Latest / Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360 / Loyalty360 Loyalty Live | Kris Tremaine and Tom Madden, Phaedon

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Loyalty360 Loyalty Live | Kris Tremaine and Tom Madden, Phaedon · Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360

• 0:04
  Mark Johnson: Good afternoon, good morning.
• 0:05
  Mark Johnson: It's Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360.
• 0:07
  Mark Johnson: I hope everyone's happy, safe and well.
• 0:09
  Mark Johnson: I want to welcome you back to another edition of Loyalty Live.
• 0:12
  Mark Johnson: In this series we speak with the leading agencies, technology partners and consultants, and customer channel and brand loyalty by the technology trends and best practices that impact a brand's ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement and, most importantly, drive customer loyalty.
• 0:27
  Mark Johnson: Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Kris Tremaine, the chief executive officer, and Tom Madden, the managing partner of Phaedon.
• 0:34
  Mark Johnson: ICF recently announced the sale of its commercial marketing group and identified private equity firm Cohere Capital as the buyer.
• 0:41
  Mark Johnson: They will launch as Phaedon and today we're going to learn more about this transition and how Tom and Kris' teams will continue to serve clients seeking to enhance their customer loyalty efforts.
• 0:53
  Mark Johnson: Welcome, Kris and Tom.
• 0:55
  Mark Johnson: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today.
• 0:57
  Mark Johnson: I'm glad you joined us.
• 0:58
  Mark Johnson: How are you?
• 1:00
  Kris Tremain: Great, thank you.
• 1:02
  Mark Johnson: Kris.
• 1:02
  Mark Johnson: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself your work at ICF Next maybe previous employment, what you did there and now Phaedon.
• 1:10
  Mark Johnson: What is your role going to be with Phaedon?
• 1:14
  Kris Tremain: Sure, I'm Kris Tremaine.
• 1:16
  Kris Tremain: I have been in and around the marketing communications digital world for more years than I care to count, but we'll say over 30 at this point, and I've been specifically with ICF, ICF Next, for the past 16 and a half years, helped them grow their digital and communications and marketing capabilities within their the sectors they primarily serve, which is government and highly regulated industries call it utilities.
• 1:49
  Kris Tremain: They do a lot of work around climate and about three and a half years ago they tapped me to say, hey, come over, we really want you to lead our commercial marketing engagement loyalty business, and so I came over.
• 2:04
  Kris Tremain: During that it was just as COVID was starting, so that was fun, but really spent a lot of time with the team and I already knew a lot of the team because the business I was running was sort of parallel to the commercial oriented business and really kind of at that point, after a year and a half or so, really talked to our CEO and said you know, this just isn't a great fit.
• 2:28
  Kris Tremain: You know, ICF is a big firm focused on totally different things than us, and we were this amazing, you know, accelerated growth business that was just sitting in the long home and so we were kind of fourth, fifth, sixth on the priority list and that's sort of where we began the talks about you know what to do with the business and really settled on finding a great partner, which we did to really help us accelerate the business outside of ICF, you know, which again is, is built really around a different model and a different set of audiences and markets, and so that's what we're doing.
• 3:05
  Kris Tremain: We are launching Phaedon, which we are so excited about, and we will continue to do all the things that we've been doing.
• 3:13
  Kris Tremain: All of our clients, all of our people are moving with this and we have a wonderful partner behind us, Cohere Capital, that just is excited to help us continue to accelerate our growth.
• 3:24
  Kris Tremain: You know our loyalty, business being a huge driver of that growth, so very excited.
• 3:30
  Kris Tremain: A fun fact I actually live in South Carolina and on a lake, and so when I'm not traveling to our cold Minneapolis, where our headquarters are, or Chicago, I enjoy.
• 3:42
  Kris Tremain: Wake surfing is my passion, so I do a lot of wake surfing and it's a lot easier on the bones at my age than regular surfing and the boat actually pulls you up.
• 3:52
  Kris Tremain: So that is my passion.
• 3:55
  Mark Johnson: And Tom, I have one familiar with you and your organization.
• 3:58
  Mark Johnson: What you did at ICF quite reputable.
• 4:01
  Mark Johnson: I would love to know a little bit more about you, tom.
• 4:03
  Tom Madden: Sure for sure.
• 4:04
  Tom Madden: So I'm talking today from Minneapolis, where it is actually in the 90s.
• 4:08
  Tom Madden: So it's it might be below 90s in January, but for now it's nice and warm, although ironically I'm fighting off a little bit of a cold.
• 4:16
  Tom Madden: But I spent my entire career actually in the loyalty management space, never on the client side, so I was on the partner agency side.
• 4:23
  Tom Madden: But my background is a little bit unusual in that I've worked in all aspects of the business except I'm not a developer, but I've led entire operations parts of organizations, the strategy, parts of organizations, business development, client services you name it all to help our clients deliver on the promise of their loyalty promise to their customers.
• 4:49
  Tom Madden: I'm proud of everything that we do at Now Phaedon, then ICF Next and Loyalty and CRM, and we've got a great team that helps our clients succeed.
• 5:00
  Tom Madden: From a personal perspective, you know, Mark, you and I have talked about this a little bit before, but I'm in the process of completing my major league baseball ballpark tour.
• 5:13
  Tom Madden: I've only got a handful left.
• 5:15
  Tom Madden: I'm going to chip away a couple more this fall and then I should be complete with all 30 parks by next year, which you know, that's over a good 10, 15.
• 5:25
  Kris Tremain: A lot of parks.
• 5:26
  Mark Johnson: Indeed, those who may not be familiar with how ICF Next's commercial marketing group has historically supported a brand client's customer loyalty efforts, can you give us a brief overview of what work your team has done for brands and industries they have worked with?
• 5:42
  Kris Tremain: Yeah, I can start and then, Tom, I'll have you jump in.
• 5:45
  Kris Tremain: You know, at our heart we'll really work around the concept of how people participate with brands.
• 5:51
  Kris Tremain: So we think about our business as helping our clients really move their stakeholders along in creating more and more participation right with their brand.
• 6:01
  Kris Tremain: So, you know, among the services that we provide for our clients are sort of, if you think about, you know, the earlier stages of participation where you're creating understanding and awareness and driving towards affinity.
• 6:15
  Kris Tremain: You know we do brand activations and marketing and communications work around that.
• 6:21
  Kris Tremain: And then, as you move you know up, you know, in participation where you're trying to achieve true loyalty and even advocacy right with your stakeholders.
• 6:31
  Kris Tremain: That's where our business, that Tom leads around loyalty comes in and we provide, you know, a proprietary platform strategy and, Tom, I'll let you get a little bit more detail on that, since it's what you run.
• 6:50
  Tom Madden: Certainly certainly so, from a from a loyalty and CRM perspective.
• 6:53
  Tom Madden: You know we really do.
• 6:55
  Tom Madden: We really bring three services to the table.
• 6:58
  Tom Madden: One is around overall strategy loyalty program strategy, loyalty program design or, as is more often the case these days, redesign, as programs may not be producing what the what our clients or what the companies we talked to are hoping they can produce.
• 7:15
  Tom Madden: So we help them reestablish Um successful strategies.
• 7:19
  Tom Madden: We also bring to the table analytics, a very strong analytics team that helps with modeling, economic modeling, forecasting, measurement, looking at various scenarios To see what kinds of promotions might drive the most success In the light.
• 7:37
  Tom Madden: And then, third, and by not by no means last, we've got our, our leading proprietary Loyalty platform called tally, which underpins well nearly a half a billion members globally and it manages over five billion transactions a year.
• 7:53
  Tom Madden: It's integrated with nearly 300 different technologies Anything you can imagine, from an airline or co-brand partner to a particular technology to help process customer service functions you name it there's, there's 300 there and we move.
• 8:09
  Tom Madden: We move just under two trillion Points a year.
• 8:13
  Tom Madden: That's massive.
• 8:13
  Tom Madden: Right like this isn't you know, this isn't Tom's Local pizza store here, where we're the enterprise Platform under some of the biggest and most well known and successful programs in the world.
• 8:24
  Kris Tremain: I was going to say the other part of our business is really around transformation, so it kind of cuts across all these things.
• 8:30
  Kris Tremain: But it's really about helping our clients improve customer experience, whether it's internal, their employees or all of their various stakeholders.
• 8:39
  Kris Tremain: Um, again, helping ultimately with the goal of driving their participation with their brands.
• 8:44
  Mark Johnson: Part of the recent announcement included news that ICF Next is rebranding to Phaedon.
• 8:48
  Mark Johnson: Kris, can you tell us more about the announcement, the new brand and what the organizational looked like going forward?
• 8:55
  Kris Tremain: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:56
  Kris Tremain: So we're super excited.
• 8:57
  Kris Tremain: Um, we've been in a process for about a year and a half now of really, um, you know, deciding how we wanted to move forward with the business.
• 9:06
  Kris Tremain: Um, you know, as I said, I was at ICF a long time, sat in a different part of the business and at the end of the day, I think, um, we have this amazing business, this amazing team, all these incredible you know Fortune 100 plus clients, and we were just sort of sitting in a in a very, you know, a home that just wasn't the right fit, that was really again focused on government.
• 9:28
  Kris Tremain: It's kind of, you know, big, long processes for things, things that didn't enable us to be as nimble and agile as we need to be in the fast-pacing world of commercial all things commercial marketing, loyalty, transformation and so we made this decision and then we spent a lot of time talking to lots of different luckily, we had a lot of different potential suitors and partners to talk to and ultimately settled with Cohere Capital and Equity Partner, because really what we just needed was help you know, an organization that was highly growth focused because we really are on a great growth trajectory and someone that would support all the things in our business that we wanted to support moving forward and not be kind of a fourth and fifth priority in ICF, which is just a massive, you know, management consulting firm.
• 10:17
  Kris Tremain: So we just didn't get the kind of attention and, you know, investment that we deserved in light of being part of such a large company focused on different stuff.
• 10:27
  Kris Tremain: So that's how you know, and we had the opportunity, obviously as part of this, to create our new brand, because really it's what's leaving ICF, is this whole business, intact.
• 10:37
  Kris Tremain: But we will now be called Phaedon and I'm just thrilled about it.
• 10:42
  Kris Tremain: We spent a lot of time working on this name to really embody who we are moving forward.
• 10:47
  Kris Tremain: And Phaedon really comes from two Greek words which mean giving and light, and we really feel that, you know, in this instant light translates to kind of the wisdom and knowledge and support we bring our clients to help them solve their biggest challenges with their brands and creating loyalty, all the things they've talked about and really it's a manifestation of our point of view and action, you know, being success oriented, inventive, influential, but also we bring intelligent imagination to our clients and we help.
• 11:20
  Kris Tremain: You know, solving business and brand problems is really our playground.
• 11:23
  Kris Tremain: That's what we love to do, and so we thought this name really embodied all that for us, and our team and our clients that we've shared it with are just super excited about it.
• 11:33
  Mark Johnson: And what core services will be continued or even offered to brands when you begin to operate as Phaedon?
• 11:40
  Mark Johnson: Are the new services or shared services brands can expect?
• 11:44
  Kris Tremain: Yeah, I mean we will continue.
• 11:46
  Kris Tremain: Our core area is obviously loyalty, which is where you guys are primarily focused on, and Tom kind of talked about the areas within loyalty that we work.
• 11:56
  Kris Tremain: Again, if you think about this participation curve, we offer integrated communications and marketing support for clients.
• 12:03
  Kris Tremain: So you know, we create, do creative campaigns, we do brand activations, we do media relations and social influencer campaigns to help brands increase participation with their stakeholder.
• 12:15
  Kris Tremain: And then you know, we do a lot of work around transformation, as I said.
• 12:19
  Kris Tremain: So, customer experience, transformation, all the things that go along with transformation organizational design, change management.
• 12:27
  Kris Tremain: You know, and, as Tom mentioned, you know we have a very strong strategy team as well as an analytics team great, great data.
• 12:36
  Kris Tremain: We have great data products and they really cut across and you know, kind of work with all of these different capability areas and those will continue and will continue to invest even more in our products or proprietary products like tally, our loyalty platform.
• 12:53
  Kris Tremain: And that's where really we're excited about it.
• 13:03
  Mark Johnson: Enhance Enhance engagement with brands that you work with.
• 13:06
  Mark Johnson: For sure you know how do these features enhance a brand's customer loyalty efforts.
• 13:14
  Tom Madden: So I would think of it as so everything we did under ICF Next is coming in whole as Phaedon, and so there are a couple, couple of three things I would want to point out.
• 13:25
  Tom Madden: One is kind of pre-technology, if you will, in the sense of marketing technology assessments.
• 13:32
  Tom Madden: Right, we have a lot of folks who come to us and say hey, we're not sure we might need a loyalty platform.
• 13:37
  Tom Madden: We're not sure what to do with what we got.
• 13:39
  Tom Madden: So we've got a team that that assesses what they've got and helps them figure out if they can kind of piece it together in a different way to achieve what they need, so they don't have to make an investment in additional technology.
• 13:50
  Tom Madden: Then we've also got, through our analytics team, a whole series of analytics accelerators that are all patent pending but they help businesses make decisions at a significantly faster pace.
• 14:03
  Tom Madden: For example, five years ago somebody might ask for a loyalty program design and we provide two different strawmen coming out of that assessment with a couple of different models behind it.
• 14:15
  Tom Madden: Now we literally have hundreds, if not thousands, of different calculations and like going on behind the scenes that enable clients to make significantly better decisions than they were capable of before.
• 14:25
  Tom Madden: And then and then finally, as I mentioned before, tali, which we've got.
• 14:28
  Tom Madden: We've we've got continued investment with our new owners.
• 14:31
  Tom Madden: They're excited to invest in Tali.
• 14:33
  Tom Madden: We've got a very big road map, a very aggressive road map over the next couple of years for Tali that we're investing into to make some things happen to help our clients achieve their loyalty goals.
• 14:45
  Mark Johnson: Tom, as you consider the state of customer loyalty, what are some of the most notable, important trends that you are seeing currently?
• 14:52
  Mark Johnson: What do you see during the transition and what do you anticipate clients asking for going forward, and how will the new Phaedon organization be able to meet those needs?
• 15:02
  Tom Madden: Yeah.
• 15:02
  Tom Madden: So I'd answer kind of on two different levels, mark, as you know.
• 15:05
  Tom Madden: As you know, when we talk about trends we have to kind of step up a couple of thousand feet.
• 15:09
  Tom Madden: And so, at a macro level, in loyalty, there's the, there's the pre COVID, there's the COVID where everybody was just operating lights on and then, as we were kind of coming out of that slumber, companies were doing what they could to keep customers, even though the customers weren't necessarily spending a lot.
• 15:25
  Tom Madden: And now they're dealing with a situation where the, where the leisure, for example in travel space, is taking over business, which is something that nobody could even fathom 10 years ago.
• 15:35
  Tom Madden: And so programs are really working to ensure that they can meet and exceed the needs of the leisure travel in the case of travel and hospitality.
• 15:42
  Tom Madden: But secondly, you know, and all of that is about, really continues to be about getting the right message to the right customer at the right time to help them make good decisions and fulfill what they're looking to do in their lives.
• 15:55
  Tom Madden: But secondly, you know, there's always technology trends and the like, but there is a, there is a general trend globally around data privacy.
• 16:04
  Tom Madden: This is coming, you know.
• 16:06
  Tom Madden: We've got a couple of instances in the US that we've all accounted for, but we've got some things coming out of Germany and China and other places that we're staying on top of to help our clients achieve those, those challenges.
• 16:17
  Tom Madden: And then also just overall, you know, continued movement to the cloud beyond the US space.
• 16:24
  Tom Madden: Right, a lot of people are in the cloud in the US only, but people need to be getting into the cloud globally to, frankly, to help with the data privacy or data residency issues you mentioned your loyalty management platform, tali.
• 16:38
  Mark Johnson: With a rapidly evolving technology landscape, brands are facing broad choices with regard to technology and it's creating some challenges.
• 16:46
  Mark Johnson: You know how can brands leverage new technology or enhance capabilities within loyalty platforms.
• 16:52
  Mark Johnson: You know artificial intelligence, gamification, machine learning.
• 16:56
  Mark Johnson: How should brands be looking at those?
• 16:57
  Mark Johnson: Yeah, it's certainly the hot.
• 16:59
  Tom Madden: It's certainly a hot topic right now.
• 17:00
  Tom Madden: Right, ai.
• 17:01
  Tom Madden: You know we've always talked about gamification, we've been talking about machine learning for for number of years and AI is the hottest thing you see in the stock market.
• 17:09
  Tom Madden: You see it where investments are going.
• 17:11
  Tom Madden: I'll tell you how we work with it today, because this is what is resonating with the companies we speak with.
• 17:20
  Tom Madden: But today, ai for us is really behind the scenes and more of the foundational elements at the moment.
• 17:24
  Tom Madden: But it's becoming significantly more helpful in getting the right messages to the right customers, as I mentioned before, and anticipate the customer needs better.
• 17:34
  Tom Madden: This is happening through.
• 17:36
  Tom Madden: This is happening through the analytics accelerates I talked about.
• 17:41
  Tom Madden: It's happening through the programming for Tali and some other things.
• 17:43
  Tom Madden: So AI, I kind of think about it in terms of days of the week.
• 17:46
  Tom Madden: I think we're really only at about a Monday evening in terms of AI and I suspect in the next two years we'll maybe get to a Wednesday morning, but so there's a lot more to come.
• 17:57
  Tom Madden: But right now, I think AI is most realistic and successful for most companies, helping at the foundational levels.
• 18:07
  Mark Johnson: Can you provide some examples of how brands are successfully integrating these new technologies or enhance capabilities?
• 18:14
  Mark Johnson: Into their customer knowledge strategies what's working?
• 18:17
  Tom Madden: Yeah, you're seeing it in Hilton, for example, has over 10,000 active promotions at any given moment.
• 18:24
  Tom Madden: That stuff gets hard to do at that quantity and at that reach, with all the different kinds of segments that are required without the help of AI.
• 18:34
  Tom Madden: When you're looking at some of the programs, when you manage to have 30 years or more of data that is a ton of data how are you going to get through that with analytics?
• 18:44
  Tom Madden: You can sort through it with human hands, where you can really utilize AI to get to insights at a significantly faster pace and a more effective pace as well.
• 18:57
  Mark Johnson: As customer expectations evolve and loyalty programs and strategies adapt, how do you envision the future of loyalty programs in your respective clients' industries?
• 19:06
  Tom Madden: You know, I think you know Kris talked about helping our clients try participation with their customers all the way from the awareness side of the curve to where the customers actually identify with their brand name and it's kind of personal to them.
• 19:19
  Tom Madden: You know, creating a humanized experience is always going to be at the core of what we need to do.
• 19:25
  Tom Madden: You know we talk about emotional loyalty in this industry quite a bit and that's really based off of some proprietary research that Denise Holt and her team from ICF NEXT o n n n nhaden commissioned a number of years back and have done some follow-up since.
• 19:41
  Tom Madden: But it's all about creating humanized experiences to move people up that participation curve.
• 19:48
  Tom Madden: Look everybody we talk to still gets excited about new shiny objects and new technologies.
• 19:53
  Tom Madden: But all of those things exist for the sole purpose of enabling us to drive humanized experiences so we can create true loyalty where people feel an identity with the brand.
• 20:04
  Mark Johnson: Kris, when you look at the future for Phaedon, what's the next big things brands can expect in the way of technology opportunities, tools strategy?
• 20:15
  Kris Tremain: What's the next big thing?
• 20:16
  Kris Tremain: You know, I think again, I think there's this fine line of leaning into the technology to support all the things we've been talking about bringing a more personalized experience.
• 20:30
  Kris Tremain: I think, you know, obviously, using AI and other tools to do that is really important.
• 20:37
  Kris Tremain: But I do think this more holistic approach to and what we're driving and calling participation which is certainly not a new term, but the way people interact with brands has changed so significantly over the past, even just a couple of years, and certainly if you look across the decade, that it's getting harder and harder to cut through the clutter and get to them and then drive them up this participation curve we're talking about to be coming not just loyal right, you know, and you can offer points and all the different programs that we do but even, ultimately, advocates, right, people who are out talking about your brand because that's ultimately what you want, right, you want to say, hey, you know you've got to become, you know, hilton Rewards member or because of this, you know, and you want those advocates of your brands, right?
• 21:29
  Kris Tremain: So I think that thinking more holistically about how you, you know, we tend to think about, even within communications and advertising and marketing, and loyalty.
• 21:41
  Kris Tremain: We think about these in buckets.
• 21:42
  Kris Tremain: I think continuing to bring those together around a continuous, continuous model for helping people.
• 21:51
  Kris Tremain: You know our clients, you know businesses get their stakeholders to participate more actively with their brands.
• 21:57
  Kris Tremain: That's the future, it's the now, but it's going to just continue to become more and more important in the future.
• 22:03
  Mark Johnson: The last question I have, tom, when you look at piece of advice or thoughts about the industry, customer loyalty is obviously growing of importance and impact.
• 22:11
  Mark Johnson: You know what are initial initiatives that you have in the works for you and your team as we head into the end of 2023 and into 24?
• 22:20
  Tom Madden: Well, I've shared a lot about what we're doing with with the analytics team under the leadership of Emily Merkel, and the strategy team with Denise Holt, as well as Tally, with Mark Hulterman who heads it up for us, and Cindy Roseland at the head of our clients.
• 22:35
  Tom Madden: So we've got a really strong team with a lot of experience in loyalty-specific solutions to help our clients.
• 22:44
  Tom Madden: But, honestly and selfishly, I'm most excited in the coming months and into next year telling the world about Phaedon.
• 22:52
  Tom Madden: We're excited about it and the clients are.
• 22:55
  Tom Madden: All of our clients are coming with us and they're all excited too.
• 22:57
  Tom Madden: I'm excited to see a lot of my friends and colleagues at your next gathering, which I believe is in November.
• 23:05
  Tom Madden: So you know, we're just gonna.
• 23:08
  Tom Madden: You're gonna see me out there smiling from ear to ear, talking about Phaedon and most importantly most importantly, how we can help our clients achieve their their loyalty goals.
• 23:21
  Mark Johnson: Kris and Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
• 23:23
  Mark Johnson: It's an exciting time for Faden and your clients.
• 23:26
  Mark Johnson: We look forward to hearing more about the transition to Faden and seeing continuing to see the great work that you do within the industry, and thank you very much for all that you do for customer loyalty.
• 23:37
  Kris Tremain: Awesome.
• 23:37
  Kris Tremain: Thank you so much.
• 23:38
  Kris Tremain: Also, I want to thank everyone for listening today.
• 23:40
  Mark Johnson: We look forward to having you back on another edition of loyalty live soon.
• 23:43
  Mark Johnson: Until then, have a wonderful day.