Several weeks ago, I began the project of writing a whitepaper on loyalty. During the course of preparation, it occurred to me that the word loyalty means a multitude of things. In marketing, the very mention of loyalty seems to evoke much excitement. I have come to realise that even marketing professionals themselves tend to take the meaning of loyalty for granted.
Umberto Eco is a best-selling novelist, a renowned academic in the study of semiotics, and my favourite author. The rather obscure field of his expertise is about the study of signs and symbols, their meanings, and the way in which those meanings are conveyed. Broadly speaking, language and words are also signs and symbols on themselves. The most interesting aspect of this study is the transient nature of the interpretation of meaning. If we took this philosophical approach to the word loyalty, the discussion on its meaning become immensely interesting.
Loyalty means very different things to different parties in the loyalty value chain. It remains an illusive and multi-faceted concept in the business world. As a marketer who is endeared to the semiotics, I cannot help but believe that the we cannot take a laissez-faire approach to the definition of loyalty in the business context as we do in philosophy. There has been too much talk and not enough scientific discourse on the concept. Before we can all agree on what loyalty means, we cannot advance in the way loyalty marketing can be conducted.
The chairman of my former employer, Aneace Haddad (click here for his blog), had this to say after reviewing my whitepaper, "Maybe someone needs to provide a linguistic framework to set things straight from the beginning."
I hope my soon-to-be-published paper will be the beginning of our own industry advocacy to do exactly that.
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