While most loyalty programmes have transitioned towards marketing schemes that drive repeat purchases, a loyal emotional connection to a brand is much harder to come across these days. It is when a customer enjoys the experience of shopping somewhere enough to make the price less relevant to their decision-making.
Customers of Trader Joe’s are this exception. The American supermarket chain was founded in 1967 by Joe Coulombe. It is currently headquartered in California and has grown to over 569 stores across the country, with stock that consists of approximately 80 percent own-label products. They cut out the middleman and buy products directly from suppliers.
The shopping experience at Trader Joe's is exactly that - an experience. The chain is known for taking care of its customers with old-fashioned personal service, quality products and reasonable prices. The store does not have a physical loyalty programme and also doesn’t have an online retail offering. It sits alone in this unique segment of the market.
Customers are known to travel for hours if they do not have a local store and fill suitcases to stockpile Trader Joe's goods. There are review fan clubs, websites and Facebook pages. Customers await eagerly for new products to be released monthly, and YouTubers trial the products while racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
As a global cost of living crisis looms, this method of loyalty will be difficult to generate from scratch. But because of Trader Joe's history, the store's customers don't look to be going anywhere.
Elsewhere in the world, including NZ, the challenging economic climate has seen customers shopping around rather than filling the cupboards from one store. If these point-based systems aren’t offering instant gratification, customers are losing interest. They seek instant discounts rather than rewards and want to find the best deal out there.
