Finding that highly sought-after customer affinity is not, as some might hope, simply a matter of having a “loyalty” program. For starters, that’s the marketer’s word for the program. Want to know the customer’s word for it? The “lower price for something I’d probably buy anyway” program.

 

Do such programs really influence purchasing decisions and customer affinity and attachment to brands? According to a recent report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council, club membership “strongly motivates, or is a big factor, in influencing buying decisions for 52 percent of survey respondents.”

 

When it comes to word-of-mouth, nearly 20 percent of club members say they are big brand boosters and almost 50 percent say they sometimes talk up the product or service they support. 

Sound good? Fully 54 percent of survey respondents said they would give up their loyalty or rewards club membership if they had a poor product or service experience with a brand. There’s “loyalty” for you.

 

Why not try relevance to build customer affinity, especially if you’re an applications maker? In other words, give the people what they want, as noted social philosopher Ray Davies suggested? Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has a video with some nifty ideas about what this might look like.

 

You’re driving down the street. Your sister’s having an ultrasound at the hospital, and discovers she has twins. She sees the ultrasound with added outlines on a large screen opposite her on the doctor’s office wall. The doctor presses a button to live-stream the ultrasound to your handheld. You want to share it with everybody in the car, of course, so you press a button to send the stream to the screen on the back of the front seats and in the console so the driver can see it.

The doctor also sends the stream and all the associated information to your primary care obstetrician, who glances it over, sees it’s ready and saves it on a device that looks suspiciously like an iPad.

 

Or you’re walking down the street wondering where to go for dinner. You see an interactive billboard on a bus stop. Manipulating the screen like a giant iPod screen, you zoom in on the part of town you’re in, get the restaurants within a, let’s say four-block radius, touch a couple to bring up reviews, menus and prices. You leave and the guy behind you uses the same screen to find night clubs.

 

Or you’re on the train home and you get a text from your wife who’s at. She live-streams it – the music industry’s real excited about this one – to you on the handheld. You put your handheld on a hot jack on the table screen in front of you and it expands to full screen size. Now that’s affinity.