Annual Industry th
Roundtable10
istrators] are starting to pay attention to
screenings and how to get people to actually
sign up and to stay engaged.
INCENTIVE: What trends are you seeing?
Platt: The thing that we see in the
marketplace and that we’re going to be
launching soon is the digital gift card, or
egift card. I think there’s a lot of interest,
and a lot of clients are asking us for it.
And there’s another aspect of it, that social
responsibility piece. We’ve been doing
recycled gift cards for a long time, and
some of our clients really like those. [Digi-
tal gift cards] will be another opportunity
to talk about social responsibility.
Harris: You don’t have as many dedicated
incentive professionals on the client side as
you used to. It’s a smaller part of people’s
job. And they’re making the mistake, in a lot
of cases, of deciding on the award by asking
the participants what they want as opposed
to what will work. Research shows, if you
ask people, the closer they can get to cash,
that’s what they’re going to pick. We get
that a lot when we try to upsell from an
open card [usable anywhere a credit card
is accepted] to a filtered card [usable only
at selected merchants who deal in aspi-
rational products or services]. An open
card is easy and simple, and people don’t
complain. But there’s less of a conversation
going on about how well the vehicle works.
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Platt: Eighteen months ago, there was
a lot more focus on utility types of cards,
like gas and grocery. As the economy has
come back, people are asking for the treat-yourself brands where you can get something you want and share it with the whole
family. What we always try to help our
customers understand is the trophy value
of it all. And that’s one of the downsides
of the gas and grocery [cards]. The trophy
value of that goes away very quickly.
The one-of-a-kind reward
they can’t wait to redeem.
INCENTIVE: How about individual
incentive cards? For awhile, the retreat
from group travel was driving that market.
Is that still true?
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top performers, Four Seasons Unforgettable
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Broudy: There is a lot of individual travel for demographic and economic reasons.
Beauchine: Due to perception and
sometimes budget, there were a lot of
people that didn’t want to run group travel
programs, so they did convert to individual
travel awards. It seems that group travel
has bounced back, but individual travel
awards may remain as one of the tiers.
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to learn more.
Pavony: Four Seasons entered into this
arena a year ago, when we launched our
Unforgettable Experience Awards card.
We’ve had some very nice success with it, but
I have to say it hasn’t replaced group travel
