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Author Archive: Bram Hechtkopf
Bram leads the "marketing of Kobie Marketing". He consults with current and prospective clients on new business opportunities, helping to develop customer retention and loyalty marketing solutions that drive increased retention and spend. Following in the footsteps of his father, Kobie's founder, Bram is eager to continue Kobie's vision of technology and data analytics as enablers of leading-edge marketing executions for world-class customer loyalty initiatives.
J.C. Penney and the Billion-Dollar Question: How to Turn the Retailer’s Fortunes Around
May 3, 2013 in Retail by Bram Hechtkopf
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Coupon king Myron Ullman is back in the spotlight trying to save J.C. Penney from itself. But can he succeed? That’s the $1 billion question currently being asked by media and retail industry experts. It’s also how much J.C.Penney lost last year when so many of its customers took their loyalty elsewhere after the retailer [...]
Starbucks Aims to Create Loyalty from its Disloyal Customers. Huh?
April 12, 2013 in Restaurant & Dining by Bram Hechtkopf
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It’s rare when a company voluntarily admits it could do something better – especially when that company is Starbucks. With a record $1 billion placed on its Starbucks Cards in the first quarter of 2013, the king of coffee has little to worry about. Which is why Joe LaCugna, Starbucks’ director of analytics and business [...]
What Can Loyalty Programs Learn from Baseball? How to Measure “Home Runs” and “Strikeouts”
April 9, 2013 in Loyalty Strategy by Bram Hechtkopf
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Leave it to professional baseball to help metrics and data go mainstream. While all sports live and die by statistics (e.g., NCAA basketball’s March Madness), as America’s oldest professional game, baseball holds a special place. As the most stat rich sport, baseball even receives its own specialized analysis based on statistics called sabermetrics. Yet as [...]
What Airlines and Hotels Can Learn from Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Sephora’s Approach to SoLoMo
March 19, 2013 in Travel & Hospitality by Bram Hechtkopf
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So, what’s happening on the SoLoMo – the convergence of social media, proximity advertising and smartphone technology – scene these days? Plenty. Like retailers, travel and hospitality brands are no strangers to attracting and retaining customers in innovative ways. But there are clearly some lessons to be learned from particularly successful brands doing SoLoMo well, [...]
Turning the Tables on Airline Loyalty Turbulence: How Big Data and Omnichannel Loyalty Can Help
March 5, 2013 in Travel & Hospitality by Bram Hechtkopf
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You don’t have to be a frequent flyer, a cabin crew member or loyalty provider to know that the airline loyalty industry has faced some serious turbulence of late. First there was the American-US Airways merger that’s raised fundamental questions over how the two vastly different corporate cultures will combine, along with their respective philosophies [...]
Should Credit Card Companies Grow Loyal to Mobile Wallets?
February 28, 2013 in Financial Services by Bram Hechtkopf
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It’s starting to feel like technological déjà vu. From the printing press and motors, right through to smartphones and Google Glass, every new technology has come with variations of this tagline: less work and greater efficiency means more time spent on other, more enjoyable tasks. If only that were true. The truth is, for every [...]
A Look at Recent Hotel Industry Data
February 26, 2013 in Travel & Hospitality by Bram Hechtkopf
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Whether it’s the number of return visits a guest makes, labor costs, or how much money went into landscaping and food preparation, the hospitality industry, like other verticals, craves metrics. But of all metrics tracked, occupancy rates – next to REVPAR – are hotels’ gold standard. That’s why I was pleased by recent data which [...]
Breaking the Financial Services “Two-Step” Dance through Enhanced Customer Experiences
February 19, 2013 in Financial Services by Bram Hechtkopf
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Do you ever get the feeling that we live in a world stuck in the two-step – two steps forward and one step back? Take the economy, for instance. Every few weeks journalists report a mixed bag: First it was announced the US economy surprisingly shrunk one-tenth of a percent in the fourth quarter of [...]
The New Customer Connection: Omnichannel Loyalty Explained and Applied
February 5, 2013 in Retail by Bram Hechtkopf
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For the past year, Kobie Marketing has been emphasizing the importance of adopting of an omnichannel loyalty strategy as a means to enhance customer engagement and drive ROI. Regardless of vertical – retail, entertainment, hospitality, travel, etc. – brands benefit when their loyalty program is embedded throughout the customer lifecycle and on channels of customers’ [...]
Why Airline Loyalty Is Not Up In the Air
January 21, 2013 in Travel & Hospitality by Bram Hechtkopf
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Christopher Elliot, author of the book Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles and Shady Deals, recently wrote a rebuke of airline loyalty programs in the Huffington Post. Considering Kobie’s work with Hawaiian Airlines and other travel and hospitality brands, I was perturbed by his conclusions [...]
