The low risk of incentives make it easier to fail often, and fail better.

People are conditioned to try and avoid failure, but this often prevents them taking chances. In looking to create a marketing promotion, too many companies avoid creating memorable and effective campaigns because the costs of implementing the campaign are so high that they can’t afford to get it wrong. “Not getting it wrong” is more important than “getting it right”, so the results are often just “kind of okay”. Or worse still, having invested so much money into a marketing campaign, more money is poured in, trying to turn a donkey into a racehorse. Economists call this a sunk cost fallacy.

The low cost of implementing an incentive campaign, using a system like iD-points, allows a company to try different approaches to drive sales. If one approach is not working, it’s easy to change the parameters, to move the goalposts, to create a different set of drivers and incentives, until an effective one is found. It’s possible to take a risk, get the feedback and measure the success, without incurring high sunk costs where the temptation is to keep plowing in more money. If something isn’t working, try another approach. Crucially, if the effectiveness of incentive activity starts to fall away, the parameters can be shifted and the activity refocused.

Incentives are the low risk marketing option.

A prospect recently said that a customer loyalty program was not needed because they got 80% of their revenue from 20% of their customers.

This company wasn’t unique – most small companies’ business also fits the 80/20 rule – also called the Pareto principle or the law of the vital few

Like any other small company, they get the majority of their income from a small number of regular customers to whom they probably have to give exceptional service for fear of losing them. There’s no requirement to run a loyalty incentive for those customers.

But that is exactly the point – how does a company engage with and increase it’s business with the other 80%?

How about an incentive for those customers that may buy occasionally? A customer loyalty incentive is something that could turn an intermittent client into a regular, valued customer.

Read the warnings of the man who said no to Walmart as a salutary warning against aggressive price-cutting.

It tells the tale of how a gardening equipment manufacturer Simplicity, the maker of the Snapper brand of lawn-mowers, took the brave decision not to continue supplying retail behemoth Walmart.

“If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At even $138, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, and if you can’t start it the next spring (Wal-Mart won’t help you out with that), put it at the curb and buy another one. That kind of pricing changes not just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market. Why would you buy a walk-behind mower from Snapper that costs $519? What could it possibly have to justify spending $300 or $400 more?

That’s the question that motivated Jim Wier to stop doing business with Wal-Mart. Wier is too judicious to describe it this way, but he looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral.”

Beware of the high cost of low prices – discounting is a race to the bottom. At IncentiveDirect, we believe that customer loyalty incentives, and staff sales incentives that encourage sales staff to be knowledgeable, articulate and passionate about the products they sell are the alternative to discounting. As Snapper believed, the value is not just about the price. At the end of the day, Walmart, (and as mentioned before, Amazon), don’t care what you buy, as long as you buy something.

“Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn’t just incompatible with Snapper’s future – Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper’s health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper lawn mower will last decades; many customers buy the mowers as adults because their fathers used them when they were kids. But Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap, any more than a Viking range is cheap. The value isn’t in the price, it’s in the performance and the longevity.”

To “do more than just reward” also means doing more than just selling.

The integrity of the pratice of paying bonuses has taken a hammering recently with the revelations that the bonus schemes in place at many financial institutions may have played a significant part in creating the credit crunch and the resulting crisis in the world economy. It’s giving incentives a bad name.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, weighed in with:

“Banks have come to realise in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves, and I would like to think that would change,” he told lawmakers.”

The BBC’s Robert Peston, harbinger of doom to the UK banking industry, believes that banks should also introduce the malus, a kind of collective responsibility for losses.

It’s an idea that some banks, such as UBS, are already looking at:

“Swiss bank UBS adopted a similar system in November last year. Some banks are looking at what’s being called bonus banking, where parts of executives’ annual bonuses are withheld over three years, and adjusted based on long-term results, to discourage them from ramping up their bonuses by taking short-term risks. Swiss bank UBS, which adopted such a system in November, calls it a bonus-malus system,”

We have spoken before about whether users can ‘game’ the incentive solutions you are implementing.

But in designing the mechanics of any incentive solution, one must also take care that recipients aren’t able to accumulate rewards through unsustainable practices, ones that are not in the long-term interests of the company.

Are the behaviours you are rewarding sustainable?