287. Sara Richter, CMO at SAP Emarsys: Loyalty has changed, Personalization, Trends, B2B is like B2C

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the FMCG Guys, the podcast that dives into innovation, strategy, and trends shaping consumer goods and retail in Europe and beyond. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the FMCG Guys podcast. I'm your host Daniel Torres coming live from Barcelona. What a year it's been, ups and downs in the industry, ups and downs for the FMCG guys as well, having live events, virtual events everywhere. And today we're actually joined by someone who we partnered with earlier in the year. We did a virtual session for them a webinar, which was fun with our friends from the CPG guys and our also good friends, Mel LaHamerad and Christina Marie Nucci. And today we're gonna speak about something that I think everybody has in mind when it comes to FMCG or CPG brands, which is loyalty. I think it's something that every brand wants to aspire to another fact that people kind of fall in love with your brand. That's the first step, but they actually get used to buy their products for life. And it's an inspiration which I think has been challenged or as I guess today puts it, it's not what it used to be. So I'm accompanied by Sarah Richster, who's the chief marketing officer at SAP MRSIS. Hey Sarah. - Hey Daniel, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. - So it's not what it used to be. Is that a good thing or bad thing? - Depends on how you approach it and what you're trying to do, right? So MRSIS, as you said, we're a part of SAP and our part of the world is to really think about how we can help marketers really approach their customers in the best way, build relationships, build experiences through personalized omnichannel engagements that deliver business outcomes and engender loyalty. So to go back to where we started. And we've actually spent a lot of time for the last five years or so thinking about loyalty and we do that through something called our customer loyalty index. And it's now, it's fifth year, which is really exciting. And we think about different loyalty types and we think about how consumers are and customers are reacting to brands, experiences that are created and how that goes forward. And yeah, I can see you saying, I want to ask a question. So ask. I have many questions to ask you. No, but just to specify. So MRSIS is part of SAP and specifically, you're that partner to CMOs in terms of loyalty or is your offering wider? - So we are partners to CMOs in terms of their customer engagement more broadly. So customer engagement is Dave's world has to happen in an omnichannel world. And I don't know any CMO who isn't looking at their customers and understanding that their customers are interacting with them face to face. They're interacting them through a plethora of digital channels and those channels change sometimes on a daily basis. Who your customer is is so incredibly important is you don't know who your customer is. You're unlikely to understand how they're interacting with you and what channel they want to be on. And are you able to actually understand and recognize that the customer that walked into that store or that branch yesterday is the same one that's on your mobile app or that went onto your website or that actually engage with you via TikTok. Those aren't four or five different customers as the same customer showing you different preferences, different behavior across all these different channels. And they want to be treated as one customer. They expect that your engagements with them are personalized, not just by the channel but by their interests, by their experiences with you. And that overall there's a relationship that is built there. And over time, there is a consistent value exchange between customer and brand. And all of those things come together, that's what's gonna start to build loyalty. And it's good to go back to your original question. - Totally, totally. And what's your, like your parent company is SAP, is it like any relationship in practice? Like when you work with a master's as a brand, with SAP is that like some type of support they give you? - Well, so we are part of SAP CX and we have been now for over five years. And we are a fundamental part of the overall SAP CX offering and we're a fundamental part of the overall SAP business suite. And we have any number of customers who are taking advantage of what an overall SAP offering can bring and how by having a Marxist and much of the overall SAP offering. For example, SAP CDP, SAP Cells, SAP Services, having a wealth of data, having an SAP ERP, how by having all of that and having that breadth and depth of data across the enterprise, how it can be activated, certainly by the CMO and the marketers and customer engagement, but obviously in other broader business contexts as well. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you just released which I was reading very interestingly, your global customer loyalty index, which I think challenges a lot of the things that I've been hearing in the industry. So first of all, I'm curious to know why would you guys want to do this global customer loyalty index? - Because customer loyalty is completely and utterly fundamental. And it is something that evolves constantly because it's about people and experiences and people and experiences continue to change. The way we engage with people and the kind of experiences we, as companies, as brands, as marketers provide continue to change. And as the market is changing and evolving, as people are changing and evolving, you need to understand what's driving loyalty if you're actually gonna be able to create experiences and programs that truly create what we call true loyalty or that trust and devotion that you want to have from customers. You could only do that if you truly understand them. And conversely, we can only provide the right solutions to our customers if we are thinking about these things and demonstrating that we understand the business and paradis. - Yeah, totally. Do you think, do you think we critical that most CMOs or brand directors understand that? - I think a lot do, actually. I think a lot do. I think it's very challenging. I don't think it's the people don't understand it. I think it's very challenging. And I think what a lot of businesses struggle with is that you quoted me as saying loyalty isn't what it used to be. Well, I think the way businesses approach loyalty has to change. Loyalty has to be more than just a program, right? A set of reward points and a card or an app. Loyalty has to really come in to the center of the organization and really become a strategic compass that the entire organization is using for direction. Whether you're in marketing or sales or back office or front office, everything that company does needs to be structured around understanding the customer and customer loyalty. And it's the companies that are doing that and the brands that are doing that that are actually being successful because they're actually activating their data across their enterprise. And they're using that in every single interaction and every single engagement with their customers. And that's what we're seeing is actually building loyalty. Yeah, no, we're going through it later, but I thought it was interesting that in your report, for example, you mentioned that in certain countries, pretty big ones like in the US and the UK, loyalty is actually going up in some segments, which I thought was fascinating because that's not the general narrative we hear out there, right? So I think that's why we try to look at loyalty not just as one something that's way out here, but we look at it in terms of different loyalty types, which is what you're talking about. And to your point, we saw true loyalty, which is that Nirvana for all brands. Globally, we actually saw that drop by five points this year, which was really quite startling. And in its place, we saw a rise to something new, which we've called trend loyalty. And trend loyalty is viral. It's opportunistic. It's about something that's very much in the moment. And it's a very different kind of thing than what true loyalty is. And brands need to understand what trend loyalty is, they need to understand how they need to be positioning it so that they can take advantage of it and capture those moments and build that loyalty and bring those customers in. - And you mentioned before that there's what is it, six types of loyalty? Can we go through them quickly? - Absolutely, so I just talked about trend loyalty, which is our new one, right? Which is this more a femoral, in the moment, loyalty that perhaps links more to social media and things like that. It's the brand of the moment, the product of the moment. True loyalty, which I've also touched on, is what we call that Nirvana for all brands. And everybody wants their customers to show true loyalty, real devotion, long-term trust in a brand. - That is like, that's like, the loyalty though. - That is, that is Nirvana. Exactly, it is, it is Nirvana for all brands. But that and trend loyalty are not the only types of loyalty that are evidenced by customers. There's incentivized loyalty, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's loyalty that is brought on by discount and rewards. There's something called inherited loyalty, which is all about heritage and brand association. So you have loyalty to one brand because of its association with another one that perhaps you have been loyal to for a long time. There's silent loyalty, which is again, what it sounds like. You are loyal to a brand, but you don't say it. You don't demonstrate it. You're not gonna post reviews. You're not going to refer. You're not gonna do any of those things. - You're not gonna be an advocate. - Yeah, exactly, but you are still loyal and you are still a valued customer. There's ethical loyalty, which is all about being driven by values, so things like sustainability does the brand demonstrate the values that match with your personal values and as a result, you remain loyal to them. So those are the, those are our six types of loyalty. And I think they represent all of the different things that we see in the market and all of the different motivations that we see when we talk and hear from our customers. - Are they mutually exclusive? - No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. You can, they certainly can overlap and you can certainly see people doing different things. But generally speaking, people's behavior tends to lump them into, put them into one of these buckets or not. - Okay, and when you talk about silent loyalty, is there like an typical example of that? - So I think, I think actually it was the way I described it a little bit earlier. Actually, I think it's you, you might purchase from a brand quite regularly, but it's so, it's so often now brand will ask you for a review. - Yeah. - You might purchase from them maybe every week and they may be your go-to for very specific items that you wouldn't think about buying from anywhere else. But you're not gonna put a review on the website. You're not gonna go on social media and talk about them. You're not gonna do any of those things that demonstrate beyond your purchase behavior and your very specific interactions with the brand or your very personal interactions with the brand that that's a brand that you're loyal to. And there's nothing wrong with that and I think it's important for brands doesn't make you any less of a valued customer but you have to understand that offering me things that are attached to a review, if I am silently loyal and if a brand understands the significant chunk of their value customers are truly silently loyal. Don't offer me incentives. Don't offer me experiences that are linked to making me be vocal because by doing that you're actually being counterintuitive and demonstrating that you don't actually understand me as a customer. And you could completely inadvertently turn me off and send me off to another brand. - Yeah, it's interesting loyalty, isn't it? Because now if I think of like in my house of like my staples of day to day, like there's certain products, like I don't know, like what I did, what I washed my dishes with by hand is always the same. But my dish washing, what I put in the dishwasher is totally price sensitive, for example. - It's really interesting. And what is the word of the trends that we found in the report was that 64% of consumers are ignoring brand names when they buy. Now, not everything they buy to the example that you gave, that's very personal to you. So what you put your dishwasher, you don't care. You don't care who it's by. It can change, it means it really, which suggests that whatever those brands are doing, they're not finding a way to engage with you that makes you see value beyond price. So they're not creating real loyalty. - Yeah, like I don't know, shaping, for example, I always buy the same brand. But my dad switches all the time, for example. - Exactly, and exactly that comes back to understanding your customer, right? If I understand you, and I understand your buying habits, and I'm able to engage with you in a personal and relevant way consistently, then I should be able to influence that. So maybe it's, when you look at those, is it about you and what you value? Or is it also about how the brands that bring these products to market are communicating with you, or not communicating with you? The experiences they perhaps aren't providing, not demonstrating that there's value, and giving you that value exchange, and making you feel that there's something in it more than just a can of shaving cream, because they're cryptic. And if they're smart about it, and they build that relationship, then there's an opportunity there. But then you're highlighting places where the opportunities are clearly being missed. - Totally, are you brand loyal normally? - I think I think of a very typical customer. I think it depends on what it is and the brand. I mean, doing what I do, I'd certainly bring my professional approach to it. I'm interested to see how a brand is looking, how does a brand use my data? I look at that very closely. I don't wanna be a victim of dark data. If I'm gonna give you data, it's a value exchange, and I want you to be demonstrating something back, for me, that gives me value. And do you understand one of the things that I think comes out a lot is our brand's understanding the trends in your generational buyers, and how that helps you perhaps zero in. So we talked about trend loyalty, and I think that also links very closely to social media, and that's a very much a Gen Z trend that loyalty is linked to social media, and that matters. But it's funny, millennials, millennials are gonna find you on an app. You need to be on the app. If you're not on the app, there you go, you're not communicating. And millennials interestingly, as you just raised the point, are rewards and personalization, very specifically. That's what this generation wants. However, you flip to baby boomers, older generation, and actually it's reliability and functionality. They're really focusing on the strategy and of the product, and what is there. So I think it's so important again to understand those audiences, and of course, meeting their generations where they want to be with the content that they want. And of course, the beauty of it today is, you have AI to help you, to help you tailor those experiences, to activate all of that amazing data at scale. And if you can do that, I think there's an enormous potential of customer loyalty that you can tap into. Totally, because now you can kind of like, better understand your consumer and segment that more and then send the right messages, or send even multiple messages and segmented ways. No, I guess. Exactly, on different channels, at the right time, at the right moment. If that's again, it's not a new phrase, but you're tipping over into marketing as a service then. Are you providing the information, at the right moment, in the way that I want it, that I want to consume it? So you're actually, my perception is, you are helping me, you are creating an experience. So I'd be a part of. And when it comes to these loyalty types that we mentioned, just as I remind the true incentivize inherited, silent, ethical, and trained, what FMCG, it's the bulk of our listenership. So which ones should matter most of them? Good question. So I think if you look at where things are changing, changing for FMCG, excuse me. So 48% of Gen Z by trending products. So trend loyalty matters. 48% of Gen Z by looked, products based on trending. And I don't, I believe that not just because of the stats, but when I talk to people, when I talk to the people, even just in the office, and you hear people talking about how they, did you see that this, did you buy this product that went viral? How often will the product goes viral? Do you buy it? That's all without trend loyalty. Have you ever bought the product from that brand? Possibly not. Are you ever going to buy the product from that brand? That depends. How are they going to continue to capitalize on understanding that there, this is a trend in a way of interacting with a specific generation and continue to offer their products in such a way at that's the right moment. Again, tapping into the Gen Z and trend loyalty, I think this is fascinating. A third will actually trust TikTok and social trends. More than mil trust and ad, I'm an actual brand. - So how does it compare? So you say a third will trust TikTok and how many will trust the brand? I like an ad, sorry. - They, well, so they, so more than, so a third of them trust TikTok, more than mil trust. - Okay. - Then they'll trust and add. So if you, if I'm serving these up to you, you are, you are, you are a third more likely to actually resonate, to believe, to react to, to be inspired by, to see true sin. Something is coming through TikTok versus and something is coming directly from a brand. - This is actually, I'm kind of surprised in a way that I thought it would be higher on TikTok. So that's also a good reminder. - I thought there you go. So it's interesting, isn't it? How do you, how do you, how do you think about it? So I think that's, that's, these are some of the things that I think that FNCG brands really need to think about. And how do you, as, as Jen said, is becoming more and more of an important buyer. They are, they are, they are becoming more affluent. They have, they have more money to spend. How are you tack, tapping into that? How are you going? And then how do you go just beyond if you're seeing that Jen said and trend loyalty combination? How do you go beyond just that single transaction? How do you then blow that out into more personalized responsive experiences? Do you have the data to understand and engage? We have a customer called Biore, who did an amazing campaign using data, TikTok, and email altogether. And they had a 30% sell through in just three weeks of what they were looking to do. - Is that the, the up and coming as leisure brand, right? - They're amazing. And what they're doing is really, really creative. As a webinar back to our website, where you can actually hear all about the story that they, that they've told. But it's really interesting to see. So that's, that's a brand thinking about some of the more traditional ways of engaging and interacting, but also understanding that that is not enough to engage a very specific segment of their audience. So how do they go and do that? And how do you bring it together? And how do you use that? Not just for a single transaction. Not just for that moment, but actually had a start to build loyalty in the longer term. - Yeah, totally. And why do you think that trend loyalty, yeah, what I don't trend loyalty, sorry, true loyalty? Why is that declining? - I mean, I think that that's like what won't surprise people. It's a kind of general narrative that loyalty is in decline. But this specifically talking on this type of loyalty, right? - So I think it's, I think it's, I think where it's in decline. It's in decline for, there are lots of reasons, right? I would, it would be, it would be a little naive to say that, you know, price pressures and all of the rest of it don't impact people when they buy because of course they do. I mean, that that, I think we have to, we all have to understand that. But I think beyond that, where it is declining, it's evidence, I think, from our perspective that brands are not engaging with their customers in the right way. They're not thinking about involving their engagement strategies. They're not looking to provide that seamless experience. They're not activating the data. They're not personalizing. Those things are, those are basics now. Personalization is a competitive imperative in my view, you have to be doing it. And if you're not doing it, then you're going to be seeing loyalty of whatever type fall off, fall off for you. - And is that personalization? As you mentioned, Millennials are very key on personalization, but that affects, you think more than just Millennials. - I think it's more, I think Millennials pick it, pick it out is something that they, that they will point to and say, yes, this matters to me. They're more conscious that it matters to them, but I think it's true for everybody. We all expect to be engaged in a personal way. And it's very obvious in our digital world where it can be so quick. And it's so easy to see where you have one brand who's engaging with you in all of the right ways, using your data in all of the right ways, presenting you the right kind of content, presenting you the right kind of products at the right moment, versus one that simultaneously, unfortunately, is not getting as right. And it makes it so easy for us to switch over. And so easy for us to switch off from this brand, even if we've been associated with them for a long time, because it's so obvious that the message they are inadvertently sending is they don't value our business, because they're not taking the time to think about who we are as people, and they're not taking the time to personalize the communication. And they're perhaps forgetting that you're, in all of this communication and all of these engagements, so many of them these days that are digital, you're really trying to recreate the experience of walking into the corner store where I walk in, and you, Daniel, say, "Sara, it's so great to see you." I knew you were, knew you'd be in the day, and we haven't seen you in a couple of days, and a couple of things came in, and I know they're the type of thing that you like, and they're in your size, so I've just put them in the back for you. So let me pull that out for you now, and let's talk about them. And that, that's personalization. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, because sometimes we think of personalization having a can of something with our name on it, no? But it's a lot about making people feel special, no? - It's human, right? It's being a human relationship. It's remembering at the end of this, that at the end of, at both ends of this conversation, this experience are people. Your people representing a brand and a customer is a person, and are you remembering the human interaction you have to not get lost in the data and the segmentation and the technology, and forget that you're still having a conversation with a human being, and if you can do that and bring that through, that's why personalization matters, because you are consistently demonstrating that, and that's why people are attracted to and purchase from brands that are able to manage engagements that way. - What are the expectations of, like, blockchain, gen X, boomers, which, yeah, maybe because there've been a round for so long that don't get talked about so much, but I think they probably have the majority of the purchasing power still, no? - I think the purchasing power is spread depends on the product, right? Purchasing power for what? I think, again, you have to look at the report, and I touched on it a little earlier, the report kind of shows you some of the different trending in the buy generation. But then you have to look at who you are as a brand, what's your audience is made up from, and then understand how does that, how do those trends then come in far more personally to your brand, your offerings, where you do business, what's being successful, what's not being successful, and sometimes, you know, you can be, it can surprise you, you can assume that a channel's not going to work for you, and then you try it, and you find that it's actually very successful, and it's not the channel that you would have expected. So, you know, we have a customer in the US who thought referrals would be a really good thing for them, because they have a, they have, they tend to have an older sort of more boomer level audience. And it turned out actually that it was SNS as a channel that was effective, and worked incredibly well as a way to engage their audience, which I remember hearing the case that I thought, okay, just turn that back again, please, for me, that, that, that, that, that was the point. They took the time to understand their audience and to try any channel, and they learned something about actually how their customers wanted them to communicate with them, and it was good for the customer, and it was good for the brand. So, going through that, that voyage of discovery, if you like, I think is very important, but also remembering the voyage of discovery keeps going, because people keep evolving, you have more and more data, more and more information about your customers, and guess what? Probably every time we wake up these days, there's another channel out there, a different way to engage, a different way to connect, a different way to potentially drive loyalty. So, are you continuing to think about that as, as you, as you work it all through? And there's probably a point of being like, yeah, like thinking, okay, like everybody's doing this right now. What are people not doing now? Like, how can I exact when everybody's thinking? You know? Absolutely, I mean, I'll tell you something interesting. So, we, this year, complemented our customer loyalty index with something that we called our B2B buyer loyalty index, or our BLI, so we have two, we have another acronym. But, and the thing that, so this looks just as the customer loyalty index looks very specifically at consumers, the buyer loyalty index looks more at B2B, and it was really interesting to see how those two lined up. And there's, there's lots to talk about, you know, consumer B2C is different from B2B, and never the Twain shall meet. What was really interesting to me is actually that B2B buyers are acting just like B2C buyers. They want personalization. They want relevance at every touch point. They want their data to be used responsibly. And that's where the industry is moving regardless of which side of the house you're on. And when you think about it, it's not really that biggest surprise because every B2B buyer in their personal life is a consumer. And they're now expecting the brands that sell to them in the business world, and that market to them in the business world, and that present experiences in the business world to be just as effective as the ones that they see in their, you know, in their personal interactions. So, I think for me, that's what's really interesting. You're starting to see this convergence and how loyalty is shaped. We may call them slightly different things. And in B2B, we talk about strategic alignment, operational efficiency and long-term value. But a lot of it's truly boiling down to a lot of the same things that a consumer wants. It's just when you're buying for a business, you're often making a larger purchase that has perhaps, you know, more impact than just, than just you buying something for your dishwasher for the next 30 days, right? And when you talk about like B2B buying, it's like, I don't know, choosing an agency or a technology solution or whatnot, right? - It could be anything. It could be, it could be any of the things that a B2B buyer does. I mean, you're a B2B buyer in part of your life as a buyer. Are we buying technology solutions? Am I purchasing supplies for my office and my buying furniture? Am I B2B to see it? And so, I have a supply chain. And I'm thinking about how that operates. So, I'm purchasing things and selling them on. And then how do I understand how that works and how the engagement works across all those different stages of the supply chain. And then do I have the data that allows me to act on all of that as relevantly as possible? So, I think it's really interesting to see how that's coming together. - And another thing that I found fascinating about your report, by the way, is that in the UK, if MCG loyalty is rising, if I rage correctly? - You did, you did. - So, well, how did that miracle happen? - So, I think, so it's interesting. See, it's actually, yes, so it's actually up 13 points here on year, which is a big, which is a big difference here on year. So, 44% of UK consumers are loyal to MCG brands. And 39% of them are using more loyalty schemes. So, I think that tells you that MCG brands are thinking about putting programs in place to allow them to connect and engage with their customers on an ongoing basis. However, it's not completely rosy because the same data also told us that loyalty is fragile because 57% of these people will still switch for a cheaper option given at the right moment. So, I think success is rooted in consistency and price, quality and experience all coming together. You need seamless on the channel engagement. And we've talked about that a lot as we've been chatting, but that is absolutely true for the UK, for MCG without a doubt. And loyalty programs that are delivering real value, right? That are showcasing that the customer and loyalty is at the center of the brand. And those programs are, it's more than a program, right? It's something that a brand uses to help them engage consistently with their customers to create those experience, to have the value exchange at the data, to actually have a longer term relationship with any given customer. Because in the UK, but I think a lot of markets, when people think of like loyalty programs, they may think directly about the supermarket loyalty programs, but here you're talking about brand loyalty programs. How does that come to life? Well, I think it's really interesting because a supermarket is a brand, right? That's true. Yeah, that's true. It's that D to, it's that B to C, right? But a supermarket and a supermarket is a really interesting example because of course they, in many cases, these days, many supermarket sell their own branded items, right? And they sell other people's items as well. So you're creating, you're creating choice as part of what you do. But I think it's interesting, you pick supermarkets. So we uncovered that 18% don't actually care which supermarket. So they're not that loyal to that brand. They want convenience. They want to go to the store this near something that's going to have whatever it is they need to get, right? But a third of them still really strongly expect a seamless experience. So I think interesting, I think a seamless experience also probably goes hand in hand as a part of convenience, right? If you're, it feels convenient if you have a good experience. It feels really aggravated and inconvenient when you have a bad experience as a consumer, right? So you need to do all the things that we've been talking about, meet the customers where they are. Be relevant. Think about the channels and be consistent about that. And if you treat me as the same customer across all those channels regardless of where I am and where I go, you understand who I am. You demonstrate that. You know who I am and you personalize. You stand a much better chance of keeping me as a customer not just for that day, but for the future. I still think that there's quite a lot of room for the brands that don't have the direct to consumer presence to kind of evolve that, no? And show up more because I think of the shaving brand I buy or the shaving brand I buy. I spend a lot of money on it because it's expensive. And I think it would appear in my life in more ways. I'm genuinely interested because it's something I do every day and it's something kind of important to me. So there's show up more randomly to me. They could probably upset me a lot. I think they could and they would probably make you feel better about you just taught it up in your head. The amount of money you spent on this brand who doesn't hasn't acknowledged to you that you're a long-term valued customer. What's a missed opportunity? That's a missed opportunity right there. So there's loads of opportunities. And if you look at FMC Richie brands, you see some even if they're not choosing to sell directly now, you look at how they are understanding that they need to know who their customers are. They're looking at engaging with them on channels that are outside just at the physical supermarket where perhaps most people pick up their shaving cream. And they're looking at engaging with you whether it's on social media, whether it's through gaming, whether it's through getting something in the packaging of the product you buy that's a loyalty program that when you go to try to engage with it, sends you to their own digital property, whether it's an app or a website or what have you, and starts to ask you for your data. 'Cause then when they know who you are, and once they know who you are, they can start to talk to you and the conversation begins. And once they have to talk to you, the first question is, "Hey, Daniel, what's your first name? "What's your last name, what's your email? "Why do you love our product, maybe?" Great, but that's the very, very foundation of the conversation and then you continue to build on that. And they get to know you better and they get to know that well, actually, there's three different versions of the shaving cream that you'll buy depending on the day or maybe you buy a different kind of version of their shaving cream depending on the time of year it is because you like aloe in the summer because you get sunburned. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but it would be valuable for the brand to know that and you would love it if the brand demonstrated to you that they knew about that. It started communicating to you in advance about something that was coming that was relevant to you or that there was gonna be an offer on a product that they knew you were gonna want in a couple of weeks' time. There's so many options for brands to have, but for a brand who doesn't sell perhaps this directly, you absolutely still have the opportunity to gather that together at first party data and to really communicate directly and to build the relationship with the end user customer. Yeah, I feel like when the promise of direct-to-consumer for personal and consumer goods brands kind of faded away, they kind of gave up on a lot of them on the whole piece of communicating directly with their consumer. And honestly, if there's value to it, as you were saying, and personalization, I think it would make a lot of sense and I don't feel like it would be even that expensive for them to build that up. I think it's all about, I'm gonna keep bringing it back to the data because that's so important. Have they sat down? Do they have so many, so many brands have data that they're not activating? If you looked inside your organization, understood what you know about your customer and then understand how you could activate that or if you've discovered you don't know enough about your customer, how can you go build those programs to get those customers who engage with you to share their data? So they want to engage with you, so they want to do, and I think you're seeing a lot of leading FMCG brands start to do exactly that when you look in the marketplace and they're starting to think about how they do this. I mean, we talked about Biori earlier, well as another great example, really doing interesting things to engage with those customers, so they might not have sold to face-to-face in a store. It might have, their product might have been bought in somebody else's store and whether it's online or physical, it doesn't matter. But how is that relationship built and how is that engagement maintained? - Yeah, and by the way, one thing that you guys do very well, I think it is Marxists is to publish all these thought leadership pieces like this, loyalty index, which by the way, I'll leave it in the show notes in case somebody wants to download it, I know that you do engagement reports but also very good, what are you publishing next? What's coming out next? - So our next, so first of all, thank you, and I invite everybody, please, we do have some great, we have some great research, and we'd be delighted to share that. So as you mentioned, we had a report on engagement that was our first report, which we started last year and we are just in the process of looking at doing that again and really thinking about it more broadly. So some of the topics you can expect to see addressed, changes in brand engagement, absolutely some trends that are emerging in FMCG, and you won't be surprised, we'll be looking, try to look forward to 2026 and beyond to see what are the challenges that are coming up for brands, but also what are the opportunities? And just, you know, our goal as always with this is to try to help brands stay ahead and help them build lasting relationships with their customers. - And when's that report coming out? - You can look for that early next year. - Early next year. So we leave you some links in the show notes so people can engage. We can also happy to make a post on our LinkedIn page, whenever it comes out to magnify it and make people download it. 'Cause it's a great read always is. So Sarah, thanks so much for joining. It was super interesting to learn about all these different types of loyalties that maybe kind of come under the radar sometimes. - I think they do. So at first ball has been a pleasure, thanks Daniel. I'm glad I'm glad it was interesting. And I think they do. And I really, I really do think it is worth for any type of brand. I know I find it useful as a CMO myself to be thinking about our customers just to take that step back and to really understand what is loyalty, what is customer loyalty about, what is driving that customer loyalty? And to really think, is that something that I'm thinking about as I'm building out experiences and communications and content that I hope is gonna be valued by my customers and taken further? - Yeah, totally, especially in our context, where growth in consumer goods and in our industries is not taken for granted. So I think that any lever you can pull and especially this one. I'll leave everyone with a statistic that we have from Bain & Company. So if you can go and find it, that a 5% increase in customer retention, 5% can have results with up to 95% in terms of what is driving for your business. So that's a pretty big metric. And if that doesn't send a very clear message that the loyalty of your existing customers has enormous value of potential, I don't know what does. - Totally, if you say so that you're seeing things in the market of new initiatives going out along these lines, I'll be watching. And maybe in a few months, we can review when we're running through each other and shopped over one of these events. - At the day, sounds great. - Excellent, Sarah, thanks so much. Really had a ball with this. Thanks to all the insolves of what's tuning in and we'll see you in the next episode of the efforts, you guys. (upbeat music) - The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from Dwyer Partners SL, doing business as the FMCG guys, or the individual author, host, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Dwyer Partners SL. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. 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