Inspiration Rather Than Limitation - Consumers Perspective on Perceived Value and Attitude towards One-to-one Marketing Oriented Loyalty Programs

Sammanfattning: We aim to investigate the consumers’ perspective on what kind of values within loyalty programs with a one-to-one marketing approach, meaning personalized offers, which can be identified in a grocery retail setting. Our aim is to seek if there is any correlation between the potential value and consumers’ loyalty to a store. We find a lack of qualitative studies within the area of loyalty programs and personalized offers that have evolved due to new technology in retail grocery stores. Since loyalty programs are a way to strengthen the customer relationship we find that there is a need to include the consumers’ opinions even more then what has been done in previous studies. We have used an explorative, qualitative approach and conducted ten semi-structured interviews with our respondents, who were picked through snowball sampling. The theories used in this thesis deals with brands, customer relationship marketing, loyalty, loyalty programs and one-to-one marketing. In this study we have investigated three elements that build up our case company’s loyalty program which has an approach towards one-to-one marketing; bonus checks, the customer magazine Buffe and the personalized offers “Mina Varor”. Based on these components we have distinguished five different values, both tangible and intangible, associated by the respondents’ that is related to a loyalty program connected to this kind of personalized targeting; economical rewards, efficiency, feeling of appreciation, inspiration and dialog. Based on these values, we can see that the particular one-to-one marketing approach that personalized offers represent cannot create an added value for the consumers in itself as a targeting tool. The way that the tangible and intangible values work and balance each other is a key to enhance value and seems to create both a hard economic bond and a emotional bond to the retailer.