What is the Monday Morning Coffee with Spaycial? Every Monday morning, our editorial team brings you 5 need-to-know news from its weekly readings, to read in less than 5 minutes.
What's on the menu this week ?
1. Loyalty programs & return visits
Like often, we kick off this week with some loyalty programs content. As we'll never stop on insisting how important it is to design loyalty programs for brands. Here's our partner in crime this week is David Slavick in The Wise Marketer, with a quote we couldn't agree more on :
"Brands must figured out how to play the game where programs attempt to take their eye off price through a delayed incentive or a bounceback reward to encourage a return visit."
2. Customer data to tailor programs
Loyalty programs still but with a focus on personalisation, the biggest pillars of all. And this A+ Forbes article gets it perfectly : "Brands with active loyalty programs can build personalized offerings based on a prized asset: customer data. Data is the lifeblood of any personalization program, and a loyalty program provides the building blocks. Brands that have strong loyalty programs have a roster of customer data from which they can tailor approaches." And what best shopper data to tailor programs than payment data?! We can explain more here.
3. Physical stores : from the Metaverse to French telcos
Two reads on the boom of physical stores for the price of one here. First comes from The New York Times which reveals that to Build the Metaverse, (Facebook (well Meta) first wants to build... stores! They would be designed to showcase products from Facebook's Reality Labs division, which is at the heart of the company's strategy for the Metaverse, from Oculus virtual reality headsets, to Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses.
Second read on the topic focus on how and why physical retail is stronger than ever in the commercial war between French operators (Bouygues, SFR, Orange, Free). Read their strategies to seduce shoppers in smaller towns in a post-Covid world in Les Echos.
4. Carrefour places data at the heart of all operations
Let's focus on ones of the French favorite retailers and largest food retailers in Europe, Carrefour, as it embraces digital expansion (2Bn€ invested in 2 years) to face Amazon on all fronts. We especially loved this quote from Carrefour CEO, Alexandre Bompard :
"We want to transform Carrefour, a traditional retailer with e-commerce capabilities, into a digital retail company, which places digital and data at the heart of all its operations."
Also he main drivers of an online push will be e-commerce -boosted by express delivery and innovative services- the ramp-up of data and retail media, and the digitalisation of financial services. All you need to know.
5. David vs Goliath, really?
Speaking of which, here's a great piece on "how retailers can prosper in the age of eBay and Prime". A great piece of reading for us as we thrive everyday to help retailers face the Gafam.
The take here is that "tech-enabled big retailers cannot offer everything to a customer. In many cases, they lack the expertise that smaller, independent vendors can offer—and this is where an advantage can be found." We're fund of that subtlety. Moreover "in a volatile post-pandemic world where more transactions will become digitalised specialist retailers still have an exciting opportunity to interact with a customer base that no longer frequents their stores on a daily basis. They can tap into ever-expanding technology to not only retain customers but truly grow and prosper in ways that were previously not feasible". And what's best for this than payment data right?