Transforming a strategic loyalty programme

The Challenge

Brad May joined InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) in October 2008 as director of its loyalty programme, InterContinental Ambassador. His remit was to manage the health and profitability of the programme, which was designed primarily to support the five-star brand InterContinental Hotels and Resorts (‘InterContinental’).

Members of the Ambassador programme paid $150 for a year’s membership, which gave them additional benefits, such as upgraded rooms, late check-out and free movies. The problem was that different internal stakeholders had very different views about the future strategic direction of the loyalty programme, which meant that, despite broad recognition of the programme’s potential, attempts to develop it had been repeatedly stymied and it lacked investment.

The loyalty programme team wanted to maintain the commercial viability of the scheme, which had 75,000 members, through, for example, pricing or increasing membership, whereas the InterContinental brand team felt the programme was an important tool to help build the equity of the parent brand.

What’s more, while IHG’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) saw an opportunity to create a new ‘ground-breaking’ loyalty programme that would be the envy of the industry, the individual hotels, which were responsible for actually delivering the benefits of the programme to guests, felt that any improvements would just incur additional cost and work for them.

May was given a year to relaunch the programme – which had had many different agencies involved for some 18 months, to no avail.

“I had to work out what to do and how to do it, cut through the politics and dispel the cynicism, and, as a ‘new boy’ with no real credibility, persuade people that we needed to work with another agency – Cognosis – to help us succeed,” he recalls.