The Air Miles for Social Change loyalty scheme covers two-thirds of households in Canada and is a real engine for environmental change, writes FRANK McDONALD
CANADIAN BUSINESSMAN Andreas Souvaliotis knows how to persuade people to become more “eco-friendly”: you appeal to their primeval greed. And Canadians are as greedy as anyone else, with an added “obsession” about accumulating loyalty points and rewards, it seems.
Souvaliotis was the founder of Green Rewards, the world’s first environmental consumer loyalty programme – so successful that it was snapped up in 2008 by LoyaltyOne, a global provider of “loyalty strategies, customer analytics and relationship marketing services”.
Now president and chief executive of LoyaltyOne’s Air Miles for Social Change division, he reels off such successes as a 57 per cent increase in take-up for Toronto’s annual transit pass, a 72 per cent boost for “e-billing” and a six-fold rise in Canadian participation in Earth Hour.
Working with non-governmental organisations such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Souvaliotis has also turned his attention to healthier eating options – encouraging people to buy more fresh produce at grocery stores in British Columbia.
The results are spectacular because of the enormous reach of the Air Miles rewards programme, which covers over two-thirds of Canada’s 14 million households. Launched in 1992, it remains one of the world’s most successful loyalty programmes, with avid support coast-to-coast.
Perhaps this is not so surprising as Canada has operated a deposit-and-return regime for beer bottles since prohibition was lifted in the 1920s. As a result, according to a spokesman for its brewers, each bottle is reused 12 to 15 times before the glass is finally recycled.
Souvaliotis, a trainee of former US vice-president Al Gore, believes the world is running out of time to deal with climate change, so every effort needs to be made to “shift consumers toward healthier living and environmentally sustainable choices”, by appealing to their greed.
Air Miles for Social Change rewards Canadians when they choose to take public transport instead of driving their cars, when they conserve electricity, when they recycle rather than dump their waste and when they choose to buy organic produce or “accredited healthy groceries”.
Of course, many of them simply want to accumulate air miles that can be redeemed for free flights. But that’s not the only option. “We would prefer people to redeem their points by opting for an annual public transit pass rather than, say, a flight to Cuba,” Souvaliotis says.
“We built our social venture based on this core belief: marketing has changed forever because consumers have changed so fundamentally.” They’re not interested in guff about “corporate social responsibility”, but want to know that their personal choices will “make a difference”.
Sustainability consultant Anthony Watanabe told a symposium at the Globe 2012 convention in Vancouver that the three key things are “trust, truth and tribalism”. Consumers must trust a brand, they can’t be told lies and they can even become its unpaid salespeople.
Watanabe cited the Toyota Prius as an example of the “tribalism” effect. New owners of the hybrid-electric car will tell all their friends how great it is to drive and how much they’ve saved on fuel – an important selling point when petrol and diesel prices are rising.
Ben Packard, vice-president for global responsibility at Starbucks, told the symposium that its customers don’t necessarily want to know every detail of the company’s environmental and social responsibility goals – “but they’d like to be sure our paper cups are being recycled”.
On the wider front, Packard said all new Starbucks coffee shops are being designed to achieve US Green Building Council standards. The company is also committed to “ethical sourcing” for its coffee and aims to achieve 100 per cent compliance by 2015 (it’s now at 80 per cent).
None of these goals would be “make-or-break” issues for consumers deciding whether to purchase a cup of coffee in Starbucks as opposed to, say, Costa or other rivals. Instead, he defined them as “brand affinity” issues – good things people would expect Starbucks to do.
As for Air Miles, Andreas Souvaliotis is very proud of what it’s achieved “because we’re truly enabling social change on a mass scale” in Canada. And last year, he spent a day with Britain’s Prince Charles, who wanted to explore how the programme could be replicated in the UK.
