31 January 09
Buy ten sandwiches, get the eleventh free. Earn one point for every mile. Spend $100 and get a $5 rewards certificate. Ten percent off the first Tuesday of every month. Three percent cash back.
Loyalty programs have a variety of structures. When they work, they work great. When they don’t, they can damage your affinity for a brand. In certain highly-competitive markets business and brands are going above and beyond to forge a loyal relationship with their customers.
According to Consumer Reports “about 85 percent of of U.S. households participate in at least one rewards program.” My wife and I have participated in several over the years with varying results. Here’s a look at a few of them — the good and the bad.
First we had citizen journalism. Now we have citizen photojournalism. UK-based Demotix gives independent photographers a global reach to major news media outlets such as France’s Le Monde and the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
Scoopt and Citizen Side are two other similar services.
In related news, Getty Images began sending out invitations this week where select Flickr users will be able to license their images through Getty’s Flickr Collection.
30 January 09
SALT Branding recently released a report on trends in branding for 2009. I’d be surprised if there was anything in here a competent brand manager or marketer wouldn’t already know. But nonetheless, they’ve done a good job refining into a nice, easy to read package. And smarter still is the timely tie in to branding in a recession.
Eight years later though, I’m still waiting for someone to reference something besides Nike-iD. Sheesh.
29 January 09
A recent post from Flowing Data led me to the website for the Portland agency Instrument. Last summer they completed an application for Google that beautifully visualizes the social influence of content across the Internet over time.
Would love to get my hands on this, but it looks like an internal Google R&D effort.
26 January 09
I was catching up on a backlog of podcasts and learned a little more about Palm’s webOS. As it turns out applications for webOS can be written with standards-based web technologies such as XHTML, Javascript, and CSS. This certainly opens the system up for a wide range of developers and will likely give their app base a jump start.
Weeks after CES the good vibes about Palm keep flowing. There is cautious optimism that they are back strong.