Insights

You don't have an engagement strategy. You have a points scheme. And they are not the same thing. Watch our CEO, Tom Peace, talk through this episode That sounds harsh. But walk into most marketing teams, ask them how they engage customers, and you'll get a description of their rewards mechanic. Points per pound. A birthday voucher. A tier or two. That's a scheme. Engagement is the relationship the scheme is supposed to serve — and far fewer brands can describe that with any

One equation governs every loyalty programme ever built. Miss it, and you're optimising things that don't move the number that matters. Value = Engaged Members × Purchase Frequency × Weight of Purchase. Three levers. That's it. Grow the number of genuinely engaged members, get them buying more often, or get them spending more each time. Every pound of loyalty value comes from moving one or more of these. Everything else is noise dressed up as a metric. It's multiplication, no

Most marketing budgets are pointed at the wrong end of the customer relationship. They chase the sale you haven't made yet and ignore the one you already have. The economics don't support that. Harvard Business Review puts the cost of winning a new customer at five to twenty-five times the cost of keeping an existing one, depending on sector. And research by Fred Reichheld at Bain & Company — first published back in 1990 and quoted ever since — found that lifting retention by