William Christodoulou

Welcome to the Credit Union Insider Podcast, hosted by Cyder, where we speak with the people who have shaped how loyalty actually works. Not in theory, but a scale across millions of relationships. Today, we're joined by Bryan Pearson, Cyder advisor, bestselling author of the Loyalty Leap, and former president and CEO of Loyalty One, the company behind the Air Miles Rewards program and one of the world's largest coalition loyalty programs. Bryan has spent decades studying what makes customers feel truly known and valued by a brand.

 

For credit unions trying to compete in the world of Scene Plus and Avion, there may be no better person to provide guidance on how to compete than Bryan.

 

Before we get started, I really just want to say thank you, Bryan, so much for kind of taking the time to talk to us today. You're a mogul in this space. You've been in the world for a while. So just being able to get your thoughts and be able to kind of riff off of you and learn from you is just an awesome experience. So I just want to start by saying thank you so much.

 

Bryan Pearson

My pleasure, Will. You may not thank me at the end of the answers, I'm always loved to have conversations about loyalty and the state of the industry and where the opportunities lie. So I'm looking forward to this.

 

William Christodoulou

That's great. Yeah, I'm so excited. we can kind of get into it you've kind of been at the front of this loyalty evolution in Canada from kind of the get go, but looking back to the beginning of it all, what kind of got you into the space?

 

Bryan Pearson

I stumbled into it in some ways, but, my background is in science. so you can think test control, lots of data, lots of analysis in terms of trying to figure out what happens. And I went on and did my MBA and ended up loving the idea of marketing strategy and sort of the understanding consumer behavior. And, you know, what I found when I got to marketing was that there wasn't a lot of connectivity between science and let's say the creativity of marketing and bringing those things together.

 

And so this whole idea of measured marketing came about for me as a result of getting into the direct marketing, database marketing side of things, and then stumbled into loyalty and said, my God, here's this incredible tool where I get to play with the intersection of consumer and consumer insights and the use of data to create value for organizations. And it kind of felt like marketing the way I should have always been thinking about marketing, right? Very analytical, very data-based.

 

So that's how I got into loyalty as a means to kind of scratch that itch if you want.

 

William Christodoulou 

And you've kind of like led it in a way through massive shifts, right? Like you took it from a very early, like a nay-sayn't industry to kind of what it's become today. you've done things like launching partnerships, navigating the big changes of like the air miles expiry, But what were the biggest lessons you kind of learned as a leader in the space so closely tied to like public trust I would love to kind of dive into that of nitty gritty there.

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, that's such a critical question. I think, along the way, did we have our stumbles on things that we did? We did, for sure. But the overarching piece that we ran with all the way through was, first of all, that there's so much value to be had in your best customers. Your best customers can do more for you. And what really frustrated us in the early years was you looked at, the telcos trying to get all the mobile phone companies trying to get new customers. And here you are as a customer spending a lot of money with a particular carrier and you're treated like a second class citizen, the value that's available, right? Whoever's a new customer was always the person who got the best offer in the market. And so I think one of the principles we had from the very beginning was just not to take our best customers for granted and look at best customers as a way to really look at what full opportunity might be.

 

And then think the second thing is, when you're running these kinds of programs is you need to really consider the customer at the center of your purpose and just spend time determining that on balance, are your actions actually adding value to that relationship over time? And are you adding to their overall experience by the way that you're treating them from within a loyalty program, but within everything you do as a business. when we made changes to the program, which I think everybody in business has to adjust their value proposition from time to time, we always made those with a view is the customer better off over time or worse off over time as a result of what we're doing? And we always tried to create better over time, continually increase the value proposition, the partners, the earn ratios, the earn rates, all those kinds of things.

 

William Christodoulou 

If you were to apply that to kind of some of the things you're seeing some bigger brand loyalty programs doing today, what kind of advice would you give those programs today?

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yeah, I think, you know, I wrote a book about it and I felt so strongly about it and that was about 15 years ago, maybe less. Time flies. But the principle of that was really, you know... philosophical view which was when you get a customer to sign up to a loyalty program what they're signing up for is to exchange it's an exchange of value right I'm providing you with an opportunity earn points or currency etc but that exchange for you to share with me you know some personal information and some information about your shopping behavior and your shopping habits. And I think that mission-driven organizations that are pursuing building that relationship over time, really building customer intimacy, as I said in my book, that at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is to take that information that's being shared and use it as a means to drive more relevant experiences for your customers. Right. And if you do that over time, your goal is to move from being a marketer company that's in a one to many space. So in other words, mass marketing, to a one to few space, which is segmentation, which many people do, but it's this last step, which is to move from segmentation ultimately to a one to one experience where it's really highly personalized. And, know, 35 years on, I can tell you that, we're starting to see the one-to-one, the real personalization come to life. But it's a practitioner issue, right? You need people who really understand how to create that value proposition, bring it together, and so that there's meaningful return on investment for the company, but also, you know, that we're creating those great experiences on the way through.

 

William Christodoulou

And actually on your book, I'm going to put the plug in the loyalty leap. I've read it. It's a great book. You talk about, that difference of transactional rewards versus that emotional loyalty that you see. How do you kind of think of organizations, especially credit unions, mission-driven ones, like what we work with, can we be able to improve on that kind of loyalty and be able to go deeper with their emotional side of things?

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, I think what's interesting is credit unions, just in the approach that they have to the market and the position that they occupy in the financial services space, they're really uniquely positioned to build that relevance, right? To move from a transactional loyalty to more emotional loyalty because of the community aspect of what's part of what they do. And I think one of things that is challenging for the larger programs to make happen is really a hyper-local kind kind of experience, right? And this hyper local view can create even deeper relevance for customers. And so in that way, I do think that the credit union side of things is very uniquely positioned in the marketplace just to be able to bring those things together. And if that's the seed of an idea, I think it's gonna be very interesting to see how they would manufacture that. I think it just would move it from a user credit card get some points to something which really starts to get much more emotional because you're connecting to your community.

 

William Christodoulou 

Yeah, and we've just to speak on that we've been working with some CUs that just that's one of the big use cases they're bringing forward is how you kind of get that front of wallet for competing with an Amex for example, right? Like I also want to have that ability to get points at a local coffee shop over Starbucks or something like that. So these CUs are kind of like differentiating themselves with that emotional local aspect of things, which is really cool to see and how they're kind of like getting into that different bucket versus like an air miles or like an aeroplane or something like that. So

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yep.

 

William Christodoulou

we totally feel you on that. I guess maybe you dive in a little deeper with the CU kind of aspect of things, is when you kind of would build out like an air miles, if you were to kind of redo it from scratch today using the technology that's available today, what would you kind of do differently? Would this kind of maybe be something you'd kind of consider kind of getting into or is there other things that you'd want to kind of apply to an air miles

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, I love that question. think it's, you know, the accelerant. There's things which would actually be, you know, potent accelerators to the model today as a result of technology. We'll get to that in a second. there's also because of all these things, it also creates a lot more confusion in the marketplace in the sense that when we did the program, it was very hard to get a loyalty program off the ground back in 92. It actually did require bespoke technology. You had to build it. And so the AirMiles idea really brought the opportunity of loyalty programs at a much lower price if companies had to do it independently. I'd say that's not actually the factor today. Now there's a lot of solution providers out there who are servicing different sectors of the market. they, you your ability to bring meaningful technology to bear on this is sort of transformed from when we launched Airmiles back in the 90s. The thing that I think is still highly relevant is the coalition model, this idea of multiple companies sharing the platform and providing the same currency. one of the key, parts of success was my everyday spending, whether I went to the grocery store or the gas station or my bank, you know, I was creating value in a single pot. And as a result of that, I created more value for myself. And so I think it's still very relevant to creating value for the customer. But I would say that, this, you know, we talked about earlier, it's, it's, it's different, right? I think that today, the opportunity to create hyper local sort of substitute somewhat for the, for the coalition nature, right? And that technology is also allowing things to be almost like a market experience where a bunch of smaller businesses can leverage the same loyalty program. They also can enable... an in and out kind of relationship from a partnership standpoint. And so, you know, I think there's territory there which is similar, takes advantage of the coalition idea, but brings it into sort of a more modern environment. Certainly technology, back to technology one sec, that's the big step change. You know, when we launched in

 

William Christodoulou 

Yeah.

 

Bryan Pearson

92, I mean, I got reports. three days after I submitted a query, I would get a report back. Now everything is instant. So the volume of data, the data lake opportunity, the analytic tools you can apply against that, how AI plays into the equation, all of that would enable a immediacy to the program. The program would have to be instant. And I think that immediacy creates new opportunities for it. Yes, technology. Yes, much deeper analytics, much more understanding what the consumers are doing, how they're engaging your program. But keep this nature of multi-partner connecting with partners out in the market.

 

William Christodoulou

Yeah, that's great. again, I'm going to be a little off-scripts and ask your opinions on this too, because you mentioned the buzzword

 

Bryan Pearson

Mm-hmm.

 

William Christodoulou

that is all buzzwords that's everywhere. how do you see AI playing a role in loyalty and what are your thoughts?

 

Bryan Pearson

Take whatever I say with not just one grain, but multiple grains of salt. You're probably the better person to answer that question than I am. But I think the... You know, the ability to use the technology to go in and understand some of the trends on how consumers are engaging with the program, how they're, you know, to be more predictive on, you know, the types of rewards or benefits that you might want to give people to focus on understanding some of the pattern recognition, you know? I mean, you can imagine that if people are routine, right? Some people, finish the week, Saturday morning is the day you go out and you get gas filled up in your car and you then go over to the pharmacy and pick up you know something and you go to the grocery store and you know if you've got this sort of routine can we can we use AI to recognize some of the routine based behavior that is out there and then you know what can we learn from that how can we take advantage of that too you know you're going I know you've you've now popped up at the grocery store I know your next stop is the is the gas station you know maybe I should push it off or back to the immediacy thing push an offer out to you which says, you know, go in at the gas station, pick up a coffee and I'll give you, you know, bonus points for doing that or you can get a free coffee, you know, again, experience based, not points, not earning anything, just, hey, I see you're out and you're, errands again today, you know, and it's that balance of what I talked in the book between, you know, what's creepy and what's sort of acceptable and building that relationship where you bridge that. Because I think AI could get a little creepy depending on how it's implemented.

 

William Christodoulou

Yeah.

 

Bryan Pearson

But if you made it really back to value, relevance and creating an experience for you as a customer, it would be great. You get a car wash once a week or something. Imagine you're there for your fifth or sixth car wash and you get something that says, your car wash today is free. you know, marginal cost next

 

William Christodoulou

it's crazy.

 

Bryan Pearson 

to nothing. Why not, right? And that's just a feel good moment.

 

William Christodoulou

Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing is like on the operational side too, I think it's, it's a long lines

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yes.

 

William Christodoulou

of how many, how big a team in the day you'd have to have in order to even kind of get an idea of what an optimized campaign would be. But now.

 

Bryan Pearson

Right.

 

William Christodoulou

able to kind of have like for example smaller groups like credit unions even able to optimize campaigns and be able to roll out things like you've talked about and all of a sudden you're actually having this kind of level playing field not based off of headcount per se but more of your relationship with your customer and credit unions case members right so it creates this really

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, love that.

 

William Christodoulou

cool dynamic yeah yeah and

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, I love that. when people also sort of talk about what caused loyalty programs to accelerate, why did they become the norm? You know, what's happened in data analytics? Why are we where we're at today? Have we really maximized the opportunity in that space? You know, to your point on AI, you know, doing the legwork, if you want of a team, bringing best practice in and then executing against that, from other industries or other sectors where you can test the modeling that they're doing on things. I think you're dead to the nines is that, labor was always the restriction. Could you find enough people who understood loyalty? Could you find enough people who understood how to use the analytic tools out there? As new analytic tools came in, again, you get into, you know, either training up a whole team or basically having to find fresh talent that comes in and AI levels that playing field. I think you can't agree with you more. It's a very interesting proposition.

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William Christodoulou

And it's all coming from this perspective again, guys like you and other people kind of putting in those inputs to kind of help shape where we're heading. And

 

Bryan Pearson 

Right.

 

William Christodoulou

this happens a lot too to where, how do you kind of stay current? We always kind of always are getting the best advice we possibly can. And this kind

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah.

 

William Christodoulou

of falls into some of the same things that some of the clients and people we work with with credit unions, they're always like, how do we stay current? How do we modernize? But it's also really, that's a vague, vague thing. We as a startup, we're always tapping into our resources. What does modernization mean to you in the loyalty space, especially for sectors that's rooted in community and things like that?

 

Bryan Pearson

think what doesn't go away in that is the creative energy of somebody kind of putting the human behavior aspect on it, consumer behavior, that's sort of thinking about the behavioral psychology elements of this and sort of behavioral economics pieces and sort of adding that strategic interpretation or sort of insight that sort of brings it together and then you can sort of standardize the execution of it. But I think monitoring modernization beyond beyond AI, which you know, you do, I'm sure you're going to do a whole podcast on this at some point with somebody who's actually got real expert power in this. but first of all, You know, true personalization. think despite the fact that we've been talking about personalization for a very long period of time, the number of people who are actually using the data that's available to create this is more limited. And there's still a lot of headroom for people to figure out what their version of personalization is. And it doesn't have to be extreme personalization. It just is about getting further from one to few to one to one. say I think the second piece is something again, I wrote about years ago was just recognizing consumer data. as, and as a company asset and this idea of enterprise loyalty, you know, that effectively everybody is, is bringing together the data sources and the data links. And you're seeing that with Snowflake implementations, et cetera, that are out there. But, you know, are all parts of the organization also using the consumer, which is, should be at the center of your purpose as, you know, kind of the element, which should drive the strategy and thinking about how everything you do, you know, impacts that experience for the customer overall. And again, you know, there's been a lot of migration over time as people are going there, but my gut says it's still headroom to continue to kind of build that and, and make sure that customer information deeply supports the strategy of the entire organization. and then the last thing is something I alluded to before is, know, the old model had to be hard coalition, right? You were either in the coalition or you weren't in the coalition, right? So you were an air mile sponsor. You weren't, you were a partner of air plan or you weren't. And. And I think today, as we talked about earlier, the ability to enable and build relationships. with multiple companies that in a way that enhances the value, you kind of look and say, Hey, there's an overlap of our customer segments. We're both trying to do the same thing. Well, why don't we partner up and create, create a benefit cycle that exists here without the need to sort of completely tie your brand. And in fact, allow your brand, which is always one of the big questions on AirMiles is that were you loyal to AirMiles, you were loyal to Shell, let's say. And the answer was, yeah, you're loyal to both. they're really good customers. both and, but it's, you know, where we saw companies migrate away from coalitions. lot of the reason was because they wanted to have their branded experience more pronounced in, the overall relationship. Well, so modernizing the loyalty space for me is keeping the idea of partnerships, just connecting them in a, in, ways that the junctions are a little bit more soft or malleable and they're not as hard and rigid.

 

William Christodoulou

Yeah, that's great. just before we move on you mentioned it was there, your kind of concept of enterprise loyalty.

 

Bryan Pearson

Mm-hmm.

 

William Christodoulou 

And when we talk about it usually, so specifically in the FI space, right? People always think just card, right? People always

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah.

 

William Christodoulou 

think like, like card, front of wallet things. And it's kind of a blocker sometimes to people understanding, like I can do more. Is it more of a behaviors that I can incentivize? What do you kind of, when you talk to maybe other clients or people you have in the past describing enterprise loyalty to NFI, how would you

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yeah.

 

William Christodoulou 

maybe dissect that and kind of help leadership in that envision enterprise loyalty?

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, however that loyalty is created, if it's a credit card based program is on forming again, by virtue of signing up in your, you're engaged in looking for ways to collect more of the currency of the benefits that are associated with that. that's that value exchange of data. And it really is about that data than being used to understand the customer, understand their needs, and then to, percolate that through the organization. So, you know, if there is somebody in lending needs to understand where opportunities may be, you know, how do you bridge and, look at that customer and the learning and sort of the, experience or the journeys that they're on, you know, what would that tell us about how. that customer should be spoken to from a lending capacity if they're not a lending customer today. So I think that's, the piece. The piece is thinking about from an enterprise wide basis, what are all our strategies in there as a loyalty program? That's giving us a certain amount of access, but you know, what can we learn further? How do we use that asset? How do we extend that across other parts of the business

 

William Christodoulou

That's it, exactly. And that's what we're trying to communicate too is like this kind of getting from your book, kind of from your mentorship, this kind of holistic, not just, let's just get one single item. How do we next best action, these things to say, how do we leverage the data and get these offers in front of people that are relevant? So totally, totally helpful. And thank you for that. A little bit on the, on the kind of relationship that you've provided us in the past couple of years, you've

 

Bryan Pearson 

Thank

 

William Christodoulou 

kind of mentored us from the early days. What about the project kind of wanted to get involved and kind of be part of this and help us out.

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, I think first of all you start with people, Will. You know, it starts with the fact that there's everybody in Cyder and you, the two of you initially as the seed founders, basically there's a genuine passion around how you work and want to create value for your customers. And so, you know, that's, that's the first step. This is not, this is not exercise in financial engineering or whatever. This is an exercise in, you know, what can we build that will create real value for customers that fills a gap in the marketplace. And I think that's the second piece is that. that you had an idea of where GAP exists in the market, and then you've expanded on that idea to address a distinct market need and found a segment that you can really over serve in some ways. You can connect and bring new tools and ideas to the sector and sort of be a change agent within that sector. I guess I see a lot of the same energy that we had at Airmiles in the early days where very mission-based, very client-focused, very inquisitive about how to frame and adjust and sort of pivot to make sure that you're addressing everything you're learning on the way through. And again, that comes back to passion, passion, passion, passion, and a desire to make a difference. So yeah, it's easy to

 

William Christodoulou

Yeah.

 

Bryan Pearson 

line up behind people who doing that and be helpful.

 

William Christodoulou

Thank you. Yeah, that means a lot again, coming from someone like you and kind of believing in us from the beginning and mentoring and giving us just the time of day. So it does mean a lot hearing that. So thank you very much for that. It means a lot.

 

Bryan Pearson 

You're welcome. Well deserved.

​

William Christodoulou 

Thanks. It's also I'm working on taking compliments. I'm not used to it. And

 

Bryan Pearson 

Hahaha

 

William Christodoulou

I guess to get into it, if you were to kind of directly speak to maybe some of the CUs or CU leadership that we might be working with or one day we'll be working with who are a little skeptical. about loyalty. What would you say to them? What would you say to open up their ears a little bit?

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, I, you know, quite often that leads to a conversation, which is, the people get confused at times between big L and little L loyalty, as I like to call it, you know, little L loyalty is, is transactional loyalty. It's behavioral loyalty. It's sort of, it's when a food retailer, let's say something like whole foods. but whole foods isn't the closest grocery store to me. There's three or four others closer and I'm shopping there and I'm using their loyalty. card but you know I'm not if I had my druthers and the Whole Foods was closest to me I'd do all my shopping at Whole Foods you know so I'm emotionally loyal and big L loyalty to Whole Foods because of the experience but I'm showing loyalty to other retailers because they just have to be closer to me right so for example and I think that that conversation with the retailer would be really the question is if you think what you're doing is creating small loyalty in other words you're running a program and you're sort going to offer points and that's going to be able to create the answer. Then you're missing the underlying theme, which is everything we talked about to here, right? Which is, you know, how does AI drive value? How do you use the data to drive it? How do you get to enterprise loyalty as a whole? You know, how are you creating differentiated experiences that sort of fit with your brand and what you stand for in the marketplace? And so, you know, I think that that's one of the biggest things. is this is an avenue to big L loyalty. Big L loyalty is what you're trying to do, which is to create the maximum amount of stickiness between yourself and your customers, to create the maximum amount of connectivity so that they are spending every dollar that they can with you, right? In terms of obtaining the services from you. So you have to have the right mindset going into it. And I think that organizations that run effective loyalty initiatives, they create new muscle for their companies, let's say. Let's call it like that. They understand their businesses at a deeper level. level, they add new channels as a result that they can communicate with their customers on a different sort of platform and they service their customers more effectively and they're able to influence their customers as a result of that to grow their total book of business with you. And I think that's the, you know, that. little collection of statements, know, little L to big L, change the narrative, open the aperture of this not just being programmatic, but being, you know, really about driving customer loyalty at the big L level and being a transformative agent within your company. Yeah.

 

William Christodoulou 

That's awesome. That's awesome. And I guess with that, now that we've kind of convinced obviously everyone listening that they

 

Bryan Pearson

Hahaha.

 

William Christodoulou

should adopt loyalty programs, every credit union is going to do it now, every single brand, they're going to hear this and they're going go, yes. What is the biggest myth?

 

Bryan Pearson 

We're We're done. Check.

 

William Christodoulou 

What is the biggest myth that people kind of believe once they've

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yeah.

​

William Christodoulou 

kind of said, yeah, we've got the tech, we've got the team ready for the loyalty. What's a big myth that they might have?

 

Bryan Pearson 

Yeah. I'll quote the Kevin Costner quote. I maybe it wasn't Kevin Costner. Maybe it was the other guy in in field of dreams, right? Where he says, if you build it, they will come. And, uh, and it's not a field of dreams. I mean, the fact is, is there's a lot of value that can be created for an organization, but just, just putting a budget together, which launches a loyalty program and then, and then funding the reward structure that's attached to it. Um, that's 20 % of the exercise. loyalty programs need to be worked in order to garner their full value. So the budget can't just be about, you know, creating the program, building the infrastructure to run it and then launching it. It has to be about the system you create around the program, the team, the data management capabilities, the analytics, the AI, the promotional activity that you're going to run periodically through the year in order to continue to add spice and excitement and keep the program interesting and, you know, sustain long-term programs. programs that you see continue to create value, continue to create value for their organizations and for the consumer are rooted in those behaviors. Where you see problems or loyalty programs fail is they launch and then they just expect that value proposition will take care of itself. No chance you get it right the first time. There's always things you can do to improve a program.

 

William Christodoulou

It's the classic, just because you got a tech, just because you do one thing, doesn't mean you ought to nurture it. You've to take

 

Bryan Pearson

Correct.

 

William Christodoulou

care of it. You've got to be intentional with it once it's launched. And that's a huge value for sure. Yeah.

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, love that. Love that word. That's a great word. Be intentional about what you're going to do. But understand you're going to do it before you launch it. it's like it's not just the intent isn't just to launch the intentional element is I need to work the system. So yeah, I love that word.

 

William Christodoulou

That's awesome. We're just about time. I've got quick little riff offs for you just for takeaways

 

Bryan Pearson

Okay.

 

William Christodoulou

before we can wrap up. So book that every credit union leader should read.

 

Bryan Pearson

the loyalty leap. I'm just kidding. No, there's no plug.

 

William Christodoulou

It's a great book. Another plug, it's called The Loyalty Leap. It is a great book. I've read it. It's awesome.

 

Bryan Pearson

There's no value left in those plugs. So anyway,

 

William Christodoulou

No.

 

Bryan Pearson 

it's I actually seriously, think, I think start with why Simon Sinek start with why I just think and especially if you're running a credit union, I just think there's a there's a very You know, it's just a very, his golden circle kind of his target, which is start with why, you know, then understand then how and then what don't start with what and then sort of work your way back through. And I think it's a it's something I've used repeatedly with organizations and, and, and with this, you know, analyzing just strategic intent for companies and, and yeah, I love that book. I love, love that one.

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William Christodoulou

That's great. That's great. Okay. First loyalty program you ever joined.

 

Bryan Pearson

It's funny, I thought about this and I think the answer formally is Canadian Plus and Aeroplan. don't remember which one I signed up when but Canadian Airlines and Air Canada both were flying at the time when I started my career back in the late 80s and I joined both as soon as I started traveling I joined both of those programs and obviously they merged together and now I'm some ridiculous tier in Aeroplan in terms of total miles flown but if I really you know, if you really twisted that just a little bit will the best loyalty program I ever signed up for without realizing I was signing up to a loyalty program was I bought an apple macintosh in 1984 Yeah, and we're talking right now on my

 

William Christodoulou

and you've had on and out.

 

Bryan Pearson 

apple mac with my apple iPhone my apple AirPods, you know, I've got I had every version of the of the eye of the what was it was the iPod? What was the the music one? I had everything so, you know, it's been a lifelong loyalty experience With no points no structure other than they just build great products that talk to each other that work seamlessly that customer experience is wild.

 

William Christodoulou

Yeah, that's super cool.

 

Bryan Pearson

So Points based, Canadian plus Air Plan. Alternatively thinking about it, Apple.

 

William Christodoulou

That's really cool. Cause again, it goes into kind of the concept of it's more than just like a carrot kind of like that physical money. It's actually just value and the why that you kind of said as to like the value of the product to the customer. That's really, that's good. That's really good. Never thought of that.

 

Bryan Pearson

Yeah, they foundationaly just focused on one thing, is, know, innovate and be just always be ahead of the curve on on figuring out how that overall Apple experience needs to work. And anyway, that's that's a whole other conversation.

 

William Christodoulou

That's a whole other one. I love it though. I love it though. We'll talk about that offline on it. All right, last

 

Bryan Pearson

Alright.

 

William Christodoulou

one. What keeps you optimistic about the future of customer slash member relationships?

 

Bryan Pearson

well, we're all human. you know, there's two answers to that. First of all, is we're all human. And so I think if you get to Maslow's hierarchy and you think about, you know, moving up from. safety and security through community all the way up to Self-actualization, I think is the top of the pyramid, right? Very few of us will ever get to truly be self-actualized, but we will look for community and we will look to connect as people. And so I think that's always the first thing. And then the second item, it's people like you actually. Will, that's, that's what I hope for. hope that the industry continues to, to grow and develop and find curious individuals who are going to figure out how to capitalize on the need for community that happens on the self actualized side of things, on the Maslow's hierarchy side of things. And they're going to continue to use member programs and different, different opportunities to find ways to actually, create platforms where customers can engage. And, and again, as we said, with the Apple on There's all sorts of ways you can twist that. And that is the topic of another conversation.

 

William Christodoulou

That's awesome. Okay, well, as we kind of wrap up, want to again thank you so much for this awesome conversation. It's always good to see you. And I'm just truly grateful from the bottom of our hearts for this kind of opportunity to chat with you today. And we hope that we can chat again soon.

 

Bryan Pearson 

Great, thanks Will, I look forward to it. Okay,

 

William Christodoulou

Cheers man, talk soon.