We all love a success story, don’t we? Winning the grand final after years of missing out, taking the first win in a come-behind victory, or holding a well-earned trophy high in the air. Having these stories, or “trophies,” on display allows you to share fond memories with friends and family and reconnect with those feelings time and time again. We like to refer to this to as ‘Trophy Value’.
Most importantly, successful B2B rewards and incentive programs result in the same Trophy Value effect. Recognition of effort and rewards are just like receiving a sports trophy, but specifically tied to your brand. It’s celebrated and should be a hero for your business. Consider these feelings and rewards that truly inspire and engage people to make incentives personal and meaningful.
For instance, using a blanket approach with your rewards won’t have the impact you want. Programs have diverse target audiences. It’s likely that each audience member, while sharing similarities, will be interested in very different things. This is why it is important to give people a wide range of reward options, which will help overcome the diversity of your audience and connect with customers easier and makes points-based incentive programs more popular by increasing the chance of program success with a more diverse rewards catalogue.
The most effective way programs can connect with their audiences is to use targeted communications. These messages serve a specific purpose – to guide participants towards specific individual rewards selected by the business, aligned with helping the program reach its objectives. By driving to these, you can create a higher engagement with desirable rewards while also casting the audience’s eyes to the prizes worth working for – making this a win-win for both audience and business!
In all programs, we recommend two things: firstly, having Trophy Value as a central pillar of the program design. This will result in a shift away from what is the reward, to what a participant can achieve. Secondly, this way you can focus on the outcome of targeting desired rewards, with the behavioural or sales efforts required by the participant to earn the rewards.
It’s important to remember that while gift cards seem like the perfect way to deliver that trophy value feeling – allowing your customers to buy exactly what they’ve always wanted with their hard-earned value – we’ve found it often serve the opposite purpose. Gift cards very often end up spent on discretionary purchases, meaning that the work they’ve put into your program is more likely to end up on groceries than it is on the trophy-value inducing high-value purchases.
By injecting aspirational products into your rewards program, customers can set their eyes on something they often wouldn’t consider directly buying and is sure to be the centrepiece of a discussion of your brand with family and friends.
Trophy value can affect the way your customers react to your brand in several ways.
We know that if a customer has achieved success through a program, they value rewards more and will truly celebrate. Like a hard-won trophy, there’s an emotional connection – something to celebrate and commemorate the time that your brand took first place in the customer’s mind!
