Blog : Will The Challenges In Marketing And Advertising Drive The Return To Loyalty Programs

The decline of cookies, which have become the collateral damage of changes in the network (and the jump to mobile) and new privacy laws, has consequences on the marketing and advertising strategy that companies follow. In addition to what the advertising industry, in general, is trying to do to offer solvent alternatives, companies are beginning to migrate their investments or to see other solutions and tools with better eyes.

So, for example, contextual advertising returns. After being the great queen of the internet in its early years and after being overshadowed by what the new online tools allowed to do, these types of ads are experiencing a revival. Likewise, companies are trying to promote those marketing solutions that will enable them to mitigate the effects of the changes. And in this new scenario, loyalty programs have become solutions with emerging power. Loyalty and loyalty programs are not new. They exist since before the network did and had been operating for a long time. The model is simple and straightforward. The consumer enters the program, usually, a membership card or a point system, which will reward him for his relationship with the brand, for example, for his purchases.

Since the consumer does not want to lose the benefits linked to the program, they end up routinely falling into the routine of buying there or that brand. One of the best examples is the supermarket cards, which are free and that manage to retain consumers with discounts, promotions, and limited actions for these customers. And, as pointed in MarketingDive, loyalty programs could increase their pull in the era of the death of cookies, but also in the increasingly stringent standards in terms of privacy. Right now, loyalty programs already have an established market.

A KPMG study looked at the use of loyalty programs in various countries around the world. In Spain, 35% of consumers make purchases a week that are linked to points and loyalty programs. They are 42% in the US, 56 in Canada and Italy, 45 in Germany, or 61 in Australia.

But companies, they point at MarketingDive, could push these programs further in the near future, as they can become a tool for respecting consumers' privacy - but still accumulating information about them - and for the post-apocalypse market for cookies where advertising will be more difficult - in a way that the consumer accepts and values. In fact, as you recall in the American environment, the movements that have been registered in the market already point in that direction. Mastercard has bought, for example, a company that helps manage offers and rewards in real-time, something that will possibly have an effect on what services they offer to companies in the future.

For companies, loyalty programs would thus be a patch to two serious problems, one in which consumers do not have a 'complicated' opinion. The fact that consumers accept loyalty programs does not mean that everything is already done and that the solution does not imply challenges. Brands and companies will have to fight two key issues. The first is indifference that consumers at heart are not very interested in the program. This is what happens when they register because they are interested in t

The second is fatigue, which for many benefits, and no matter how free the program is, the consumer is already saturated with these promotions and prefers not to register.