Each month the Quantum Jump team will flag developments in strategy, creative and martech worth a marketer’s attention. This month: why every brand wants a ‘wrapped’, what the latest loyalty research tells us about two very different markets and an expensive lesson in selling the wrong film.
Wrapped season: everyone wants one
In a few weeks, Spotify Wrapped will drop. Top artists. Top genres. That song you obsessed about and played 300 times in March. We love Spotify Wrapped in our offices as we get to see what’s collectively ‘top of our pops’.
And that’s the clever thing. It works because it isn’t really about Spotify. It’s about you. People share it because it says something about them, and Spotify gets millions of free ads in the process.
It’s become a thing, and much aped. Now everyone wants one. YouTube has its recap. Mecca launched its beauty bag wrap back in 2023 (top brands, top products, your Beauty Loop level, what to try next).
Mecca’s version split the audience. Some customers loved it. Others said the results didn’t match what they’d actually bought. One shopper was put in the top 3% of a brand’s customers after four purchases. Another wondered whether seeing a whole year of beauty spending in one place was really a good idea.
That’s the rub… a ‘wrapped’ only works if the data is right, interesting and the customer comes out looking or feeling good. There’s a danger it’s just a receipt with nice graphics that reminds you how much you spent with the brand.
For brands that want to build moments of connection with their customers, done well it’s a big opportunity. Most brands have this data, but often it’s hard to organise and parse it to deliver it back in a meaningful way. And just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
The answer can only be yes if your customers would share it – a true test of value – and share it for the right reasons!
Parallel universes
Our Loyalty State of the Nation research (run in partnership with research agency Yabble) surveyed Australia too for the first time this year. We surveyed 750 people on each side of the Tasman with the same questions, meaning we can now compare the two markets. Especially useful when some programmes operate in both markets. It’s fascinating.
Australians are more positive about loyalty overall. 62% say a programme they like makes them like the brand more. In New Zealand, it’s 49%. Young people, in both markets, are yet more positive, showing that the future of customer engagement is going to be very interesting.
Interestingly, Kiwis are more emotional about it. Emotional attachment drives 44% of loyalty equity here, against 35% in Australia. Aussies are more rational around the benefits.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a little used strategy in NZ is much more popular in Oz. 24% of Australians would definitely pay a subscription for extra benefits in a loyalty or customer engagement programme. Here it’s just 10%. In the Aussie data, we can see the increase in the popularity of schemes that have a paid layer, such as OnePass, Everyday Extra and Amazon Prime. The paid programmes rank higher on our Loyalty Equity Index, our proprietary measure of loyalty programme strength.
Kiwis are also less keen to share their data – 41% are happy to share it for relevant offers, against 58% of Australians.
So for any brand running one programme across both markets, “same same but different” is the brief. The mechanics may travel, but tone, engagement techniques, tiers, a paid layer and how hard you lean on data may need adaptation.
Digger: has the marketing got it wrong?
Awards season isn’t too far away, and film marketing is often as interesting as the films. Think Barbie for benchmark brilliance. However, this year’s best case study appears a flop.
Digger is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film for Warner Bros, starring Tom Cruise as an oil billionaire whose drilling sets off a climate catastrophe. That’s what the trailers sold. A big, broad climate satire. One critic described it as “Dr Strangelove for the climate generation”.
It isn’t really that film. However, we don’t want to spoil it as the real film is a lot more interesting than the film the trailers promoted.
Iñárritu, the director, reportedly wanted the misdirection. The trailers stayed deliberately vague. The result was a film costing somewhere between US$125 million and $180 million that opened to US$8 million in North America and had made around US$41 million worldwide by mid-October. Critics split (53% on Rotten Tomatoes). Audiences gave it a C+. But then, it wasn’t the film they expected.
So has the marketing got it wrong? Probably. Not because misdirection can’t work, but because in this case, the misdirection painted an unappealing film. It expected too much of the audience to piece together the clues (in fact, there seemed to be no clues). Digger hid its real story and promoted an aspect audiences were least likely to want. The trailers made the film look like a one dimensional pantomime, with Tom Cruise comically made up.
There’s a lesson in there for brands too. The thing that makes your product interesting is usually the thing worth leading with. Clever concealment is a luxury, which often can go wrong. For those of us with long memories, think of the ‘Pink fist’ campaign for Telecom NZ, that never actually got beyond the trailers before being pulled.
A thought to end
Fair to say all the stories above link up to one thing: customer insight.
Did someone forget to test whether the brave marketing of Digger would work? How might Spotify wrapped clones sense check they add value to the conversation prior to going wide? And how many loyalty programmes get launched into multiple international markets without true market insight for the local markets they are dropping into?
