Carrabba’s Italian Grill stands apart from many of its chain restaurant competitors. Sure, the food is freshly prepared, the wood-burning grill adds ambiance to the setting, and the service is excellent, but I was thinking about their approach to building customer loyalty.
Looking at several national competitors in quick-serve (QSR) and white-table restaurant chains, I found [...]

Technology Enables, but Imagination Wins
Tasti D-Lite not only rolled up its sleeves to take advantage of open API’s from Twitter, Foursquare & Facebook to integrate them with its point-of-sale system – it used its imagination to make an otherwise familiar loyalty program structure become the first and most widely executed example of “Social Loyalty” in [...]

The Loyalty Research Report released by ACI Worldwide has received tremendous coverage, most of it making loyalty marketers feel like pulling up their hip waders and tugging down on their helmet. In the words of my old boss at North Carolina National Bank Hugh McColl, it’s time to “hunker down”.
The survey was conducted by Wakefield [...]

Here in Orlando, enjoying the best Loyalty Expo to date, I can tell that change is in the wind. Today’s sessions covered future visions of how loyalty is evolving to drive results for brands across vertical industries. Loyalty 360’s chief, Mark Johnson provided a keynote documenting  changes in consumer behaviors that are compelling loyalty marketers [...]

There are two forms of brilliance in business – one displayed by people who invent things we haven’t thought about before (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) and those that find a way to incorporate these new communications channels into mainstream business to generate revenue.
In many aspects of social media, we are waiting for the dots to be [...]

A day in the life with Foursquare has been changing, imperceptibly at times, but lately its reached the Malcolm Gladwell point, I mean the Tipping Point.
The difference I’m talking about has less to do with users and is all about merchants. That’s good news and also a partial answer to the one big question hovering [...]

In the past week, business has taken me to Vancouver, BC and San Jose, Costa Rica with a pit stop in South Florida for a day or so at home. None of that was a big deal until my colleague Mike Atkin noted at dinner that we’ve been hitting these spots in conjunction with some [...]

In the past week, business has taken me to Vancouver, BC and San Jose, Costa Rica with a pit stop in South Florida for a day or so at home. None of that was a big deal until my colleague Mike Atkin noted at dinner that we’ve been hitting these spots in conjunction with some [...]

I’ve been in way too many meetings lately where I have been asked the question “Is Social Media just a fad that will soon blow away?”
Fortunately, I’m well schooled in responding to skeptics since, for the past dozen years, I’ve been answering the classic question in my core business, “Does this Loyalty stuff really work?”
I [...]