Turning customers into advocates: what actually makes people come back

Advocacy is a by-product of usefulness. People recommend things that keep doing something for them, and no amount of asking, prompting or emailing produces the same effect.

That is an awkward conclusion if you have just signed off a loyalty scheme, so it is worth being precise about why the two are different.

The bargain a points scheme is actually offering

Strip a points scheme back to its mechanics and it is a trade. The customer gives you effort and personal data now. You give them a small amount of value later, conditional on them coming back often enough to collect it.

Look at that trade from the customer’s side of the counter.

The effort is immediate and repeated: download the app, create an account, remember the password, have the card on you, remember to scan it before you pay. The value is deferred, uncertain and small. A meaningful share of it never arrives at all, because points expire and accounts go quiet. Breakage is not a defect in the model. It is one of the assumptions the business case is built on.

Customers are not bad at evaluating that trade. They are extremely good at it. Response rates are what they are because the offer is weak, not because people are apathetic or need a better push notification.

Why sign-up numbers flatter everybody

There is a second reason the numbers look worse in reality than on the slide, and it is a measurement problem.

Sign-ups are captured at the moment of least friction: a customer standing at a till being asked a direct question by a person, with a queue behind them. Saying yes is easier than saying no. That number then becomes the headline, and it grows every month whether or not the scheme is working.

The honest ratio is different. Take everybody who has ever joined, and count how many have used the scheme in the last ninety days. Then count how many have ever redeemed anything at all. Most schemes can produce those two figures in an afternoon, and most do not put them on the board pack.

If you run a scheme, get those numbers before you spend anything else on it.

Loyalty to the discount is not loyalty to you

The deeper issue is what a points scheme teaches.

It rewards the transaction. Buy, collect, buy again, collect again. Done well, that produces customers who are genuinely loyal to the mechanism of collecting. When a competitor offers a better rate, the rational move is to switch and collect there instead. You have spent three years training people to shop on price and then been surprised when they did.

Real advocacy behaves differently. Someone recommends a product because it did something for them they did not expect, and because recommending it makes them look like a person with good judgement. Neither of those can be bought with a voucher. Both are downstream of the product being good and continuing to be good after the money has changed hands.

Which is where most brands run out of road, because once the product leaves the shop there is no channel left.

What a product that keeps being useful does instead

There is a channel. It is the product itself.

A tag in the product or its packaging, read by any modern phone with a tap, turns the physical item into something that can say different things at different points in its life. No app, no download, no account. What appears is controlled by the brand and can be changed at any time.

Three real examples, none of which asks the customer for anything.

A honey jar that counts its own refills. Tap it and it tells you this is refill number eleven, how much carbon the eleven refills have saved against buying new jars, and credits 20p towards the next one. The jar is doing the accounting, and the customer gets a small, concrete piece of feedback for behaviour they were going to carry out anyway.

A beer pump clip that answers the question you already had. We built this with Atom Brewing Co, a Hull brewery, launched in April 2024. The tag sits in the pump clip on the bar. You tap it with a pint in your hand and find out what you are drinking and who brewed it. The interaction works because it lands at the exact moment of curiosity, and it costs the drinker five seconds.

A stolen item registry. An owner marks a bike as stolen. Anyone who taps that bike before buying it second hand sees the warning and is asked to call 101. The person that helps most is not even the original customer. It is the next one, who has just been saved from buying stolen goods by the brand.

Notice what none of those do. None of them offers points. None of them asks for an email address as the price of entry. Each gives the customer something at a moment they were already paying attention, which is the only moment that has ever worked.

The unglamorous benefit

Sell through retail, wholesale or a marketplace and you never learn who bought your product. That is the structural reason post-purchase marketing is so hard for small manufacturers, and it is not fixed by better copywriting.

A tagged item fixes it quietly. The first tap is an introduction, made by a customer who chose to make it because there was something on the other side worth having. You have not asked anyone to join anything.

The data you get is also more useful than a points balance. Not what somebody bought, but what they did with it: whether the jar got refilled, whether the part got ordered, whether the item got resold and to whom. That is a picture of the product in real life, which is a better guide to what to make next than any survey.

Where to start

Not with a scheme, and not with technology. With one question, and it is deliberately harder than it looks.

What would be genuinely useful to somebody in the third month of owning this product, once the novelty has gone?

If you can answer that, you have the beginning of an advocacy strategy, and turning customers into advocates becomes a question of mechanism rather than persuasion. If you cannot answer it, a points scheme will not rescue you. It will simply give you a number that goes up.

Veribli puts a tag into a product or its packaging and gives you control of what appears when someone taps it, so you can change it as the product moves through its life. The technology grew out of nearly thirty years of tracking physical items, including over 900 million refillable containers moving through a circular supply chain.