Keeping things simple was the prevailing theme during this year’s 8th annual Loyalty Expo presented by Loyalty360 – The Loyalty Marketers’ Association.
The Coca-Cola Company simplified the My Coke Rewards for Schools loyalty program in its recent re-launch to engage more consumers and schools to actively participate.
As a result, the My Coke Rewards for Schools loyalty program took home the Gold Award in the Best Use of Customer Insight or Voice of the Customer category at the 2015 Loyalty360 Awards. Awards were handed out during a ceremony at the 8th annual Loyalty Expo, which was held April 27-29, 2015, at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando in Orlando, Florida.
Taylor Miffleton, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, Coca-Cola North America participated in an intriguing interview with Loyalty360 to discuss the company’s program.
Can you talk about Coke’s approach to Customer Insights, how they are gathered and how the company uses them to inform its successful loyalty program?
With a variety of products, The Coca-Cola Company reaches different generations and segments of consumers. Understanding each of these segments and what our brands mean to them is critical to remaining relevant both throughout their day and throughout their lifetime.
To understand consumers, Coca-Cola gleans insights through multiple sources: In-house and third-party research, social conversations, direct consumer feedback (e.g. through customer care channels). One common theme from this research: Today’s consumers have a desire to make a social impact and expect the brands they love to lead similar commitments in their communities
The newly re-launched My Coke Rewards (“MCR”) for Schools program is one manifestation of Coca-Cola North America’s commitment to local communities. Consumer insights showed an opportunity to (1) engage more schools, (2) provide consumers with new ways to donate, and (3) provide schools with the needed flexibility to use funds where they were needed most towards physical education, sports, technology, art and/or classroom supplies. Making the program available to 130K+ eligible, accredited U.S. schools allows Coca-Cola to simultaneously create both a hyper-local and nationally scalable experience.
What are your customer loyalty goals and how have the results matched or exceeded your expectations?
Coca-Cola wants to authentically engage consumers and reward them with exciting experiences, opportunities and rewards to drive both brand loyalty and purchase loyalty. Among these is the opportunity to grow brand love authentically by supporting the causes our consumers are passionate about.
The new MCR for Schools program is off to a great start! We re-launched the program at the end of January, and we’ve already seen a 9% increase in points donated and a 19% growth in the number of consumers donating to schools YTD.
How do you define Customer Loyalty at Coke and how does Customer Feedback impact that theme?
We define “loyalty” as both transactional loyalty and emotional loyalty.
To earn both, we want to connect with and recognize our consumers as individuals. Coca-Cola uses feedback mechanisms embedded in the My Coke Rewards program to identify an individual’s passions, interests, and favorite Coca-Cola brands, to ultimately serve them a more personalized experience
With an abundance of technology solutions available in the marketplace, how do you know which ones best fit your customers and their expectations?
During the MCR for Schools refresh, we clearly outlined the goals for what the program needed to achieve—deliver more value to schools, engage more consumers and schools to actively participate, and keep it simple operationally. Our internal technology teams and existing technology vendors helped us evaluate the landscape and vet potential technologies to meet these objectives.
Ultimately, we determined the best solution to help us to accomplish our goals was Kula Cause’s Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing (CLM)™ technology. The CLM technology allowed us to leap-frog technical development so we could launch the new program quicker, and also had the flexibility to “white-label” it for the best front-end user experience to connect 1-to-1 with Coca-Cola consumers.
The new MCR for Schools program and user experience creates a significantly enhanced donation experience. We are already seeing the program scale and make a bigger impact in local communities. We are looking forward to things to come!