Beyond the loyalty paradox

This article discusses outdated loyalty programmes, and suggests how the relationship between customers and brands is changing towards a 'kinship economy'.

Beyond the loyalty paradox

Craig Wood and Andrew Curry

Customers are changing. They expect businesses to want to have an appropriate relationship with them, in which they get treated as human beings. And they're more loyal to businesses that do treat them like this. But most loyalty programs are designed in a way that creates instead a transactional relationship with the customer. In this gap—which we call the loyalty paradox—lives a whole world of cost, and a whole world of opportunity.

As The Futures Company argues, we are moving towards a "kinship economy," in which personal relationships are central, and...

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