(This is the fourth Future Patrol, a monthly series of macrotrend posts by WONY Strategist Emily Segal. You’ll see Wolff Olins’ established macrotrends called out with a hashtag.)

#Hyperloyalty 

I. What it is:

Loyal3, launching in May, is a new startup that enables consumers to buy shares of companies (really $10 fractions of shares) directly on Facebook, an idea CEO Barry Schneider is calling “the ultimate ‘like’ button.”

Loyalty programs have already become a focal point for incenting consumer behavior, creating personalized perks, and gathering consumer data. 

Loyal3’s move to put real stakes behind consumer engagement shows that loyalty is beginning to generate new revenue models. The #Hyperloyalty trend is about precisely this kind of consumer-focused shift from marketing to value creation.

Future Patrol predicts that loyalty programs will become an expectation for every brand –even in industries that have conventionally gone without them – with elements such as crowdfunding, branded currencies and extra perks for good social media behavior as key features.

II. Some examples:

FROM REWARDS TO MICROECONOMY

The line between jokes and innovation has become increasingly blurry. Virgin Holidays’ April Fools’ Day hoax, a branded currency with Richard Branson’s face on it, recalls a trend we discussed in Future Patrol’s #Funny Money post: loyalty and rewards programs are becoming alternative currencies unto themselves, with points that can be redeemed for nearly as many things as cash can.

 “Most large companies – from Starbucks to British Airways to Sheraton to American Express – are evolving their reward and point loyalty systems into digital micro-economies, complete with redemption and exchange between systems.” (Cayman Financial Review) 

EXTREME CONSUMERS

Frequent flyers are the day traders of this new economy.

“Mileage runners are the high-tech nomadic wanderers of the air. Predominantly male, generally obsessed with flying and miles, and typically employed in white-collar careers that involve significant business travel, they scour the web for cheap flights, phoning in sick or using vacation days to fly the longest itineraries they can string together.”

GAMING THE SYSTEM

Loyalty programs – and games – are both about incenting customer behavior, and both use feedback loops and points to that end. But a loyalty system need not actually be a game to feel like one.

“Assembling a mileage run means deciphering complex fare rules and pulling together information from up to a dozen websites. It’s an achievement that tickles the same satisfying problem-solving centers of the brain as a Sudoku puzzle, and always ends in the deep-rooted human thrills of travel and flight.” (Wired)  (“Frequent Flyer” documentary on Vimeo)

THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE

Freedom is the best perk. 

“Designing programs with an overarching theme of “freedom” can instill incredible power into our initiatives.” …. “Not “freebies.” But “freedom.” The ability to do things, to make decisions, to enhance one’s life, in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The word is telling. Many elements contribute to freedom, and, yes, the freebie is one such element. Others include privilege, convenience, assistance, guidance, choice and ease.” (“Freedom: Perhaps the ultimate aspirational reward” Colloquy Blog)

COERCIVE CURRENCIES

However, “freedom” is not the first word that comes to mind when integrating social media into loyalty schemes. Giving consumers deals or discounts because they have desirable social media influence is a marketing trend, but also can create a coercive situation in which consumers must forfeit deals if they want to preserve their privacy

+ Gilt Groupe provides extra discounts for users with high Klout scores

+ Amex / Twitter: The new Twitter integration lets American Express cardholder receive special offers by tweeting with a special hashtag. Initial partners include Zappos, the Cheesecake Factory, McDonald’s, Best Buy, Virgin America, and Whole Foods. In order to redeem a deal, you send a tweet with a hashtag and the offer is loaded on to the account. The credit appears automatically when the card is swiped. (Venturebeat)

+ Exchange systems like Pay with a Tweet, or Chime.in that exchange goods for social media “love” and personal data from consumers

+ Reputation currencies like Whuffie Bank (where you get discounts and rewards based on your online social reputation)

III. What this means for brand: 

+ Extreme consumers and mileage runners have invented their own rituals around current loyalty infrastructures. There’s an opportunity for brands to leverage the subcultures that spring up around the way they architect their companies. What seems like extreme niche behavior today will likely be mainstream tomorrow.

+ Don’t become so seamless and ubiquitous that you slip beneath the convenience threshold. Failure and friction are important elements in building brand loyalty – and put the “social” in social media. Help your customers “play, fail, replay, achieve, succeed and progress” (LS:N). 

+ Brands that make customers feel free are powerful, but the feeling of getting away with something may be even more powerful.

(For more on rethinking value download Value-Creative: Change the Game)

Untitled watercolor by Ken Price

Robert Jones and other experts at Guggenheim Forum

Robert Jones is participating in a live web conference about naming things, this Wed at noon EST, hosted by the Guggenheim Forum. The Forum is a continuing series of moderated online discussions catalyzing intelligent conversation on the arts, architecture, and design. 

On the simplest level, a name takes an object from an undifferentiated mass and makes it something individual—something unique. But what exactly does a name mean, communicate, do? How do we decide if a title is “successful”?

The forum will look through various lenses—branding, linguistics, poetics—to critically evaluate the fundamental issues raised by the relationship between something and what it’s called. Panelists include Robert Jones, strategy director of Wolff Olins; Frank Nuessel, Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Louisville; and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesarus and Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Boston Globe.The discussion is moderated by Mark Abley, journalist and author of The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. 

“The Name Game” will include a one-hour live chat hosted by Mark Abley at noon EDT on Wednesday, April 25, and is presented in concert with the exhibition John Chamberlain: Choices, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through May 13, 2012. 

Go HERE for more information and instructions on how to experience the live event on 4/25. 

User Experience Is The Heart Of Any Company

“If you start with ‘useful’ as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first,” writes Wolff Olins head of strategy Mary Ellen Muckerman in an article in Fast Company this morning. 

Muckerman continues:

“The principles and theories of UX have created a new normal in terms of brand delivery and interaction. They state that how people actually use your product is much more important than how it was intended to be used. So engaging your consumer in ongoing, iterative product development is more valuable than holding out for a “perfect” product launch.” 

She looks at Apple’s ascendence over the past decade, M-Pesa’s branchless banking system, and Zopa, the world’s first peer-to-peer money lending service as 3 case studies on being useful. Continue reading on Fast Company here.

This story is also part of our Game Changers report, which you can read here.  

Brick and mortar as marketing tool. Online as sales platform.

By Marissa Vosper

A “Match Made in Merchant Heaven” was the headline this morning on Forbes, describing the recent partnership/funding announcement between upstart menswear e-retailer, Bonobos and department store darling, Nordstrom.  Or as Evelyn Rusli of the New York Times termed it “a symbiotic deal,” whereby Bonobos will aim to illuminate the Nordstrom execs on all things online in exchange for $16.4M in cash and a retail presence in some 100 Nordstrom locations nationwide.

What’s interesting is that, while most companies are desperately attempting (and sometimes failing) to take their offline concepts online, Bonobos (with help from Nordstrom) is moving in the opposite direction – but not for the reason you might expect.

Certainly a brick and mortar presence provides a physical scale that the Internet cannot replicate. But for a company like Bonobos, who has leveraged the limitless scale of the web to grow more rapidly than most (the company launched in 2007 and is now the fastest growing men’s clothing retailer online), this physical presence is more about marketing than point-of-purchase. According to Rusli, “by 2011, [Bonobos] was devoting about 20 percent of its revenue to marketing, about double the previous year. The hope is that the Nordstrom partnership will expose Bonobos to new clients, particularly those who may not be shopping online”… yet. 

Craft your culture to shape your brand

By Amaris Singer

I recently read a fascinating interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, a provider of note-taking and archiving technology, about how he’s sculpted his company’s unorthodox culture. Libin has structured Evernote’s two offices and employee benefits around the idea of facilitating achievement, and he holistically considers the factors that may further or inhibit that goal in and out of the office.

From providing his employees housecleaning twice monthly (to get his employees’ partners on Evernote’s side) to offering unlimited vacation (and $1000 if people actually take a week off), Libin ensures his type-A employees are refreshed and happy enough to do their best work. Libin has successfully created benefits that affect people outside of the office so they can do their best when they’re at work—and feel proud of, and loyal to, the company they’re building together.

Libin has also made choices about Evernote’s physical offices that demonstrate smart, on-brand thinking. He is constantly looking for unnecessary technologies to dispense with and recently got rid of employees’ desk phones. Most offices just have desk phones by default. By asking what purpose they served for Evernote’s business, given that they’re not a sales organization, and by considering existing redundancies (like paid employee cell phones) Libin realized the landlines were extraneous and detracted from the purpose of being at a desk—getting work done. This technological subtraction helped Libin’s ultimate goal of achievement by removing barriers to it.

Libin also took steps to ensure his employees, and his two offices, one in Mountain View and one in Austin, were well connected and equally valued. He created a flat hierarchy for employees by removing any obvious markers of status (aside from compensation), and having all employees sit together. He encourages people to stay connected and to communicate in-person where possible to avoid a confusing and infuriating email (ball and) chain culture.

Libin also tries to create parity between the offices by using a giant digital screen that functions as a “window,” showing each office to the other and enabling employees to see and talk to each other—not for meetings but for the creation of a broader one-firm culture. These decisions about how to structure the offices and working environment create connections that help people achieve, therefore ensuring that every element is purposeful and in service of Evernote’s goals and brand.

Libin’s holistic thinking about the factors in and outside the office that affect employees’ work demonstrates incredibly savvy managerial and brand thinking. He constantly re-evaluates old norms, asking what purpose they serve, and whether they obstruct rather than create the clearest path to getting work done. This critical re-evaluation, this re-connecting of the dots, is also what Evernote as a product, and as a brand, seeks to do—eliminate barriers to creative achievement. 

Image by James Kape