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 Gavin Dein is CEO of Reward, the largest sports loyalty company in Europe, operating the Reward Programme for more than 30 sports organisations across five disciplines, representing 4m fans with a buying power in excess of £20bn. Reward’s goal is to expand into different passion centres by offering the programme free of charge to both organisation and supporter. Here, Dein outlines why soccer was an obvious starting point for his company’s scheme.
There are a lot of men in the UK who don’t participate in a high street loyalty programme. There are a lot of men who cumulatively spend billions of pounds and the retailers don’t know who they are. There are a lot of men who would join a loyalty programme if there was a coalition of relevant retailers who offered them points to spend on things that they really want. I founded a company to capture male spend and drive it to a coalition of retailers by tapping into fans’ passions. Why did we build a programme just for men? That’s easy. No matter how hard I try, I can never understand women! But, by understanding a man’s passion, we have been able to work out how to motivate him by offering rewards that he wants. We have discovered a hook to drive male footfall into retailers and keep existing customers loyal. Starting with soccer It was in the football [soccer] industry where we discovered the first hook, and saw an opportunity to bring the two worlds of football and loyalty together. We called that opportunity Reward.
We chose football first because it is an industry that I understand intimately and it has a problem that our programme can address. It's an industry with lifetime loyalty of its male fans and has mass appeal. It is an industry where that loyalty is being called into question and there exists an opportunity for Reward to answer that call.
It is often said that most people are fans of a club for life. From cradle to grave fans support their club, but not always financially. They can read reviews, talk with their mates about the game in the pub but never spend money with the club.
Today, the average season ticket is more than double the price from 10 years ago. I am afraid that the football industry is at a dangerous stage of its evolution. Stadium attendances are down, Television coverage is over-exposed and the predictability of the game is turning fans off. Many fans feel that football is getting too expensive. We are seeing football's heart beat, the true fans, feeling like they can’t afford to go.
This has the potential to affect football’s future. Clubs are at risk of losing their most loyal customers with many feeling that the club is trying to rip them off. These are the types of people who will change their house, their car and even their wife, but they will never change their football team.
I started Reward to help make football more affordable for the ordinary fan.
I started Reward to help pay for peoples passions and I am passionate about it. I want every fan around the world to be able to participate in one of our Reward programmes and never pay for their passion again. Getting football for free We at Reward have built the infrastructure, a programme that has the ability to do this. The programme that we've developed is not the most sophisticated loyalty programme in the world. In fact, our proposition is rather simple. We found that the majority of football fans are male, and these males shop in very few places. So we said to them “You know you think football is getting too expensive, well if you shop here, you can get your football for free” and they were interested.
By coming into the industry from football, and working with some of the most loyal customers in the world, we have built a very different type of loyalty programme that addresses the needs of men through the rewards that we offer.
By coming into the loyalty industry from the Rewards end rather than the retail end, we were able to build a programme more for the fans than the retailers.
By working with more than one club, in fact over 30, we are able to be a niche player operating a mass-market programme.
By representing millions of men through their passion centres, we have been able to build a business model that is both scalable and profitable by using their passion as a hook to drive footfall to retailers.
Our fans aren't the typical point's collectors. In fact, they are some of the hardest people for a retailer to have a relationship with. Our research has shown that they are promiscuous in their shopping behaviour, caring more about price and convenience rather than retailer, don't want to carry and swipe a loyalty card, aren't particularly interested in the prizes offered by other loyalty programmes and would prefer to remain anonymous when shopping.
On the surface, it seems like men will never join a loyalty programme, but if we can understand what they are passionate about, understand what they really want, we can find retailers that are willing to offer a discount in return for driving footfall to their stores. And with that discount we can fund fans’ passions. Relevant Rewards So, we built a programme to help people pay for their passions, fans pay for their tickets, merchandise and provide them access to meet their favourite player, signed memorabilia, have their son be a mascot for a day or even participate in a penalty shoot out at half time on the pitch. Nobody else can provide these types of rewards. Our loyalty department works closely with every club to get meaningful rewards for the fans.
By subsidising the prices of tickets and generating turnover from fans buying shirts with points rather than from JJB, the clubs are able to show the fans that they care and still make more money.
When fans redeem ‘money can’t buy’ items that cost the club very little or distressed inventory like tickets to a Third round FA cup game on a wet Wednesday night, we are able to really unlock the margins within the redemption store and pass even more value back to the fans.
When you know their passion centres, demographics and the things that are going to influence their shopping behaviour, it isn’t too difficult to work out which retailers are relevant and which ones are interested in turning football into footfall.
Because we are helping retailers have a relationship with a hard to reach segment of their market and because we are offering a success based programme, retailers are able to offer us a larger discount to attract new customers and help keep existing customers loyal.
We do not believe that this will create a lifetime loyalty to the retailer, but whilst they are helping pay for people's passions, these fans will be more likely to shop with them than their competition.
The fan helps the retailer by shopping, the retailer helps the fan by giving points, the fan helps the club by spending the points back with the club. Cardless Reward Programme Operating an easy to use offline programme was where we knew the biggest challenge was going to come from. When we first started thinking about an offline programme, we looked at everyone, and everyone had a loyalty card. Tesco, Shell, Game. ID Data, one of our founding investors and the producers of the Nectar and Tesco card, were encouraging us to issue cards (funnily enough), but something didn’t seem right.
We knew that getting fans to carry a card and pulling it out to collect points was going to be a hard task, so we went to the credit card issuers, talked with Visa and Mastercard, sat down with the retailers and acquiring banks and finally developed a simple mechanic for the fans to shop on the high street without having to carry a loyalty card but still collect points automatically.
Today, using the Cardless Reward Programme, we are able record and reward transactions made at our retail partners without a loyalty card. Fans are able to shop as they normally do and collect points automatically.
The Cardless Reward Programme is a fantastic development that makes our Reward programme more relevant to our fans and simplifies the point’s collection experience.
We have now rolled programmes out for football, rugby and cricket clubs. Reward believes that there are other passion centres that our programme can help reduce the costs including music, the arts and even charities where points are converted into donations.
The infrastructure that we have built with both technology and processes have created a scalable business that can reward fans of everyone from Manchester United through to Barnet. The pillars of Passion, Understanding and Relevance have allowed us to look at other sports around the world from the NHL to the NFL, Hurling to fly fishing.
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