marketing would witness during the course of the year. But did we get it right? Let’s take a look back ….

Personal development is recognised as the most effective way in which business relationships with business partners can be nurtured. And while business schools are having trouble to keep pace with these developments, this is presenting a very bright business future for online enablement. It is proven that certified business partners sell more...

Most companies have come to realise that offering online education modules continues to be an important driving force in establishing successful channel partner relationships. At Motivforce R&D, we often are asked to come up with a convincing business case that outlines how clients will start earning by learning, simply by making the switch to online enablement. These are the four key benefits on which we think such a case can be built:

In today’s markets, your company’s success depends hugely on the motivation and abilities of your business partners. Willingness is often fuelled by elaborate incentive structures, but ability is a different cookie. More and more firms are experimenting with online modules across multiple (mobile) platforms, so there are ample and innovative opportunities to work on your business partners’ tech, marketing and sales skills. Yet, we often see that the message cannot keep up with the medium. In other words, content is offered that is out of line or, at best, loosely coupled to strategic channel objectives.

Follow our 5 step process:

Thinking of or running an Employee Recognition Program?

The exponential growth of Big Data now makes it possible to predict the performance of teams on the basis of laws and patterns in social interactions.

The research highlighted the traits of the ideal team player and also successful teams.

Most loyalty marketers focus on rewarding customer or business partner behaviour. Yet, there is another important side to the loyalty coin and that is recognizing the performance of employees. There is a so-called profit chain that links employee motivation and behaviour with customer loyalty. We have witnessed an important shift when it comes to employee recognition programs; the focus is no longer on incentivizing individual employees, but on rewarding the performance of teams. 

In designing employee recognition programs, it is imperative to be very specific about the kind of behaviours that you want your associates to display (and get rewarded for). Many of our clients make the mistake of relating their incentives to broad and generic corporate values. Instead, the specs are important, as they make for easier and more transparent reward criteria. Also, do consider recognizing your operational managers. For many customer-facing employees, their supervisor, team leader or store manager is a role model who they look to for guidance on good practice. 

When Leicester City won the Premiership, at the Etihad, Manchester City’s home ground, fans stayed to applaud Leicester players and manager off the pitch, despite the fact that they had just humiliated their team. This is in line with recent research that shows that single-brand loyalty is rapidly eroding in favour of multiple brand loyalty. Customers often partially defect and as a result there may be a much higher ROI in trying to increase customers’ share of spending with your brand instead of trying to maximize customer retention intentions. Brand loyalty is a team sport!

The Pokémon Go craze, which is based on a killer app that has got millions of people leaving their computer screens. Responding to Nintendo’s call to action to 'catch Pokémon in the real world...' Strange as it may seem, there is a very, very important lesson for your loyalty program.

Our loyalty professors Ko de Ruyter and Debbie Keeling share their latest research and how to avoid channel partners having mixed feelings about your loyalty program. How does this impact program ROI and what can you do about it? 

Have you added social loyalty in your recognition program? 

In a recent blog post by HMI, our USA ally in loyalty excellence, they discuss the merits of one of our predicted 2016 hottest loyalty trends. Read more at their blog here. Elements of the post are from one of our own blog articles, Loyalty Goes Social, from earlier this year. 

Recently one of our clients came up with the idea of running a bundle promotion.
Bundle promotions are commonly seen in our B2B loyalty space and the concept is well accepted by customers.
However, here we need to pause and remind ourselves of the purpose of running a promotion. 

A loyalty and incentive company has to behave like a doctor – it has to diagnose the problem before implementing the cure. One common mistake that companies make is, instead of making a personal diagnosis, they just copy what their competitors are doing To avoid these mistakes...

Clients often point out that many loyalty program members cheat and that making compliance rules stricter hardly seems to have any effect. It’s not like they’re all bad apples, it’s just that a lot of members seem to curb honesty, here, there and everywhere.

At Motivforce R&D we are all doctors. Not the kind you turn to when somebody on a flight is having a heart attack (although we do get asked sometimes!). We are pretty useless at saving people. We probably could tell you though what the impact of such an incident would be on passenger satisfaction or how it affects the airline’s brand equity. This is useful when you work for a loyalty marketing company.

In order to find answers, let’s take a look at some more facts. When customers voice their discontent socially, they share a story about a personal experience. It’s often a tale from the heart, it’s not a professionally edited PR statement, and its tone of voice is authentic, unpolished, raw even.

Some of us at Motivforce have been avid Star Trek fans since our early years. Mind you, not the super nerdy types who glue on pointed ears and pretend to chat via chest-fitted communicators at conventions. Nerdy enough though, to sometimes use the show as a frame of reference when confronted with the realities of work life.

At a Motivforce event held in Sydney, Australia, co-director of Motivforce R&D, Professor Ko de Ruyter presented research on how to best cultivate an engaged social community and focussed on: marketing strategy, customer relationship management, social media and customer loyalty. He used popular culture icon Lady Gaga as an ongoing example throughout his presentation. 

This article was originally posted on crn.com.au