Living in the information-laden society of today, how do you find the information that really matters to you? The internet, and your inbox, is flooded with content, messages, and promotions. And, the bigger the waves of digital information become, the more difficult it is to catch a clean breath above the top of that wave.
Our team at the Wise Marketer Group invests heavily to land on a relevant theme each year for our Loyalty Academy Conference, with the 2019 version hosted on March 6-7 at the Pier 66 Resort & Marina in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This year’s theme is “Winning with Customers by Making Changes that Matter”.
We chose this theme because we wanted to acknowledge the information overload that we are all experiencing and the challenge it comes with to prioritize what we need to focus on most. We are proactively curating a day filled with insights and discussions on topics that should be of interest to those leading change in customer engagement and loyalty marketing.
Each budget year you have choices on where to spend your conference money, just as you do in 2019. For me there are just two reasons to attend a conference:
The first is community. I want to be able to network with people I know and meet new people. Not everyone I meet must be a “prospect”. That mercenary approach means that I don’t want to meet you unless I can get some money from you. Ugh. I want to meet current and potential clients, for sure, but I also want to expand my network of people who can open new thinking and “expand my universe” in customer loyalty.
The second is information. It is increasingly difficult to experience truly valuable content at a conference these days. When the agenda is assembled based on who wrote a sponsorship check, the content, by definition, becomes an after-thought. Building the agenda of speakers at the Loyalty Academy, we have done our best to create the agenda first, then invite speakers who have a compelling story to tell related to a particular topic.
Several steps taken in 2018 helped to sharpen the focus on stories, themes and trends that matter most in customer loyalty. Early in the year, we collaborated with Maritz to publish a compelling research study covering consumer preferences for customer loyalty. In the early fall we published the first Delphi report, which shared the top 10 trends in customer loyalty based on a methodology that polled an international group of professional advisors and practitioners to global brands. Just recently, I published a 2-part recap of the top news items during 2018 on WiseMarketer.com.
Our mission at the Wise Marketer Group is to establish a recognized “global voice for customer loyalty”, providing marketers with a comprehensive, insightful, and unbiased perspective of relevant news, editorial opinion, and research. I hope our unwavering commitment to curate the flood of news and content for your benefit is clear.
We believe that brands and solution providers deserve a more sophisticated venue to express their unique point-of-view on customer engagement and loyalty than what has existed in the past. We also believe that individuals with industry expertise deserve to be recognized for their experiences, success and contributions to true thought leadership based on the merit of their work.
This is why we have landed on the theme for this year’s conference of “Winning with Customers by Making Changes that Matter”.
I hope to see you at Pier 66 Resort & Marina on March 6 &7 in Fort Lauderdale. If you have any questions or want to touch base, please contact me anytime.
Bill Hanifin is CEO of The Wise Marketer and is a Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional (CLMP).
