Loyalty is more about products and service, and less about promotions, says Jacqueline Gold

I love George. Not the clothing range, although I really admire the brand.

No I love George Clooney and, after seeing his performance in the multiple Oscar-nominated Up In The Air the other week, I found room to love him even more.

The film has a number of themes but central among them concerns relationships and loyalty and in particular the ones we all have with businesses.

As a travelling executive his most cherished relationships were manifest through his collection of loyalty cards and their accompanying rewards programmes for numerous hotels, rental cars and airlines.

In one scene his character explains the key differences between each brand right down to the detail of the muffin one hotel chain gave you when you checked in. He easily distinguished between which of these little touches were insincere marketing gimmicks and which were of genuine value to him. He saw through everything. I suspect most of our customers do.

Of course, every brand worth its salt has a strategy to build better relationships with their customers, some of which feature muffins but most focus these days on social media.

The other week American Apparel poked their friends on Facebook about a secret Sale it was planning: a riot ensued and some policemen got hurt. Bargain hunters or cheapskates, call them what you will, but these retail rioters weren’t loyal customers and just because that’s how Facebook labels everyone, they weren’t friends either. They came in their numbers because American Apparel was selling stuff for less than it cost them to make.

By contrast they were queuing through the night and around the block for the launch of Apple’s iPad and nobody got hurt. These people are the real loyal customers. In fact, in modern marketing parlance these are brand advocates, the unofficial Apple cheerleaders.

I would hazard a guess that some of them have Apple tattoos and new Apple middle names too. Apple wasn’t selling it off cheaply, nor were there “crazy” launch promotions. These loyal customers queue all night just so they can be the first to experience the amazing products that Apple designs and makes: unique, exciting, time-saving, task-simplifying, life-enhancing, beautiful products.

And there’s the rub. I have always believed loyalty is what you have once all the promotions are stripped away, ie, loyalty to your products and the service you package it with.

As a retail team we can directly influence the service but we should be more demanding of our product development teams. In fact, give them the budget you and the retail marketing team have allocated for your loyalty card programme and ask them to think George Clooney and create something all your customers will swoon over.

It is the best way to grow the market you are in - build long-term loyalty and get away from the ever more desperate round of share-stealing promotions and price cuts.