Making It Happen
This headline from early April in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention:
The story adds: ““The biggest difference this time is we are loving those who love us,” [JC Penney CEO] Mr. Rosen said, adding that “we need to give them more opportunity to come back and find things they love.””
This is a point echoed by Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System: “Executives allocate time and financial resources in support of treating customers well, so that they come back for more and bring their friends.”
The common theme: make sure customers come back for more and bring their friends. Therein lies the secret to profit-centric marketing. And to accomplish it, what is needed is what I call “extreme retention” (XR). Bridging the two needs a set of tokens: Mu, as rewards for attention and data, and the XRT (eXtreme Retention Token), which opens a gateway to differentiated experiences for the Best Customers. The mantra: Better Experiences for Better Customers.
Here is how there are all connected:
- Conventional retention thinking equalises data collection and experiences for all customers. Extreme Retention uses CLV to create a new SBU for the Best Customers. (Think: Velvet Rope Marketing.)
- Conventional retention thinking becomes too much about the features of martech platforms. Extreme Retention flips the focus to a new set of parameters to maximise engagement and excitement with Best Customers: gamification, asset appreciation and loyalty. (More on this soon.)
- Conventional retention thinking leads to generic loyalty programs with dollars and cents, points, and tiers. Extreme Retention is about Loyalty 2.0 – data and time, experiences and differentiation. Loyalty 2.0 is about the upstream of transactions with a focus on attention, engagement, habit creation, streaks, stickiness, and zero-party data, with “atomic rewards” to incentivise and nudge behaviour of the Best Customers.
I have covered some of these themes in the past:
- Imagining µniverse: The B2C Metaverse
- Atomic Rewards: The Solution to Attention Recession
- Martech’s Magicians: Microns, Micronbox and µniverse
- µniverse and Bharatverse: Web3 Explorations
- Constructing the µniverse
- Martech 2.0 and Web3: Solving Advertising’s 50% Problem
- Loyalty 2.0: How Brands can Tokenise Customer Attention and Data
- Profit-centric Marketing: Start with Email 2.0 and Loyalty 2.0
Extreme Retention builds on the blockchain to ensure complete transparency. The Mu token rewards attention and data, with the marketer in complete control on who to incentivise. The XRT can be thought of as an NFT which opens a world of privileged experiences for the Best Customers – so they can keep coming back for more and bring their friends, thus maximising their category spend with the brand. Extreme Retention is about replacing profit killers with profit creators. It provides a roadmap for marketers to reimagine marketing for the Web3/Metaverse Era, and position themselves not just as CMOs but as Chief Profitability Officers, a title which will be much in demand during the coming slowdown and likely recession.
