A walk around the mall
Perkler staff got to go on a field trip the other day and the outcomes were really interesting. Graham and Linh headed off to one of our city’s largest malls (our hometown of Canberra is just a few hundred thousand people but we’ve always had a pretty good mall culture going back to the 70’s).
The boys visited every store in the centre asking about their loyalty programs and what they offer consumers. They visited everything from huge national and global brands right down to the local food court proprietors.
Considering we already have well over a thousand programs in the Perkolator, the results were interesting.
49 new brands were entered into the Perkolator, with 46 that they found already in our database. So in a mall of around 200 stores 95 had information in store about their programs.
The most interesting thing is that of the programs we already had in our database 40 programs had to be modified. That means the websites of the brands had different information to their in-store collateral. In most cases there was more specific information on hardcopy material than we had seen in other public information on the program.
This might seem like a small point, just a slight difference in the information available, but it is critical in building relationships with consumers. If a consumer can’t trust that all of the brands touchpoints (web, brochure, advertising) gives the same information how do they know what they are entitled to.
I know there are different strategies at play here. Many brands leave detailed info in store because they are chasing truly valuable customers - the ones who have come in and are purchasing. But at Perkler we believe that loyalty should be used more to encourage people into the store in the first place.
To do that you need to make loyalty rewards active and up to date for the consumer to make a decision. As times get tougher for retailers we are very confident stand-out loyalty offerings (rather than carbon copies of competitors programs) or at least stand out individual offers, will be a key marketing tool to getting people to purchase.