The Phish x Peloton Readers’ Remix: What Brand Loyalty Programs Miss

After I completed my 500th Peloton ride, I lingered on the bike expectantly. I stretched more slowly than usual, checked the messages on my phone, fiddled with my water bottle, and finally– with waning optimism– I looked back at the Peloton touchscreen still half-hoping something would happen. But yet, nothing did.

Despite my loyalty to Peloton (all 500 of those rides happened in a little over a year), my Peloton experience on that milestone ride was identical to the 499 that preceded it. And I still haven’t even gotten a lazy stock email congratulating me on my milestone (sniff sniff).

I know, I know: I should have re-arranged my life to clip in for a live ride, and I should have festooned my user profile with all sorts of crazy hashtags to try and get the instructor’s attention for a milestone shout-out. But the point of this piece isn’t to decry this missed opportunity to reinforce my loyalty to Peloton, nor is it to detail Peloton’s marketing malpractice (we covered that pretty comprehensively in the first Phish x Peloton piece).

Instead, what I’d like to discuss here is the realization that I’ve made over the past few weeks with the help of reader response: I’ve realized that almost every brand loyalty program out there is missing out on something pretty huge.

The Hollow Behavior of Brand Loyalty Programs

Beyond my well-documented irrational enthusiasm for Peloton, there are a handful of other brands with which I rack up a ridiculous amount of behavior: airlines, hotels, credit cards, and even Starbucks (okay, especially Starbucks). These brands all have loyalty programs that constantly communicate with me through notifications, emails, and expensively produced brochures. Points and perks are all over the place. But the remarkable thing is that– despite my loyal behavior– none of these loyalty programs ever make me feel anything. There’s a ton of behavior, but very little emotion.

I believe that the reason these brand loyalty programs ring so hollow is because they chase behavior without understanding emotion. To help us dig into this, here’s a quote from one of the notes I got from a reader:

“Very few brands have actual superfans. For example, there are no superfans of Marriott…”

With nearly 8,700 properties, Marriott is the largest hotel company in the world. They use their dizzying scale to roll up all 32 of their hotel brands into one big rewards program (the faux-French mash-up “Bonvoy”) in the hopes of fueling irrational enthusiasm for the Marriott megabrand.

Bonvoy spends lavishly on sun-dappled TV ads, ubiquitous sports arena signage, and glossy brochures. But yet you could claim that there are no superfans of Marriott/Bonvoy. To find out why, I’ll share the second half of the quote from the reader:

“There are no superfans of Marriott…

but there are superfans of the W Hotel in Bali.”

The problem with Bonvoy is that they’re trying to make an emotional connection with the Marriott megabrand, not the proverbial W Hotel in Bali. They’re trying to get you to feel something about each and every one of their 1.7 million hotel rooms, which is akin to Drake superfans getting email from Universal Music Group encouraging them to love every other artist on the UMG roster.

To bring this back to the connection I should have had with Peloton after my 500th ride, here’s a quote from another reader:

“Yo, I felt like a KNEW Alex Toussiant. He sounds like me, listens to the same music as me, and made me feel like I was unlocking a better version of myself with every ride. If my 100th ride tee came from Alex vs Peloton, it’d be worth a lot more to me.”

So, as it turns out, after my 500th ride I should have never gotten an email or a push notification from Peloton per se. I should have gotten it from Matt Wilpers. Though my behavior clearly qualifies me as a devotee of the overall Peloton megabrand, the spark of my irrational enthusiasm starts with something (indeed, someone) far more specific: the instructor who slogged it out with me for so many of those rides.

Fueling Fandom for Your Brand: Micro > Macro

I believe the biggest piece that most brand loyalty programs miss is that the macro purchasing behavior always starts in a very specific, very micro place.

To address this missing piece, I offer the following three steps of advice for marketers who seek to more effectively fuel fandom and the loyalty it can foster:

1. Reward Behavior, but don’t forget to fuel emotion. The core of most brand loyalty programs is, predictably, some variant of a “buy 10 get 1 free” behavioral incentive. But what these behavioral incentive programs almost always overlook is why you were motivated to purchase in the first place. Whether you’re a local restaurant chain or a global hotel behemoth, you need to build your loyalty around the emotional why– not just the behavioral what. You have to fuel emotion, not just offer transactional incentives.
2. Communicate via your micro spark, not your macro letterhead. Probably (partly) out of pride, most loyalty programs communicate through the most all-encompassing corporate logo available (their version of Bonvoy, rather than their version of the W Hotel in Bali). However, I think it’s far more powerful for brands to communicate through whoever/whatever is the spark of loyalty, rather than through the corporate entity. Does that mean me getting emails from Matt Wilpers (instead of Peloton) and my favorite server at my favorite restaurant (instead of the restaurant chain)? It sure does.
3. Use surprise to supercharge the predictable. The transparent predictability of loyalty programs can be very motivating (raise your hand if you’ve invented a reason to squeeze in year-end flights to get over the hump of the next airline loyalty tier). But this predictability can also numb the emotion that is at the core of super fandom. Sprinkling in moments of surprise– moments of reward that your fans could have never predicted– can supercharge the impact of any loyalty program.

Thanks again for reading. See y’all again soon.