Brian Almeida, Founder of ‘Points for Good’ , has designed and launched some of India’s most loved loyalty programmes — be it JetPrivilege, Taj Inner Circle, or Shoppers Stop First Citizen Club. Almeida is now trying to channelise loyalty points towards charitable causes.
What has changed in the loyalty business?
In the loyalty industry, the biggest story we talk about is McDonald’s. For years on end, McDonald’s refused to do a loyalty programme. Two or three years ago, they launched a loyalty programme globally. Everyone keeps asking me: Will loyalty die? My common answer is that if you understand loyalty programmes as a structure, it is not dying but moving with the times.
First, it was all about the ability to recognise a customer around the point of sale. It started with American Airlines, which recognised gold members, platinum members and so on. Then it gave you a traceability and tracking mechanism, which is the points currency. And then you got data — not only could it track customer behaviour, but it also gave brands an ability to predict trends. So the insights and analysis and future trend behaviour became a big part of the business. Today, it is also migrating into a lot of AI applications.
Loyalty programmes give brands a zero-party data asset. So there’s no permission requirement and that is becoming a big asset for organisations, particularly with the new privacy law in India.
During Covid, the four North American airlines raised money from banks on the back of their loyalty programmes, whose valuations were really high.
Another change is the whole transition in technology. Earlier, when we did a programme with the Taj, we put an RFP out for software. We had eight big software companies bid for building the software. Now technology is almost readily available off the shelf. And technology has increased the scale of adoption — so today, the penetration, percolation and adoption of loyalty programmes is quite high.
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