The Power of Love: Lean Into Loyalty, with Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. Loyalty is one of the most important components of love. It can also be one of the greatest drivers of your competitive advantage and growth in financially challenging times. Chris Perry, chief Learning Officer at First Mover and our own, Lauren Livak Gilbert, teamed up to dig into the best new practices of loyalty and describe them in a new research report. Eight Love Languages of Shopper Loyalty. We dive into their advice on how to most effectively build your relationship and turn your best customers into even better customers, and ultimately your advocates. Chris, welcome back to the show. We're so happy to have you back on.

Chris Perry (00:59):

Thank you so much, Peter. Lauren, I'm excited to be here.

Peter Crosby (01:01):

And today we are talking about my favorite topic, love. I know, but not the butterflies in your stomach. Kind of love expensive dinners and roses, but more like the discounts that you get and feeling special and recognized kind of love. Alright, we're talking about shopper loyalty and you've done a lot of thinking about it in the month of February, which was the appropriate month to have you on, but we're very popular, but we're happy to have you. Now, you dove into the eight different love languages of shopper loyalty, which is, well, first of all, tell us why shopper loyalty and maybe even particularly in this chaotic economic era perhaps is becoming more and more important. And then tell us a bit about what you discovered through this deep dive on loyalty.

Chris Perry (01:55):

Yes, no, and I was very excited to partner with Lauren on this because some of our thinking came to fruition here and it was like the perfect storm, but everyone loves love and honestly, love can go well beyond Valentine's Day month. We should always be loving in every way. But this was kind of interesting. We all want growth. And this year especially, e-commerce is maturing more than ever, even though it's still growth, but it's maturing. There's a lot of inflation and economic uncertainty and tightening of the belts. And so a lot of major retailers have called back some of their growth goals because they're not sure how the American consumer, even the global consumer is going to behave. So the challenge is there's a lot of pressure on growth, but that's what we all want. And growth is ultimately a function of acquiring new people and maximizing current people, getting them to buy more often.

(02:50):

IE loyalty. Now what's really interesting though is so when you think about acquisition and loyalty, there's always that kind of like, well, which one's more important? You have seasons of a brand or a retailer's lifecycle where they focus on one or the other when they're a challenger or the leader or whatnot. But I found this really interesting. So I thought about love. We want shoppers to love us, and I thought this was really interesting. So according to eHarmony, 85% of adults consider loyalty the most important trait in a partner, which makes some sense. Nobody wants, I mean, there are a few casanovas out there that just love to be in multiple, I'm not judging but want to be. I love people that are with everyone else all the time, and that's fine. So we value loyalty as people, and then when we go to work, it's like we don't, because actually only 33% of brands and retailers consider loyalty more important than shopper acquisition, which is really interesting, which is probably not surprising that most historically brands and retailers have focused more on acquisition versus really, I would say robust in their shopper loyalty programming and efforts, right?

(04:03):

There has been a lot of work there, but not as much as there could be. So we saw that as an opportunity. And it's interesting because shoppers consider loyalty programs the number one reason they would be loyal because they get those perks and those discounts and other things. But I found the other really funny thing too, 65% of brands and retailers use the shopper loyalty programs they have for shopper acquisition as their number one reason. So they're even using the loyalty programs to get new people as opposed to keep new people and really cross sell them, outsell them for more trips. So there's all of this need to drive loyalty to keep people, and it's less costly. It builds bigger baskets, it drives more trips and more profitability, obviously. I mean, it helps in so many financial ways, not to mention experience ways, but there's a big gap here. And so Lauren and I were talking about doing something on loyalty for the month of love, and I've always loved personality tests and types, the Myers Briggs types, and also that book, the Five Love Languages, right? Words of affirmation, gifts, intimacy, physical touch,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:17):

Acts of quality time.

Chris Perry (05:19):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Acts of service. And that really has helped me in life with my wife and my children and my parents and my siblings and understanding their love languages and be able to give them what they need and hope that also communicate what I need. And so we felt like this was an opportunity to talk about that with respect to shoppers, both for brands and retailers, even though retailers are often the frontline of the shopper loyalty program. And as we were thinking about programming, we realize there are different dimensions to programs. And programs aren't just a membership program, it just could be an effort, an initiative, a campaign. But there's the idea of intrinsic versus intrinsic benefits. So tangible perks, gifts, discounts versus I would say intrinsic being more belonging, education, advancement, feeling like you're giving back versus extrinsic, which is the more tangible ones that we're used to, passive versus active ones that I don't have to work so hard for versus ones that I may have to take an actionable step to get, and then more collective versus personalized ones that might feel one-to-one but are available to everyone versus ones that are designed just for me.

(06:33):

So when we mapped out those three dimensions, we actually got eight different love languages of shopper loyalty, which we then named appropriately and then started to break down into the mechanisms behind them. Great examples of them. And a lot of brands and retailers have a little bit of everything, but it's really more of a what do you have as we talked maybe about a couple of these today, what do you have? What does your shopper profile want or would they engage with even more? How do you differentiate versus your competition? And how can brands help retailers maybe layer on some loyalty efforts so that it's not just on the retailer to do it themselves? And we're seeing a progression from some of the dimensions over to the other side of the dimensions. So we can talk about that as we highlight a few today.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:22):

And there's eight different ones. We are not going to talk about all eight. We will direct you to where you can find all of that digital shelf institute.org/loyalty month or LinkedIn. But we are going to dive into just a couple of them. So Chris, let's start with the first love language gifts of consistency. Let's chat about what that looks like in some examples.

Chris Perry (07:43):

Yeah, no, no. So gifts of consistency, we said was the first one. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit. And because I would say it's the easiest one, it's the one most retailers have offered in the past, some brands have offered in the past. It's passive meaning that it's easy for shoppers to take part in. It's available to everybody, even if it feels again personal, it's still more available to the universal audience. And it's extrinsic, right? It's these tangible value-based offers, right? Discounts for various acts that you take, but that you would normally take. You're not taking special action. And so again, these can be simple examples of these could be cash back on purchases, just I get a point back for anything I do that could be like target circle, where if you just join it, no extra action, you get 1% back through your target circle app.

(08:34):

It could be subscribe and save or Chewy auto ship and save where it's a subscription discount. You did have to subscribe, but after that, it's very passive. You don't have to do any more to get the discount. It could be points that you get. It could be free delivery on Prime, it could be, or with a Walmart plus membership part, it took an action, but then after it all the extra perks just came naturally with anything that you did. So I would say rather low, I would say low lift to do and offer. I don't mean that there isn't programming the software and tracking and account management and CRM and all that stuff, but those are generally the easier ones. And again, I don't want to say they're foundational. For some businesses like Costco, you're a member of Costco and you have access to the treasure hunt.

(09:24):

That's one of their core value propositions. So they should keep doing that. But as everyone else adds loyalty programs, a Costco or a BJ's or a Sam's Club might have to say, well, what do I do about my program to further differentiate it? Because in the past, just the program was differentiation. Now I might need to add some different love languages to stay differentiated. So that's the idea is to kind of work through the languages and see in my table stakes here, is this an area to lean in or should I move to another love language as well?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:56):

And Chris, what do consumers usually expect from this kind of gifts of consistency? Do they expect a certain value back, a certain number of dollars? What is the consumer expectation? If I'm thinking from a brand, what will actually drive value?

Chris Perry (10:12):

No, that's a great question. So I've been scouring the web and all the various thought leaders and data providers and relevant solution providers out there for data. I mean, there's so many cool pieces of research on shopper loyalty that I feel like I haven't seen. Nobody was really focused on shopper loyalty. The part that's weird is it's like it's sitting there. I haven't seen anybody elevate that overtly, but I would say it feels like at a minimum level, a lot of companies kind of give that one to 5% back as a passive offer, obviously for subscription, because truly committing to more, sometimes it's five to 15%, but usually it's 15 on your first purchase versus, so the idea being that because it's loyalty, it's not like, Hey, I'm giving you 20% off if you buy a really big basket right now. If you pull forward your demand, it's more of a, if you just keep coming back, you get this little bit back over time.

(11:12):

And then they also still layer on some of those other basket building offers and things like that, which also play into loyalty. So you may again, have three or four love languages happening at the same time that stack, but that basic level is just enough to say, yeah, you were already convenient to shop at, you give me an extra little bit of value. If I stay with you, I get the value you normally offer every day on a one-off trip, plus this longer term commitment. But it does depend on the product category, the price point or the basket ring that you're buying. I mean, obviously, I don't want to say 5% on a very large high price item would be a lot more money, absolute dollars than on a candy bar. So it may depend on what the item is at the time.

Peter Crosby (12:01):

Chris, I'm thinking about your opening statement about, and it's true that most companies spend most of their effort over on new acquisition.

(12:16):

And part of what I wonder is the reason for that. I mean, they're probably a bunch, but that the holy grail of incrementality is so much easier to measure. I would imagine when it's a net new customer to you, like that is incremental, thank you. Whereas inside of a loyalty program like this, I'm guessing there can be a lot of people who might take the view, oh, well, we would've gotten that anyway, so are we just wasting our time here or something? How does incrementality come into play here and are there clear ways to prove it?

Chris Perry (12:53):

That's a really good question, Peter. And I think that's the thing too, is that there's multiple types of incrementality again. So there's just the net new, which is again, to your point, the easiest thing. I didn't have you in my accounts. You've created a new account, you're new to me and you're buying more items. So that's always easier. And I want to throw out, I know with the Walmart Luminate data, Kroger 84 51 data, I know round de with targets kiosk data, there's increasingly Amazon A MC. There's a lot more data for targeting very unique audiences, but then increasingly manual ways, if not then hopefully long-term automated ways of actually being able to see. So Lauren wasn't new to me, but she increased her average purchases per purchase cycle by three times. That was incremental. Now again, it may not now for the brand, maybe she was going to buy that dog food already, but now she bought it at that retail.

(13:51):

So maybe for the brand, it wasn't net incremental, but for the retailer it was, which then the brand could use to drive incrementality later because they can say, Hey, look, because we activated with you and helped you drive your loyalty in incrementality in these ways, we're a better partner for you. Can you favor us now and give us incremental space on your shelf or incremental activity or, so again, this is why it's an important love loving relationship between retailers and brands because obviously brands want market share within a retailer, but they're not always thinking about growing the category for the retailer. The retailer wants more category share from their retail competitors, but that may not necessarily be new to brand for you. But there are ways, I guess going back to your point is there are ways to measure incremental trips, incremental baskets. We have a whole matrix of metrics for measuring these different types of incrementality. In light of imperfect data today, there are metrics that can help you get a sense of directionally that I'm getting that kind of incrementality from loyalty or that I'm targeting the right shopper that should lead to that kind of incremental data. So if I see growth, I may not be able to see that it's exactly basket building, but I was only activating basket building activity. So that growth should be coming from that, my only noise in this space.

Peter Crosby (15:16):

I think that's great to keep front of mind as we start to mature this approach to the love languages. So let's move on to the next one, which I happen to think I'm very good at. Well, maybe half of it anyway, surprise and delight. I surprise my husband all the time. Delight. I dunno if jury's out on that. But in terms of shopper marketing, tell us about winning with surprise and delight.

Chris Perry (15:42):

So this one is generally passive in the sense that while the surprise part is the active part on the retailer or the brand, that the shopper didn't have to do anything. They're just like ta, I went up, wow, a gift, a perk, an unexpected something. It's typically extrinsic IE tangible gift on your birthday or a recognition of something or an achieved VIP status, or you've got upgraded on your, I mean, again, we are not just limited to retailers and brands. It could be, Hey, I got a free upgrade because I'm the Delta medallion sky plus Platinum 15. I always feel like you could have every month of the year with your stone of the month or your crystal of the month. We have all those levels, but I got upgraded for free or I got personalized recommendations or even offers that were clearly catered to me.

(16:35):

And that's where it gets to slightly more personalized because my birthday is literally the day the world began. So for me at least, so to me, even if it's something you do universally, I'm only talking to Peter. I'm only talking to Lauren. So there are a lot of good examples of that. A lot of the beauty retailers do. Sephora does these. They don't give me a gift. I'm not beautiful enough to be in their program, but they would give me a gift if I had joined Kroger and other retailers personalized because of their loyalty programs and the data they have on shoppers can personalize the coupons and the offers. Even just something simple like that, oh yeah, I was going to buy that and look a deal, or Hey, I was thinking about that or I hadn't thought of that. Wow, a value at this time when I'm crunched on budget, there are lots of different types of, I would say surprise and delight awards or gifts that can be truly gifts or can just be extra discounts or bonuses that would come through the traditional program.

(17:40):

So again, you have to, I think the beauty players typically cater to a little more personalized messaging. But that's why I like to think about this across all retailers who speaks this love language Well, because maybe I'm toilet paper brand. I'm one of the paper brands who wants loyalty, surprise and delight from, but who knows what if you did that? I imagine dude wipes would do something like that. That's their kind of personality, but learn from a category that's doing something a little different because then you'd be differentiated. Obviously you have to make sure it's strategically relevant for your shopper because everybody else gives me points if I buy, but you give me every once in a while you throw out a special, it's like a five ply toilet paper that I would never have expected, but what innovation, I'm just making this up, but always walk the shelf, so to speak, proverbial shelf and look for other categories or industries doing this well, what can we learn from the airlines? Definitely not on how to do this profitably, but what can we learn from the airlines on their programming and what shouldn't we do? That's the other thing. They might be overly confusing with 17 groups that board the plane at different times. Maybe we want to simplify it, but still borrow one of their love languages. So I love getting inspiration from categories I normally would write off because often they're doing something, A toy brand might be doing something that a cleaning brand could borrow and heighten their involvement and their engagement a little more.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:18):

I think the beauty brand example is really interesting because if I think about the many times I buy things at Sephora, you often get a free gift or a free sample or you get to choose based on your level of points, how big your sample is. But that's a really great way for me to break into another brand or to try a new brand. So I look at that surprise and delight, especially around the free gift or free something at purchase. It allows you to potentially expand with your current customer base because I've gotten a bunch of samples and been like, oh my gosh, I love this. I'm going to go buy the full product. So I think that's another way of thinking about surprise and delight for brands. Maybe you have a new innovation or you're trying to do a sampling program. How can you connect that to the existing loyalty program you have to help your consumers break into a new brand market area?

Chris Perry (20:10):

No, and I love that. And see, actually, Lauren, what you just alluded to, is it acquisition and loyalty go hand in hand, right? A loyal shopper might tell their friend that they should be the first time shopper. So you are going to always have a yin and yang acquisition opportunity, whether it be the brand to your point, Hey, I shop these six brands at Sephora every day or every week or every month when I run out, but I tried a new brand. So I wasn't new to Sephora, I was new to L'Oreal, or I was new to Estee Lauder or a challenger brand that entered the scene. So the brand could use the loyalty program for acquisition, but then Sephora might use that program in their instance for, it's not a matter of you coming back for more trips, you've bought more from me than you would buy normally.

(20:57):

So that's my loyalty now is buy rate on the basket side, not on the trip side. You were going to keep coming back to me for the categories you normally bought me, but now you're buying a new product or you've traded up to a more premium one. So that's the thing is we have to look at loyalty as, again, it's dollars per shopper and trips per shopper, right? Or dollars per trip, trips per shopper, but obviously dollars per shopper over time, and that can come from a number of different areas, but you can leapfrog off the loyalty program to drive some acquisition as well.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:29):

I love it. They can go hand in hand. Well said. Okay, let's chat about love language number eight, self-actualization. Tell us how people feel connected to be able to do something like that and participate.

Chris Perry (21:42):

So we named this one, Lauren and I both were, as I bounced ideas off, we named, this is like the pinnacle one. Now obviously you may need all of these, right? Or you may need a blend of love languages. Again, you might not just jump to the highest of mind or spirit, but we almost thought of it's a little bit like the love languages almost work their way up. The Maslow hierarchy of needs to some degree because a more extrinsic offer is going to be a little bit more about basic sustainability, basic physiological needs and security and all of that. Whereas then you start moving into belonging and advancement and feeling self-esteem and becoming the best person you can be. So we kind of said self-actualization might be a little bit of a haughty word, but we thought it represented this idea of intrinsic benefits at a personalized level and a more active role for the shopper.

(22:37):

And so these are the harder ones for brands and retailers to activate, but they actually are true differentiators. And honestly, even if it was only 3% of your shopper base that was going to really engage around that, they might become your advocates, your true, your evangelists of some level for your brand equity, but also for whatever the benefit is or the program. So some really cool examples or types of tactics would be obviously learning and upskilling and certifications. That might seem like, well, am I expecting that from my retailer? Well, maybe not. But when you go and do a workshop on how to build a bird house at Home Depot with your kids, it's kind of cool and you learn something. And now dad looks like he's really handy, even though he really isn't, right? He's handy with crafts, not with home projects, but now he looks really handy. But any of that can look good, even if it's not for LinkedIn purposes. It's just for,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:34):

Is this a personal example of, I know

Chris Perry (23:36):

We get, I always weave in a few personal ones,

(23:39):

Very creative, just not with wood and stone and metal, but with paper and other craft items, I'm actually quite good. I can cross stitch like no other. A lot of those fun skills. Other things could be interesting too. Again, it may be personalized progress towards a specific goal. So there are a lot of, I would say fitness brands that obviously through the apps and whatnot, help gamify your activity. I know Peloton and others that try to, obviously they want you to be engaged and use the product and keep the subscription to stay loyal, but they're also doing it to keep you healthy, right? There's an altruistic goal. One of my favorite ones that I think Kroger is actually starting to reinvigorate a little bit is their opt up program. So it to be, it started in 2018 with their opt up app, which was really to gamify healthy eating.

(24:33):

So as you bought things through your loyalty program in store and online, it would score the nutritional value of the food you were buying and give you recommendations on how to improve color coding and scoring the number. And it almost became a game with friends and family. It's like, man, you eat trash versus man, you eat really great. But I feel like they could have really doubled down on that. They do have the opt up score on food too, which would push you to make better choices, but now they just launched opt up for members of their program. You can get a 30 minute nutritionist consultation, virtual through the opt up, optimize your nutrition program to actually get personal recommendations on how to improve your eating habits, what foods you eat, et cetera. So I think that's such a cool thing that's uber relevant to a grocery retailer, whereas the drug class of trade might go after health and pharmacy and urgent care.

(25:31):

Not to say that's off limits for Kroger, but they went after more of the nutrition side. But there's some really cool capabilities too on the brand side, L'Oreal's mo face skin advisor tool that they've used for both virtual tryon, but also for assessing the health of your skin so they can make recommendations or direct you to a dermatologist as an example, or one of my favorite ones is General Mills, even though I worked at Kellogg's and I had to shake my fist competitively at General Mills, I always love General Mills box tops for education, which they expanded beyond their brands to other brands because that is you having to scan your receipts or collect the box tops, so to speak, extra action for you. So it's active, it's personalized because you're dedicating what school it goes to and it's your school because charity starts at home and it's intrinsic because you're not getting a discount per se in that moment.

(26:25):

You're giving back to the community to your kids or the kids of your fellow community members and whatnot. So we're your grandkids or however you participate. So I love those examples. I mean, there's a lot of them out there, but see, again, it's not just a retailer play. A brand can do that and actually augment retailer loyalty too. If you get credit for it, that's part of JBP enhancement. It is not just doing it on the side and hoping someone notice go in and bring that value back in and maybe trade it for other value for the brand that could be more extrinsic in-store brand blocking and more facings and more end caps, because I'm actually bringing you Walmart more value. So I think that's an important part of, but self-actualization is the pinnacle and the goal, but it can take very different paths depending on what kind of brand or industry you're in.

Peter Crosby (27:16):

So Chris, as you're talking through these love languages, it's triggering something in me that I would like to throw a question at you that assuming, I mean I think the case you're making is that you ought to be putting more thought, more creativity. There are opportunities to be had within loyalty that you ought to be thinking about particularly during this time, and particularly some of the things you're talking about as you go kind of up level, it seems like it's more and more needs to be not just something that lives in shopper marketing and they run their little programs over there, but needs to be cross-functional because you're using it as a lever with your retailer partners and all that kind of stuff. And I was just wondering if you had best practice cross-functional organizational ideas for where you see the ones that are doing this best, who's actually at the table and how does that work to achieve what you're talking about?

Chris Perry (28:14):

No, that's a great question. By all means, as all of us having done some, I know DSI has done work on org structures and change management in this space. There isn't one. I know Profit Hero had some really great work on the evolution of, especially even in e-commerce with any area of change. There's the sidecar or it's just the embedded versus the more integrated democratized role. So I would say if loyalty is new to you, it's probably got to be with any change. It's got to be a dedicated role. Who owns that? And maybe it does start with shopper marketing because that's been their purview, but it needs to be elevated by leadership to be a cross-functional thing, even if there's a point person who's logical and has a lot of experience in it to try to drive that forward. I do think though, to some degree where we've seen e-commerce accelerate fast has been when it got integrated or democratized very quickly and embedded within the brand.

(29:16):

I worked at recit, and so I have a fondness for the early mover advantage Recit got. But to be fair, they far surpassed anything the OG mafia team that we had have done. But to be fair though, they embedded that even in the brand teams, there was an equity team that managed the digital and the digital commerce piece from a strategy standpoint. So you had a counterpart in brand that actually cared about e-commerce because of its influence on commerce. And so they got that. They might be humble and say not perfectly, but they got it way ahead of a lot of other brands. So the same idea being that if I'm a brand, really it needs to be at the brand level where I'd say my three initiatives and my OGSM strategy for the year, my objective goal strategy measures model is going to be my loyalty initiative and it's going to be tops for education.

(30:10):

I have no doubt that for General Mills corporately, but maybe even for some of the key brands that are pillar brands within the cereal business and others, that's a pretty core lever. But because it's such an ingrained part, that might just be the way they do things. Now, it's not a dedicated only thing. They always think that way. But if it was the first time you did it, you'd probably want to put that as, I have three big initiatives this year. I'm launching this new innovation. I am rebranding my equity to go after this other shopper audience and I'm going to develop a loyalty program. And if that's true, then suddenly all parties have to get behind that. The sales team has to activate that because that's got to be translated into trade strategy and a customer marketing plan. And it's being measured strategically, but also tactically at the end.

(30:58):

So I don't know if this isn't like there isn't a perfect map yet, Peter, I think for the org structure, but I think it's got to be a dedicated initiative with the dedicated lead until it becomes second nature, because it's just literally what we do all the time. Like I said, I don't want to speak for General Mills not having worked there, but Boxtops just feels like it took a life of its own and now it just lives and breathes in their organization as well as breeds with other organizations who join them across the table, non-competes that join them. So I think that with any area of change, you have to make it a special thing. It's got to have a special time on your agenda. It's got to be measured with special metrics or designated metrics. And then over time, then it can just become like, Hey, we we're love language speakers. We know we're fluent in this now. But change always starts with the dedication piece, but we have an eight part change management formula that's not, again, theoretical. It's very practitioner oriented, but that you can apply to anything loyalty being one of those areas.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:02):

Well, speaking of that, Chris, if we think about more brands are focused on loyalty because we know customer acquisition prices are going up, you're trying to keep the customers that you have, you're focusing on building a loyalty program. What do you think the future of loyalty looks like as more and more brands have these programs? Are they going to be competitive? Is it going to evolve? What is your projection in your crystal ball?

Chris Perry (32:27):

In my crystal ball, I would say, well, I do think because found some data too, that was from Harvard Business Review that actually had highlighted the most important features of shopper loyalty programs today in yester year. And what was interesting is naturally access to a retail platform. So the membership access to free delivery or whatnot was important. Basic customer service, access, ease of use, some of those simple kind of table stakes that I would say are a little bit more extrinsic, tangible, were expected, but very quickly, most of the things people want are those intrinsic things, right? Because kind of expecting discounts and basic values and cash back and points back and things like that. Everyone offers that, right? So it kind of goes back to the same thing in an omnichannel world where everything's price transparent, what makes you different? When convenience is the same, I'm one click away from Kroger versus Walmart versus Target versus Amazon.

(33:23):

What else makes you better? Is it what you carry, right? You carry different assortment. That's why private labels and exclusive products and exclusive brands start becoming really interesting, not just for value, but because they're different. And so you've seen a lot of retailers really plus up their private brands to be more appealing than just a value play. They're almost their own brands now, especially the target approach. But again, Kroger has the biggest organic brand in the country with simple truth, right? So it's like they've already been building this up for a while. This isn't new, but this is a big part of differentiation. But part of the differentiation has to be in the what love languages. You speak to me, if one person in the category starts talking to me intrinsically while still offering the extrinsic tangible benefits, I might lean towards them. If all things kept the same, given me a chance to support sustainability, and that's important to me, or you've allowed me to support pride or to support a local pet shelter or whatever.

(34:26):

Cause matters to that shopper, into that brand or that retailer. So I think we're going to see a lot more intrinsic. I think we're going to see more. Personalization is obviously targeting in a privacy safe way, and the infrastructure allows for that. Ai, obviously, gen AI can almost help with that in some cases a lot more. But I also think there's going to be a lot more pairing of brands. So one last little example that is relevant to what we talked about was General Mills, and they did not pay me to say any of this. I just really liked their program. General Mills actually worked with Walmart to integrate a nons scan necessary feature. So essentially, both of your accounts are tied together. So if you buy anything on Walmart that through walmart.com or through your Walmart account, that is a box tops for education. You don't have to scan the receipt. It just auto applies to your account. So what a cool pairing, right? So now I know I want to keep shopping at Walmart for the box tops brands. So it's a double loyalty, right? For baskets and trips over time. So I think that's, we're going to see some of these. I filled your gap. You fill my gap. We can trade loyalty value together and it's going to be a bigger part of the JBP.

Peter Crosby (35:36):

I love all of this. That's my love language for today. I think the ninth language, yes, the ninth language is no, the ninth language is go to digital shelf institute.org/loyalty month and pick up your copy of what's the formal title, Chris? I don't have it in front of me.

Chris Perry (35:56):

Well, it's the eight love languages of shopper loyalty. But we're also excited, obviously at the upcoming digital shelf Summit. We're going to be talking about Till Death Do us Cart, and we're, I'm excited to be partnering with my former colleague, Jill Rourke, who's been in this e-commerce and retail media space for a long time. She's going to bring her expertise to the table too, and we're going to talk about some of these, but give some additional tangible examples and how brands can activate loyalty further trying to drive that change. So I'm excited to engage with her and share this with more people too. I think, again, this might be the first time people were going like, oh yeah, loyalty. I kind of took that for granted. I took that loyal person, the bus that always comes around every 15 minutes for granted because it'll come another 15 minutes. But no, they won't always come back if you're not there at the bus stop. So at some point, you have to be on the bus, be ready for the bus. So we want to make sure we take care of those people. And so we're excited to keep this discussion going.

Peter Crosby (36:57):

Death to US cars, I love

Chris Perry (37:00):

It. Never had a lack for puns and

Peter Crosby (37:03):

No, never, never. Well, Chris and Lauren, this was a co effort. Thank you both so much for this research and the thoughtfulness of it and the creativity of it. And so go get your copy, digital shelf institute.org/loyalty month, and Chris Perry has always thank you so much for bringing your smarts and your joy to our podcast.

Chris Perry (37:29):

Thank you so much.

Peter Crosby (37:31):

Thanks to Lauren and Chris for showing us all the love. Again, hop on over to digitalshelfinstitute.org/loyalty month for the full report. Become a member while you're there. I promise you'll love it. Thanks for being part of our community.