As the Head of Loyalty at Z Energy, Bronwyn Barberel, holds end-to-end responsibility for the delivery of two loyalty programmes in the New Zealand market: Z Rewards and Caltex Pumped.
Barberel started as an Assistant Product Manager in the Direct Marketing Centre (part of NZ Post), helping businesses utilise direct marketing as a channel that delivered measurable results.
She said the technology may have changed, but the fundamentals have stayed the same over the years.
In between, she has held roles sequentially, circling through all customer-facing roles across industries, including electricity, business services, tech, optics, fuel, convenience, mail, and retail, until finally landing one where she could use all the skills and passion she has developed.
She remembered the early days of her career, when she would buy lists of customers' addresses to mail marketing to; they came as address labels, and she would manually apply them.
Technology solutions like Eagle Eye have obviously moved this along a lot, but those same rules apply: target, offer, and timing are king. Behavioural science has stood the test of time and must always be considered and kept at the forefront.
Barberel has also been mentoring in the incubator stage, small businesses in the wobbly-and-needing-to-scale stage, and kicking off new business lines within larger organisations, building new ways of working, but teaching line of sight to customers is the most valuable skill. Watching some of her team members believe in themselves and do amazing things has been quite rewarding.
Her own mentors included Belinda James and Andy Baird, who taught her to keep it simple, to remember that brand matters, and to believe in oneself.
In the coming years, she hopes the industry will create a more emotional connection with customers.
“It would be predictable that we get focused on the intelligence and technology that is available to us and forget that we are working with humans who are emotional and not as logical as the loyalty people sometimes build. In the end, all that matters is how they feel about your brand.”
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