Jim Sullivan

COLLOQUY

Jim directs the advancement of enterprise loyalty at COLLOQUY, an endeavor guided by his almost 30 years of managing in marketing, strategic planning, business development, innovation, and communications. Jim also assists with COLLOQUY’s loyalty workshops, seminars and conferences, and serves as an academic liaison for colleges, universities and thinking institutions performing research on Enterprise Loyalty.

I-Networks on Overdrive

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Posted on 2012-03-12

Imagine a world in which 100 million consumers became aware of and watched a 30-minute infomercial on the history and key message of your brand, all within the space of three days, at no cost to your company except the production costs of the video?

Imagine that content penetrating the consciousness of all those consumers and causing them to not only share it with their "I-Networks"their individual networks of friends and family that COLLOQUY's 2030 Forecast identified two years ago (http://www.colloquy.com/article_view.asp?xd=7763) but also whose message was so strong that many of them immediately went online to part with their money to buy your product?

Now, here's a buzz kill: Imagine that all that incredible social media power was circulating and taking action on some frightening and negative news about what your brand was doing to the human...

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The Jewel in the Crown

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Posted on 2012-02-15

India's Tanishq Jewelers Embraces the Whole Customer.

At the height of British Imperial power in 1877, Queen Victoria took the title, “Empress of India” and declared the sub-continent “The Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. Well, I'm sure Vicky wouldn't recognize the economic dynamo that the free and independent people of India have created, especially since the 1990's-era economic reforms. India's economy ranks ninth-largest in the world (close behind England which is seventh), mainly because the combination of education and economic liberalization has created the world's largest and fastest-growing middle class.

Within that context, I was surprised to learn at the 5th Annual Loyalty Summit in Mumbai last week that Jewelry (or “Jewellery” as they spell it) is the third-largest consumer category in India. Traditionally, fine jewelry represent for Indians meaning-filled symbols of life's most significant milestones, and are purchased with the idea of being not...

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We Have a Lot to Learn from Each Other…

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Posted on 2012-02-14

I have just settled into my seat on the flight back home from a week in India, the world's largest democracy and, within a decade or so, the world's most populous nation with the fastest growing consumer market. Think of it—a vast cohort of an additional 300 million aspiring consumers enjoying for the first time discretionary incomes adequate to allow them to participate in the promise of a better life offered by the global consumer marketplace. The world has never seen such a rapid appearance of such a huge new consumer market, equal in number to the entire populations of the United States and Canada combined.

I was in Mumbai to address the 5th Annual India Loyalty Summit and help announce the launch of COLLOQUY India—a new range of research, education, and media resources specifically designed and tailored for loyalty marketing practitioners there. In blog posts later this week, I'll have more to say about that unprecedented and unmatched launch. For now, I want to...

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Facebook Tops Social Networking in Brazil

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Posted on 2012-02-09

As COLLOQUY has been publishing our research on loyalty around the world (two Cross-Cultural white papers and one on India, with additional coverage on Brazil to come) we took note of the news from comScore that Facebook has taken over the top position in the Brazilian social networking market after a very successful 2011. It's probably no surprise to anyone who has celebrated Carnival in Sao Paolo or hit the beach in Rio that Brazilians are just as social online as they are in person

Brazil had been one of only seven markets in the world in which the social media giant had not been in the top spot. Facebook leaped over Orkut and Windows Live getting more than 36 million visits in December of 2011.

According to the comScore report: “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the...

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You Gotta Believe

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Posted on 2012-01-06

Lack of belief in program ROI is the mother of all pain points—as identified in a survey of our Loyalty Storm Trackers

Early last Fall, COLLOQUY’s radar began to detect loyalty marketing storm clouds not on the horizon, but perched over us—raining, and raining hard. Those clouds are drenching signals that effective and efficient execution—getting things done—seemed to be growing much more difficult. As industry fore - casters, we decided to address the threatening problems and their solutions by conducting the 2011 COLLOQUY Loyalty Practitioner Study, an online survey of loyalty marketers who themselves are facing the darkening clouds.

This is the first in a series of COLLOQUY articles that will draw on the survey’s results to focus on overcoming implementation challenges.

While the survey was open to all and therefore “unscientific” as projectable research, it provided us with enough of the right feedback from front-line loyalty leaders to understand...

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Marriott’s Ties That Bind

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Posted on 2011-12-15

Today Marriott Rewards did something you should do if you haven’t already. They enticed Members like me with a significant potential reward to "like" them on Facebook. But not only that, they successfully convinced me also to link my Marriott Rewards Member number to their Facebook page.

They have followed our advice (or someone’s just as smart as we) and tied their social media strategy to their loyalty strategy. Some other hotel chains, the AIRMILES (Canada) Rewards program, and very few others have done this so far. Have you?

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Top 5 Things I Learned at DMA 2011

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Posted on 2011-10-06

Here’s a topline summary of what I took away from this year’s DMA Conference in Boston as a quick summary of themes.

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Hard Liquor, Soft Benefits, Real Ownership

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Posted on 2011-05-18

Well, it finally happened. I have my own cask of bourbon whiskey. I received the official certificate in the mail yesterday, authenticating the presence of my name burnished on an properly aged and carefully charred oak barrel, freshly filled with “the good stuff.” In roughly six years or so, in 2017, today’s raw whiskey will emerge from my cask as “the REALLY good stuff”, be bottled and capped in wax as “Maker’s Mark.”

You see, our own Ms. Kelly Hlavinka is a Maker’s Mark Ambassador, and last year she urged me to become one, too. Seems we share not only an interest in all things “loyalty,” but also a sip or two of Kentucky’s Pride on occasion.

How do I actually know that my name is on a cask of whiskey? Because my partners down in Kentucky took an actual picture of it and sent me the link to see my name emblazoned and burned right into the oak itself. Cool.

The really cool thing? Yesterday, my Ambassador’s certificate was sealed with the same red wax bearing...

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What the World Needs Now

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Posted on 2011-03-22

When I dropped my iPhone recently, with cracked screen the only damage, I went online and scheduled a consultation at the "genius bar" at a local Apple Store for later that day.

Now, it’s a confident retailer that calls its front-line customer-service agents "geniuses," and wants them to interact with customers face-to-face so everyone can see if they are or aren’t. Geniuses, that is. More than simply a confident retailer, however, it’s a retailer that loves its customers.

"Love?" you ask, "In business? It’s just not a proper business topic. Too ’warm and fuzzy’ for most corporate types."

It’s too bad businesspeople are so uncomfortable talking about the "L" word, because otherwise we might be able to see that many barriers to customer loyalty stem from a lack of it. I encountered no such barriers in the Apple Store, where I’d expected to hand over my iPhone to a lengthy and expensive repair despite the fact that it still worked fine. The technician...

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Breaking News: “Loyalty Programs Are Working”

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Posted on 2011-02-18

The reporter of a Wall Street Journal Market Watch recapped the findings of Accenture’s 2010 Global Consumer Research, the sixth in a series dating back to 2005, this week. Accenture, a technology consulting and outsourcing company, annually surveys 5800 consumers in 17 "mature" and "emerging" markets for their perceptions of service, quality, and satisfaction with companies in 10 service industries ranging from retail and banking to mobile, cable TV, hotels and airlines, all the way to insurance, among others. If you’re interested, you can read an executive summary of that report, too. Here’s the link.

COLLOQUY does a lot of research and we work hard to "tell it like it is" by carefully designing, analyzing, and reporting the facts as objectively as humanly possible. As near as I could tell, Accenture was doing that, too. Their conclusions sound both familiar and quite challenging to anyone concerned about delivering great service that causes customers to stick around and...

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