Excellent presentation and thanks for including and attributing some of my photography in your work…

Eric R Ward (aka a4gpa)

In regards to your article “The Long Wow” I agree with several of your points, and somewhat the general conclusion.

Customer empathy: Yes we should begin to dive into customer experiences and actually understand what they do with our products/services. An often overlooked product that pioneered this approach in General Mills was Hamburger Helper. This program, which entailed observing mothers in their daily routine, generated a new understanding of their customer and helped spur a massive increase in Hamburger Helper sales.

Wow at every opportunity: Again, I completely agree with you on this point. We should strive to wow customers at every touchpoint.

Where I find myself disagreeing with you is in the disregard of Loyalty programs in favour of the points mentioned above. You mentioned Harley Davidson as a company that did not have a traditional loyalty program, when in fact HOG (Harley Owners Group) has been a pivotal program and key part of Harley Davidson’s growth. Another example is Harrahs Casino’s loyalty program (inspired by observing the customer in the field) – read the article Diamonds in the Data Mine.

Yes, we should look at wowing our customer at every touchpoint. Yes we should dive deeper into customer research so we can give the segment what it wants. But we mustn’t throw out loyalty programs and disregard them as cassette players. We must adapt these techniques and learnings to continually evolve loyalty programs that work. Harrahs Casino’s did it. Harley still does it.

I think this will result in scaled down programs, but more efficient ones.

-Just my two cents,

Johnathan