This blog post is
based on an article of the same title published recently in Incentive magazine
by the editor, Bruce Bolger. We’ve been
reading articles by Bruce for years and he is often right on and has always
seemed to have a good pulse of the industry.
However this one is a bit misleading.
While we have no doubt
that many organizations “employ little or no personalization in their loyalty,
sales, dealer and employee awards presentations” it is certainly not as high as
85%, probably not even close. This
number comes from an informal survey of the leading rewards and recognition
wholesalers who “found that no more than 15% of the packages they fulfill leave
the warehouse with any kind of personalization.” That would seem to assume that those same
recognition wholesalers provide 100% of all the awards issued in any of the
loyalty, sales, dealer and employee awards programs. Again that’s not even close.
In addition, based on
figures consistently presented in Incentive magazine regarding the various
types of rewards used in these programs, merchandise supplied does not even
make up 50%. Without empirical evidence
at our disposal we would venture to guess that when you added gift cards and
travel to the award mix, merchandise might not even equal 25%.
We should also not
forget that most reward programs found in business have a communication
component and there is a great deal of budget dollars spent on the presentation
of awards. Many of the ways to
personalize the presentation have already been done within these communication
components. Maybe to add additional
notes or letters within the packaging of the item might be a nice touch? Certainly it should be considered when no
communications of the kind comes from within the program. But to say that 85% are not shown this
courtesy in our opinion is as mentioned somewhat misleading.
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