Bill Brohaugh

In "Supermarket checkout still stuck in the past," The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story about technology and the grocery industry. The Times notes that grocers have experimented with various technologies, but have been slow to adopt them because of cost and other factors. Quoting food-industry analyst Phil Lempert, editor of The Lempert Report, "Most consumers would rather have a competent cashier and bagger than any new technology." It's in part a matter of trusting technology, which leads to Lempert's view of the future: "But what people do trust and value is their smartphone, and that's an easy next step for the industry."

A critical step in whatever technology is used - kiosks, websites, mobile apps, self-checkout, scanners or even (as we'll see in a moment) talking shopping carts - is that it center around the customer. The customer must not only receive benefit but also recognize benefit. Contributing editor Lance Du Chateau took up that...

In "Magna Cum Loyalty," COLLOQUY Managing Partner Kelly Hlavinka lauds Citi's new ThankYou Point-Sharing App, which enables ThankYou Rewards members to strive for group rewards by allowing them to pool rewards points with Facebook friends. We see this sharing-network concept as further evidence of the growing power of what we call "the I-Network." In the age of social media, consumers are creating their own networks that loyalty marketers must understand and address if their brands are to be allowed within those networks.

A recent survey by ad agency Campbell Mithun in partnership with Carbonview Research quantifies an aspect of this trend (with such terminology as "the sharing economy" and "collaborative consumption" to describe when a group of people - neighbors, family, friends, and so on - purchase and share a product or service.)

According to the study, "not only did 60% of overall respondents find the concept of sharing appealing, but a full 71% of...

I once participated in a grocer's loyalty program in kind of a tag-team fashion. Though the program was in my wife's name, we both participated in the program: my wife had the keyfob and I had the card, meaning our purchases reflected interests for the household in aggregate. And we were both loyal to that grocer, and appreciated the benefits of the program. Such sharing can be something of a headache for marketers who want to concentrate on learning about individuals (we both cooked, but vastly different cuisines), but in many ways, the whole of a household is an individual, with its purchase and behavior activity consolidated into one view.

Besides, there are advantages to treating entire households as individuals, in a sense. When redemption offers have full-household benefit, the program becomes more attractive to the individual member, and becomes memorable to others in the household and, by extension, in the member's social network. That's good not only for currying...

"When it pains, it pours" is a phrase I've often heard, mainly because I made it up and I practiced it in front of the mirror several times before sitting down to write this blog (and of course I'm just kidding).

Kidding or not, I don't need to tell you about the expressions of consumer pain pouring out when people social-mediate about negative experiences (real or imagined) about redeeming loyalty-program rewards - and specific to this discussion, frequent-flyer program redemptions. Blackouts, expiration, inability to upgrade from first class to sitting in the flight deck (just kidding again). Yes, consumers also social-mediate about great experiences, but I needn't go into all the theory and reality of how rumors and bad news and myths travel faster than, oh, the speed of your typical trans-continental flight, now do I?

So it's refreshing to see an independent voice point out the fallacies surrounding myths about the programs we're involved in: "5 Myths Debunked for...