Guerilla Loyalty

My family lives on an island west of Seattle. We have 2 grocery stores, 4 traffic lights, and 3 pizza places. So even though this doesn't appear to be the blazing mecca of state-of-the-art marketing technique, I observed a tactic that reminds us all that sharp marketing needs no special context.

After phoning in for pizza delivery a few months back, I heard a new twist that impressed me. The order-taker asked, "If you have a punch card for any other pizza place, we'll trade it in!". Since this is my family's running favorite, I gave the delivery driver my "other pizza" loyalty card (with one punch) and received a "replacement" loyalty card.

In marketing, we are always either growing the market or seaking to take market share from others. The reason this tactic impressed me is how it unabashedly goes after the loyalty that the competitor has built up!

Sure, you can look at this as giving away -- on the average -- half a punch card. But the other way to look at this technique is that we "detoured" future business that would have headed to our competition -- without incurring the cost of an advertising campaign for that purpose.

And little things (good ones like this, as well as thorny ones) tend to be remembered by customers! More on that in a future blog.

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