Last week, Connor Mulcahey, 13, downloaded Bump onto his iPhone. Bump let’s you trade contact info and other stuff like photos on your iPhone to a nearby iPhone. Using an internet connection you select what you want to share with your chum and then you bump your phones together or wave them nearby. […]

Long airplane rides are great for catching up on my reading. But instead of putting my nose in the latest John Grisham novel, I opted to flip thru the March 9th issue of Fortune instead which carried the cover story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives.” It wasn’t all that fresh in terms […]

What do Randall Stross, Karen Webster and Aaron Strout all have in common? The same view on the prospects of “Friending” Your Toothpaste.
Would You Join a Toothpaste Community?
This post was co-authored by Bill Fanning and Aaron Strout.
A conversation I have somewhat regularly with our sales guys is the concept of whether or not a company […]

A couple of years ago I posted a paper on the credit card’s midlife crisis. At the time the problems were that the credit card had become commoditized (the desperate attempts by banks to appear different, shows just how same old all the offers are), the market was close to saturated, and the days […]

Professors Meyer-Waarden and Benavent have just published some new research on loyalty that may underscore some of we’ve been talking about now for a while: most rewards don’t reward those whose loyalty really matters.
Their thesis is that consumers all value different things and a one size fits all program will miss the mark the majority […]

Commitment - the holy grail of relationships. It’s what Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City finally got from Mr. Big and what Jennifer Aniston could never quite achieve with Brad Pitt. It’s also increasingly what savvy marketers hope to foster with programs that eschew loyalty in favor of solutions that create committed customers.
Conventional rewards […]

Quick, someone grab a Websters.
Because I want to talk about the crux of my current conundrum with loyalty programs (as they are now architected). What are these programs trying to achieve anyway? My economist friends say that they are all about the “lock in” – so reeling in customers with the promise that sometime in […]

Starbucks announced its new rewards program designed to perk up (pun intended) its worst sales slump in 7 years. This program is designed to give consumers instant gratification – refills, complimentary flavor shots, free drinks with the purchase of coffee beans, and even two hours of free wi-fi (at their Starbucks cafes) so long as […]

Card rewards are going to disappear and fees are going to return according to a recent research report Disruption in the Payments World. That’s a distinct possibility. Between the interchange fee lawsuits and Congressional pressure for the card associations to get rid of interchange fees it is possible that the US could go the way […]

Two recent articles on mobile bar codes illustrate the importance of a key catalyst principle—you have to get the pricing balance right for your stakeholders. A trial of mobile bar codes among students at Case Western University flopped in part because of price—students were unsure how much downloading the barcodes was going to cost […]