Cycling commentators like to quip that the individual time trial is a “race of truth”. In other words there’s no place to hide as the man and machine face off against the clock.

The winner of the most recent edition of the Tour de France was decided on the final day in such a race, as Cadel Evans scorched his rivals and took the overall Yellow Jersey with the second best time of the day. Australia’s first overall Tour de France victor was undeniably better on this day – the truth was told.

Building a brand is much like a “race of truth”. Consumers are either for you or against you. And, there are only so many brands that stand out in today’s market evoking emotional response and nearly blind loyalty from their customers.

Starbucks, Apple, Coca-Cola, Facebook are brands that generate passion. Visa, MasterCard and Google register tremendous awareness but don’t necessarily conjure up “passionate” responses. I worked for Visa in the past and can attest to the fact that many consumers don’t understand the brand. I still get questions from friends asking if I can help fix their credit card problems! That of course is a matter between the issuing bank and the cardholder, not the domain of Visa/MasterCard.

Some brands are strong regionally but invisible outside their core market. Grocers Wegmans and Publix come to mind as do coffee chains Dunkin Donuts and Tim Horton’s. Dunkin is apparently embarking on national expansion, so the name may become more familiar across the U.S. soon.

Borders had a brand that was high profile, but became fuzzy. Some say that the lack of focus led to eroding customer loyalty and ultimately, the chain’s demise. You can read one assessment of Border’s failure here. IMHO, I’m not sure Barnes & Noble is doing a much better job in creating a brand that consumers care about – they just happen to be the last chain standing in the book-selling category.

Luxury brands drive customer loyalty through aspirational messaging, exclusivity, and, if backed up with customer experience that reinforces the brand, are sustainable. Nieman Marcus, Coach, Cartier, Tiffany are all brands that speak for themselves.

Some brands equate ubiquity with success. I wore Nike shoes in my early cross country days but my love of the swoosh waned as I saw the logo plastered on everything from golf balls to swim suits. Under Armour adopted the same approach from the starting gate as their logos seems to show up everywhere.

Does brand saturation create confidence or invite a suspicion of quality?

The brands that trigger emotion and sustain it over time seem to be highly focused. NorthFace and Patagonia have created aspirational brands among the outdoor and adventure travel set. I’m just waiting to see which one introduces the Bear Grylls line first!

Ironman has built a brand that oozes passion, commitment, aspiration, desire. Please write me if you know of another organization that sells out nearly every event it operates one year in advance, registering 2,000 people at the exorbitant price of $625, all for the privilege of torturing themselves through a 140.6 mile race.

With the ever expanding presence of the Ironman brand, it runs the same risk as Nike and Under Armour. The ubiquity of brand impressions in the market dilutes the core message to “best” customers and opens the door for competitors. As Ironman attempts to consolidate its hold on the endurance sport market, new race series have sprung up, most notably the HITS series using 6 time winner Dave Scott as spokesperson.

The importance of brand understanding for Loyalty Marketers is that we have to maintain perspective on the power of our brands to engage customers before any incentives are introduced. Every market is competitive and we need to study the range of customer choice in the market and understand the limits of impact for our loyalty strategies.

Organizations should adopt a holistic approach towards building loyalty strategy. Brand understanding is critical to crafting the value proposition that will complement core branding messages and further solidify relationships with our customers.

The proven model worldwide to form a multi-partner Coalition loyalty program is essentially the same, regardless of the local language.

Operators normally chase down the one or two leaders in each high frequency category (retail, grocery, fuel, banking) to form the foundations of their value proposition. With regional coalitions easier to launch than ones of national stature, consider a new path to partner identification and recruitment, one that is practical to execute and could lead to big results.

What if marketers started the identification process with the consumer, not the partner? Imagine if they paused to understand the way consumers feel about individual brands and which ones fit together best to achieve a partner network that connected with large consumer groups on an emotional level?

A conversation with a friend provided me an example of how bundled preferences become a purchase-decision reality. My friend will remain unnamed, but the complexity of his purchase decision making process is worth some server space.

After bragging a bit on his country’s Olympic Hockey Gold medal, he shared an unsolicited opinion about his favorite Canadian rewards program. His description was transparent and blended logic, emotion, and value.

After ticking off  his range of choices for loyalty programs in his market – AirMiles,  Canadian Tire Dollars, Esso Extras, HBC Rewards, Petro Canada’s Petro Points and Shopper’s Drug Mart, he surprised me by saying “I collect everything through my Aeroplan card“.

Why? Not for just one reason, but several:

• He likes the speed and convenience of paying at the pump with a RFID device and chose Speedpass for its ubiquity over Shell’s Easy Pay device.
• He’s a big Tim Horton fan, which has lots of stores within the Esso C-store footprint.
• He’s an RBC loyalist, having banked there since a young age, and Esso tends to have RBC branded ATM machines at their sites.
• His family has always considered Esso to be their “family brand” of retail fuel.
• And, the more he sticks with Aeroplan, he finds he can accelerate his collecting through his Elite status that triggers partner offers.

Through my quick conversation, I found that it was the combination of brands assembled by Aeroplan that made the difference. I realize that my conversation constitutes a “focus group of one” but it is illustrative of how we can re-engineer partner selection processes to launch and operate multi-partner loyalty programs that are more effective.

This little tale provide evidence into why coalitions work but also points to the reality that even individual loyalty program sponsors should consider the power of developing partnerships in the future.

Either way, it is clear that consumer loyalty is not triggered solely by the collecting activity itself but by brand affinities and the customer experience taken as a whole.

The beauty of business travel has to be the opportunity to see life through a different lens. At least I am claiming this as a benefit as there has to be an offset to long airport security lines, expensive food, and uncomfortable airline seats that compose the rest of the experience!

When we remain sequestered in the US, we tend to believe that the way we do things is the “only” way. But while we naval-gaze on how we can leverage the continual wave of innovative technology to add efficiency and cost savings to our business, we miss the bigger point. There are still lots of gaps to be closed in markets outside the US and quite a few of them can be closed with minimal effort or thought. For example, when I find reward program operators hoping to add online rewards redemption or upgrade technology, I can confidently provide advice without stretching the limits of imagination.

On the other hand, I often encounter situations where technology is more advanced or a business model different enough that loyalty program operations are enabled well beyond what we can execute within our borders. The fact that many banks are both issuers and acquirers of cards opens up all sorts of possibilities for POS messaging and reward redemption that is a much bigger challenge to implement in the US.

At the end of a busy day in Toronto this week, I was seeking a little caffeine boost and stopped into Tim Hortons, Canada’s favorite coffee and donut provider. Waiting to pay, I saw a sign on the counter informing me that Debit cards were not accepted at Tim Horton’s “to maintain our high speed of service“. I posted the photo on my Pikcur account and share it with you here just in case you don’t believe me.

I’m really not sure how to interpret Tim Hortons’ policy on Debit Cards. Visa had a long running campaign illustrating how debit cards bring speed and convenience to daily shopping experiences and the launch of contactless debit cards several years ago raised the ante on moving the “Q” through check out.

Maybe its really not speed that Tim Horton is worried about. In fact maybe their policy is less about adding convenience to the customer experience and more about reducing processing costs. Even that argument falls short as the cost of cash-handling has been proven to be significant in the QSR world.

Sometimes we don’t have all the answers, but we can observe and document for the moment, hoping that the dots are connected somewhere down the road. For now, I’ll just put Tim Horton in my “Questions about Debit Cards” file.

The beauty of business travel has to be the opportunity to see life through a different lens. At least I am claiming this as a benefit as there has to be an offset to long airport security lines, expensive food, and uncomfortable airline seats that compose the rest of the experience!

When we remain sequestered in the US, we tend to believe that the way we do things is the “only” way. But while we naval-gaze on how we can leverage the continual wave of innovative technology to add efficiency and cost savings to our business, we miss the bigger point. There are still lots of gaps to be closed in markets outside the US and quite a few of them can be closed with minimal effort or thought. For example, when I find reward program operators hoping to add online rewards redemption or upgrade technology, I can confidently provide advice without stretching the limits of imagination.

On the other hand, I often encounter situations where technology is more advanced or a business model different enough that loyalty program operations are enabled well beyond what we can execute within our borders. The fact that many banks are both issuers and acquirers of cards opens up all sorts of possibilities for POS messaging and reward redemption that is a much bigger challenge to implement in the US.

At the end of a busy day in Toronto this week, I was seeking a little caffeine boost and stopped into Tim Hortons, Canada’s favorite coffee and donut provider. Waiting to pay, I saw a sign on the counter informing me that Debit cards were not accepted at Tim Horton’s “to maintain our high speed of service“. I posted the photo on my Pikcur account and share it with you here just in case you don’t believe me.

I’m really not sure how to interpret Tim Hortons’ policy on Debit Cards. Visa had a long running campaign illustrating how debit cards bring speed and convenience to daily shopping experiences and the launch of contactless debit cards several years ago raised the ante on moving the “Q” through check out.

Maybe its really not speed that Tim Horton is worried about. In fact maybe their policy is less about adding convenience to the customer experience and more about reducing processing costs. Even that argument falls short as the cost of cash-handling has been proven to be significant in the QSR world.

Sometimes we don’t have all the answers, but we can observe and document for the moment, hoping that the dots are connected somewhere down the road. For now, I’ll just put Tim Horton in my “Questions about Debit Cards” file.