Even as technology and consumer behavior evolve, many brands are holding onto misconceptions about engagement, loyalty, and growth. A closer look at eight modern marketing myths shows how a fresh approach can establish enduring consumer relationships, build community across channels to supercharge growth, future-proof loyalty programs, and break free from the cyclical marketing carousel in the face of uncertainty and change.
FACT: Acquisition without retention turns a funnel into a drain.
While the numbers vary by industry, acquisition costs 5 to 25 times as much as retention, and these costs have been steadily increasing in ad-saturated markets.
Nevertheless, acquisition still takes center stage. The majority of B2C brand executives report allocating more of their budget to acquisition than retention.
Without retention, though, many brands are losing consumers as quickly as they gain them. The combination of rising customer acquisition cost (CAC) and churn upends this long-held myth. Loyalty and retention can not only increase customer lifetime value but also open a new growth channel through genuine brand champions.
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FACT: Traditional loyalty programs are too limited to foster meaningful and lasting connections with consumers.
The most well-established loyalty programs operate like a coffee shop punch card, offering discounts for repeat purchases. But these generate a superficial consumer relationship because they only gamify purchases. They do nothing to gamify or extend engagement beyond the point-of-sale.
On average, consumers interact with companies across eight different channels, but transactional loyalty programs don't allow brands to engage and reward consumers in a cohesive way across these touchpoints.
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FACT: Building an audience on social media doesn’t ensure a sense of membership or community, especially when activity has become fragmented among social media platforms.
There’s a difference between having a presence on multiple platforms and optimizing engagement across platforms.
To build loyalty, brands need to connect, engage, and reward consumers. But they have been stymied by the inability to do all three in a comprehensive way across all brand-owned channels and brand-curated touchpoints.
Absent a unified approach, brands have been investing heavily in social media campaigns but generating only shallow engagement. Brand-linked identity emerges when consumers see one another. Engaging with other authentic fans builds a sense of belonging. With campaigns that are just a steady stream of branded posts, brands overlook this critical element of growing consumer enthusiasm and committment.
Even worse, many brands don’t realize they are spinning their wheels. PWC found that 84% of executives think consumers trust their brand, but only 27% of consumers actually do.
Closing this gap demands a new solution. Kazm is a turnkey loyalty platform that integrates all touchpoints and allows brands to boost retention by recognizing and rewarding diverse types of consumer engagement.
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FACT: Consumers place the highest trust in word-of-mouth recommendations, and loyal fans can be a high-impact growth channel.
Although influencers get eyeballs, a big audience isn’t necessarily a trusting audience. In a survey by Nielsen, consumers said influencers were no more trustworthy than traditional advertising. In contrast, 88% said they were most likely to trust recommendations from people they know.
Rather than renting an influencer’s audience, brands can turn their existing fans into a dynamic growth channel. Genuine social proof from brand champions can boost reach and traction through word-of-mouth recommendations while simultaneously building community and loyalty.
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FACT: Current consumer profiles are incomplete because they do not capture and unify diverse touchpoints.
Consumers interact with brands across a fragmented landscape made up not only of various social media platforms but also email, website visits, phone, chat, and IRL locations. Consumers may also use separate and unlinked accounts on different platforms.
Fragmented data erodes a brand’s ability to understand who their consumers are and how to effectively engage them. It also undermines the value of AI tools that personalize targeted campaigns at scale. Without a cross-platform solution, brands are forced to either push campaigns ahead with flawed segmentation or rely on generic messaging that feels stale and fails to resonate.
At the same time, inaccurate data makes it more challenging for brands to identify their true super fans, who are the most passionate, engaged, and inclined to be brand ambassadors. Failing to recognize these vital community members means significant lost opportunities for brand-building and growth. Overcoming these data deficiencies starts with a loyalty platform like Kazm that facilitates connection with consumers, engagement across touchpoints, and creation of unified membership profiles.
FACT: Most loyalty programs focus on discounts, but consumers today are looking for a different kind of value. Their loyalty is not bought with discounts but cultivated through connection and community.
This reflects a sea change in how consumers relate to a brand. Beyond monetary perks, consumers want unique experiences and interactive participation that build a sense of inclusion and membership. Consumers also want to be heard. They want a voice in providing feedback and want the opportunity to collaborate with brands and each other.
Brands can meet this demand by enriching the consumer experience with gamification, quests, membership tiers and milestones, fan forums, exclusive access, customized rewards, and tailored collaborations. Discounts can become complementary rewards that further incentivize engagement in a brand’s loyalty ecosystem.
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FACT: Fragmented engagement keeps brands on their heels, and outdated consumer data software further bogs them down.
While brands often think of themselves as nimble, incomplete consumer profiles hinder their ability to make timely, data-driven pivots. Without visibility across touchpoints, it takes too long to recognize changes in consumer needs and engagement patterns.
At the same time, legacy customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP) software is not built to turn on a dime. Updating these programs for new platforms and capabilities can require slow and expensive engineering. Brands become stuck either waiting for software updates or paying expensive agencies to hastily launch new campaigns.
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FACT: While piecemeal approaches will always be inefficient and clunky, a turnkey solution like Kazm makes unifying member data across touchpoints both seamless and scalable.
Using Kazm’s loyalty platform, brands can integrate data into a single dashboard. This no-code solution turns a fragmented environment into a growth opportunity as brands can easily connect with, engage, and reward their fans to build enduring loyalty.
On the back end, Kazm provides more complete member profiles and applies machine learning to reveal insights and metrics that can help plan, execute, and measure targeted campaigns.
No-code integrations also help Kazm future-proof a loyalty program. Brands can quickly adapt to trends in engagement, including on new platforms. Without the burden of custom engineering, brands can stay flexible and rapidly iterate to best connect with consumers.
In addition, this solution benefits consumers who can take advantage of more compelling loyalty programs. Consumers win when they have more opportunities to interact with other fans, engage with their favorite brands in diverse ways, and receive unique rewards for sharing their brand enthusiasm.
Without any need for bespoke engineering or expensive installations, Kazm’s plug-and-play platform helps brands spin up a new growth channel as they turn their audiences into consumers, their consumers into loyal members, and their loyal members into vibrant communities.
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While old ways of thinking about marketing and growth are plagued by misconceptions, one thing hasn’t changed: consumers will always trust a genuine endoresement from a friend over an ad.
Cross-platform engagement with varied and meaningful rewards can foster a lasting connection with consumers that is impossible with traditional loyalty programs. This not only increases retention but also encourages loyal fans to become brand champions whose word-of-mouth recommendations are more powerful than other ad messaging.
Brands today face a dynamic and fragmented environment for reaching and engaging with consumers. Debunking common marketing myths is the first step to turning that from a challenge into an opportunity.
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Kazm enables unified cross-platform community engagement and loyalty. Easily launch white-label memberships to reward activations across EVERY touchpoint - with no-code and no limits. Learn more about Kazm, including product demos and case studies, at https://join.kazm.com.
