Supporting Aimia’s Social Purpose

Paul has been working with Aimia, the global leader in loyalty management to support them in harnessing the power of loyalty as a force for good.

Known best perhaps in the UK for their leading coalition loyalty programme Nectar, Aimia is a global leader in loyalty management. As well as its own coalition loyalty programmes, Aimia runs loyalty programmes around the world for many of the most globally visible brands. It has developed unique capabilities in analytics and insight, customer engagement and customer loyalty management, as well as channel engagement and events management.

Aimia’s social purpose agenda provides an answer to an intriguing question – “how can loyalty be harnessed as a force for good?”. Two essential ingredients in any loyal relationship are “trust” and “reciprocity”. After all, there is no reason to be loyal to someone you don’t trust, and the best relationships have to be good for both sides.

As part of Aimia’s Social Purpose Week I was recently asked to speak about how loyalty marketing skills can drive positive impacts for good causes drawing on our extensive experience through our social venture Pimp My Cause. Loyalty is relevant to every major sphere of life – few of the biggest problems society faces are best solved by any one person, organisation or even sector acting alone in isolation.

We are now working to build learning and development programmes across a number of teams within Aimia that combine supporting Aimia staff in further developing the capabilities they need to deliver on their core mission of building loyalty and at the same time making a positive social contribution in line with Aimia’s core values.

The programmes share in common that they will involve the development of strategic challenges for Aimia staff to participate in solving for Pimp My Cause member causes. The challenges will be structured around Aimia’s talent development priorities, involve senior level participation and lead to real outputs that have the potential to drive breakthrough success for the charity and social enterprise partners.

The programmes will provide a real test of leadership, help staff to diversify their experience in a compressed amount of time, foster entrepreneurial “smarts” and provide a test of their marketing skills under extreme conditions.

If you think you might be brave enough to tackle such a challenge with colleagues in your own organisation, do get in touch!