3 Most Common Communication Failures Preventing Loyalty Program Success You have heard this from your significant other. It’s the different between the playoffs and the title, a good education, and a raise. Yet marketers somehow forget it. I am speaking of course, about proper communications. They are the centerpiece of your personal relationships, and the vortex of any good loyalty program. And no matter how good you think you are at it, there is always room for improvement.

In a recent post, I delved into gamification of loyalty and in the midst of illustrating how real-time, location based, rewards platforms are often better suited than traditional loyalty programs, I only gave proper communications passing reference- even though effective communications is and will always be the driving subtext of any loyalty program.

We all know over the last several years, a growing need for cutting corners – and coupons – has paved the way for sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and others to offer attractive discounts to consumers and – as their salespeople pitch it – equally attractive perks to participating businesses. It’s changed consumer behaviors, disrupted business models on the local level and it’s made a few people very wealthy.

I spent most everyday in conversations with CMOs, loyalty program director, CIOs and executives across a variety of industries- and while many are still struggling to catch up with, and better leverage, the new behaviors of social media and the real-time web, almost none have a mobile strategy worth bragging about. Why is this?

Big data is the rage. Big data companies are getting funded. Big data scientists are getting hired. A slew of blog posts are screaming for marketers to understand and use big data. So what is Big data? In a nutshell, it is doing what Google has been doing for over a decade. Taking in, indexing and categorizing massive amount of data generated from the web. It involves new hardware and software paradigms and new skill sets to further challenge us.