BOOK REVIEW

The Loyalty Leap – Bryan Pearson

Preaching the vital (though obvious) role of data in building customer intimacy

       Covered in the dust of neglect from years of being intentionally snubbed, I had written off The Loyalty Leap as one of those books I for some reason found in my possession but was unlikely to ever make the time to read. As expressed in other reviews, I have grown to harbour a general disdain for this type of business literature, which frequently strives to impart an over-simplified business philosophy. Too often the result reads as an unnecessarily long series of platitudes that would be better published as a white paper were it not for the obvious ambition on the part of the writer to promote himself or his company.

       My fervor for a new professional challenge however – that of building out a loyalty program for an emerging industry – prompted me to discount my previous vexations and give The Loyalty Leap a chance. Its author, Bryan Pearson, is the President and CEO of LoyaltyOne, the company behind the renowned AIR MILES program, so I hoped to discover at least some nuggets of insight within the book’s pages.

       Pearson’s expertise on customer-centric strategy is evident from the outset, as he highlights how today’s measured marketing tactics can and should be leveraged to better understand customer needs. The opportunities that result from the abundance of digital data need no further emphasis, but Pearson posits that by harnessing this data in the right ways, companies can offer customized experiences and thus establish an unprecedented degree of loyalty. To do this, they must focus on ‘loyalty’s three ‘R’s’: rewards, recognition and relevance. Especially important is the latter because customers willing to share their information expect to enjoy an improved experience in return. Companies who collect data but then betray this expectation, such as continuing to deploy mass messaging, violate this underlying agreement.

       Perhaps more importantly, rigorous analytics can also reveal which customers exhibit behavioural loyalty as opposed to emotional loyalty, where the former is motivated by rewards and convenience and thus can lull an organization into a false sense of complacency. By contrast, emotional loyalty borders on irrational (think Saatchi & Saatchi’s idea of Lovemarks) and is of course more desirable as these customers have a significantly higher lifetime value. Though he does emphasize the customary need to thoroughly protect privacy, Pearson’s case for a data-driven, customer-centric operational model is open-and-shut. The issue is this could have been easily achieved in under 100 pages, less than half the work’s final page-count.

       Undoubtedly this book would be a beneficial read for companies who have not yet embraced the idea of robust data management and analytics. Or perhaps it would help those who are in possession of data but are still unsure how it’s best leveraged to unlock potential growth. Unfortunately for someone like myself, who has already been schooled to consider data a foundational business asset, the book begins to feel long-winded only a few chapters in. It did spark several novel thoughts about my own company’s loyalty program but again, as with other business titles, the ROI fell below my personal threshold for returning to read this type of book again.

-NP, August 2017