The traditional paper loyalty
card has become a victim of its own success. When I first came across loyalty
cards over 20 or 30 years ago, I thought they were a great idea and I remember
keeping them in a special compartment of my wallet. It was not long however
before many more shops picked up on the trend. After a time, you couldn’t pick
up a coffee anywhere without being offered a stamped loyalty card. Very soon,
my wallet was bulging with them. Sometimes I would have two or three loyalty
cards for the one shop and every so often, in a fit of punctiliousness, I would
put these half-finished loyalty cards together and consolidate them on my next
visit into one super loyalty card. That was a long time ago, before I succumbed
to loyalty
card fatigue.
The loyalty card app is an
innovation which makes it a practical reality. As long as merchants had to rely
on pieces of cardboard, the more loyalty cards there were in existence, the
weaker the effect of each one. Like a debased currency, the more there are, the
more useless they are. The loyalty card app has the effect of reversing this
devaluation. Because the loyalty card is now virtual, and because all loyalty
cards are held on the one app, no matter how many shops and customers use them,
there is only one virtual loyalty card. This has precisely the opposite effect
of cardboard loyalty cards: the more the loyalty card app is used, the more
valuable it becomes.
Or think of it this way. Suppose
you run a clothes shop with a certain number of repeat customers and you
considered a loyalty card. With cardboard you would think twice about it
because you would know that your customers have maybe five or six cards already
and do not want to add another one to their collection, especially to a shop
that they will only visit maybe once a month. Your loyalty card would only be a
nuisance to them. However with a loyalty card app, your customers
can get loyal with you without any inconvenience. All they have to do is one
tap on their phone.
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