Kobie Marketing Revamps Leadership, Tries a New Approach

Kobie Marketing has designed a plan to grow the company’s customer base while eliminating customer pain points. At the head of this plan is new President, Marti Beller. Beller’s appointment kicked off what Kobie said will be a year of promising growth, with expansions planned in both the technology and professional services offerings.
 
The family-owned company, launched by the Hechtkopf family in 1990, now has more than 460 employees. It has been on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing, privately held small companies for eight years. Beller says, “We don’t see any slowing down.”
 
Beller continues, “For me, getting back to a mid-size company where culture is a huge component of what the company is all about was very important to me. What brought me here was the family feel of the culture, the fact that our products and services are best in class, and the fact that I got to be part of a community and culture that I thought I could call my home.”
 
Beller was previously Senior Vice President of Global Loyalty Products and Platforms for Mastercard. Before that, she was president of Connexions Loyalty and co-founded PlanG, a social enterprise venture that enabled individuals to donate to the causes they cared about.
 
Kobie is among the largest players in the loyalty marketing industry, an approach to marketing that involves providing rewards and incentives to consumers for using a product. Kobie builds loyalty marketing programs for many of the world’s most successful brands.

Beller says Kobie stands out in part because it provides both technology and services, and each offering complements the other. “We’re not just leaving you to use our technology and hope that it’s all okay,” she says. “We’re a huge component of your everyday business and people here work for those companies every day to make their programs better.”

She has also suggested that loyalty programs are somewhat saturated at this point, and she hopes that Kobie can break the mold by providing invaluable insight into customers’ behaviors. “We have a proprietary service, an algorithm, called emotional loyalty scoring, we can see how a person is driven by status, by habit, or by reciprocity,” she says. “By knowing that about a customer, even if they have a points program, we can talk to each of those customers differently.”
 
She cited three examples to illustrate her point:

  • An American Airlines flyer might care about status, knowing that if something goes wrong while traveling, they will be taken care of. A promotion about points won’t appeal to that consumer as much as an offer that tells them they’re about to reach platinum status.
  • A Nordstrom shopper might not care about seeing a pre-showing of a designer collection, which would be an appeal to status, but does want to develop a relationship with the company, so that customer cares about reciprocity.
  • An Amazon Prime user often goes to that site because of habit.
 
“With those three drivers,” Beller says, “we help people understand how to communicate to their consumers and that is something no one else does. Strong products, strong services, and the fact that we can put an entire emotional intelligent layer on the way they market through emotional loyalty scoring is what sets us apart.”

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