Essential Reading for Marketing & Business Professionals

Wednesday 17th September

Data Privacy Compliance Steps:
* Are you heading to jail?
* Customer Loyalty Programmes - the five rules
* TV viewing hits record high

It's true, you could be on your way to
prison, just for doing your job! Find out why
the new consumer protection regulations could
end your career and freedom!

And now for the good news - TV viewing
figures are up, up so high they've set a new
record according to the latest stats from the
IPA.
And finally we have five rules for
customer loyalty programmes - from the gurus
of Customer Relationship Marketing

James Pearson - Editor

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Are you heading to jail?

Last May the new Consumer Protection
regulations came into force. Have you taken a
look at them? If you haven't you could very
well be on your way to jail. Why? Because
breaching the regulations can carry a prison
term - specifically for the Manager
responsible for the breach. And your website
could very well be about to convict you -
without you even knowing about it! Here's how:

Does your website have this line, or
something like it?
"tick here if you don't want us to pass your
details to carefully selected partners"

Actually what this REALLY means is "we will
sell your data to anyone who gives us money".
And because you have not EXPLICITLY said this
you will be breaching the regulations and
quite possibly heading to prison! Find out
more by reading the full article.

Click here to read the article in full

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Customer Loyalty Programmes - the five rules

According to the CRM gurus Don Peppers and
Martha Rogers Ph.D. there are five simple
laws that must be followed to achieve real
success with any customer loyalty programme.
We reproduce the five rules below:

1. Never waste an opportunity to gain
insight about a customer...

Offer a choice of services or treatments so
that the choices a customer makes reveal
something about them. That way, members can
also enjoy the experience of helping to
modify the programme to better fit their own
personal preferences. For example, if you
allow customers to identify their own prize
in advance, you can gain additional insight
into what motivates them. Loyalty programmes
in financial services, for example, could
take advantage of the insights gained by
identifying someone who chooses an award for
lifetime achievement, compared to someone who
chooses the largest prize for short-term
behaviour.

2. An effective programme offers
modularity, enabling participants to mix and
match its various aspects to their own
preferences...

Modular offerings are a practical way to
allow customer-driven personalisation of a
programme without going to the extreme of
full customisation. Key aspects of the
programme, such as member qualification, can
be developed with several alternatives, and
customers can be offered a set of guided
choices to choose from. A sophisticated
marketing approach could offer different sets
of choices for different groups of customers
based on their value. For example, a lower
value customer might choose from reward
alternatives that include a service upgrade,
while higher value customers might be given
choices that include additional redemptions
or alternative merchandise.

3. Consumers want openness, and they want
a service or programme that works with other
programmes...

The more open the system is, the more
beneficial it is to customers. Transferable
points and rewards offer the customer the
greatest flexibility in using their programme
earnings. The goal of a loyalty programme is
not to buy loyalty in the short term but to
act on customer insights and deliver what
each customer wants. An even better goal
would be to anticipate what each customer
need at any given time. As the programme
gains more insight, it can mature into an
increasingly open value proposition. For a
customer, the main barrier to switching
should not be purely economic (i.e. losing
the points they've earned so far) but based
on convenience (i.e. having to start all over
again and 'teach' another programme about
their individual desires and preferences).
This kind of openness is inevitable in
loyalty marketing programmes, and operators
can either innovate now or be forced to react
at a less convenient moment when their market
is suddenly changed by a competitor.

4. A loyalty programme should be managed
based on customers, not products...

Align your organisation with identified sets
of customers, and then measure your employees
and the success of the programme by the
positive impact they have on customer
behaviours within those groups. Organise your
marketing efforts so that the customers whose
behaviours you want to change are taken care
of by people whose annual evaluations are
based on improving the numbers. That way
you'll send a clear signal to the marketing
department that you want to make progress in
each and every customer segment.

5.
Above all else, stick to simplicity and
integrity.

A loyalty programme with fewer rules and
restrictions is more engaging to the customer
than one with lots. And it's better for a
company to narrow its programme so that it
only extends offers that can be delivered
reliably rather than including elements that
can't be guaranteed. Airline programmes often
suffer, for example, when they offer
high-value redemptions that are limited to
too few flights or seats, making their
rewards hard for high-value members to find.
If you can't deliver reliably on what your
loyalty programme promises, you risk
undermining trust in your brand.

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TV viewing hits record high

The latest Trends in Television report,
published by the Institute of Practitioners
in Advertising says that we watched more TV
than ever before during the quarter ended
June 30.

.

According to the report we are watching more
and we're watching more satellite TV. But the
growth in digital TV has slowed right down.
Here are the figures:

· Average daily hours of viewing now stand at
3.57 hours compared to 3.46 hours for Q2
2007. These are the highest ever viewing
figures recorded for the second quarter.

· The non-terrestrial channels' share of
viewing continues to grow, albeit marginally
this quarter. However, the percentage of
viewing to channels carrying advertising grew
to 62%.

· The percentage of all homes able to receive
digital broadcasts now stands at 83.5%, up
0.5% since Q1 2008.

So why are we watching more TV than ever?
Part of the reason is the very poor weather
this year, but an even bigger part is the
increasing gloom about the economy. TV is a
renowned "comfort blanket" so expect the next
quarter's figures to be even higher. Of
course, it is just possible that the quality
of programmes has improved ..