Phaedra Hise

I've been doing my best to confuse my grocer, but so far they are keeping up with me. Kroger clearly has an appetite for personalized communications, and over the past few months they have served up several real-time offers that have kept me and my expensive foodie tastes from going elsewhere. In a time of cost-conscious shoppers and big-box price competition, this type of relevance is becoming an increasingly important strategy for grocers who want to hang onto their high-value, high-potential customers.

My first trick was to muddle the basket. A friend won a gas stipend from work, and so for a month we shopped together, and he let me scan my Kroger Plus loyalty card for his grocery purchases so that I could earn an extra fuel-points discount. Kroger's at-register couponing interface immediately noticed the addition of dog food to my basket – it offered me a few other pet coupons at the register, and added some more to the digital coupons in my Kroger app. They also...

A friend tells me about her cleaning service's clumsy attempt at social media marketing. They sent her a $25 discount coupon (she's already a customer), the expiration date on the coupon was 12/31/11, and when she emailed the company to alert them to the mistakes, her note was bounced back with a “no-reply” error message. A marketing FAIL trifecta!

Of course, she immediately posted this on Facebook (and named the cleaning service), which unleashed a pack of similarly sharp-toothed complaints about generic, boring, or just plain wrong marketing attempts.

Attention, loyalty marketers: This is not your father's direct-mail game. This isn't even a direct email game. Today's customers expect all communications and offers to be personalized, accurate and absolutely relevant. If you don't give that to them, the fallout could earn you an embarrassing mention on Tosh.0, or a business-damaging blowup on Facebook or Twitter.

If you aren't getting it right, one of...

I had an epiphany about emotional loyalty in Target yesterday. I was buying a welcome mat – a pedestrian purchase (literally), almost too banal and mundane to write about. Target had a dozen or so on display, and as I debated about the coir with red poppies versus the streamlined rubber grid, I suddenly realized that I wasn't looking for a welcome mat. I wanted a vehicle for self-expression.

Consumer brand affinity can be sorted into essentially two camps: transactional loyalty, in which customers buy your product because it's easy, affordable and does the job; and emotional loyalty, when customers buy the brand because it helps them express who they really are.

The thing is, today's consumers are all looking to make purchases based on emotional loyalty. That's because most of the products out there meet a consumer's basic needs for functionality, performance and affordability. When those basic needs are met, consumers move up Maslow's hierarchical pyramid to...

Whether you laughed or cried over the firing of Terry Francona, you must admit the news was shocking. The Red Sox skipper was let go after finally securing the World Series title (twice!) for long-suffering Boston fans. Thanks. Don't let the door hit the chew in your back pocket on your way out.

And now we have this new guy: Bobby Valentine. Fortunately, he's used to Big Market Sports and can likely handle the fact that all of New England will second-guess his every move. For example, Valentine has decided that his pitching staff needs to work on fielding and, surprising for an American league team, hitting. His reasoning is based on a common coaching mantra – work your weaknesses!!

But other coaches, like my cycling coach, advocate the opposite. They say to build up your strengths so that nobody can touch your combined ERA, perhaps, or your final sprint speed.

The “leverage your strengths” approach won Lance Armstrong a record seven Tour de France titles....