There Is No Best Award!

Our friend Paul Hebert makes some excellent points in this post on his blog Incentive Intelligence. It’s too bad that more clients don’t listen to this kind of advice when they plan their incentive programs, if they did their participants would be more productive and earn awards that they wanted and they would have better programs that produced better result.
We have often railed on gift cards being the “best” reward in the incentive industry because we are tired of traditional award companies foisting traditional merchandise awards on companies at pricing that is, well frankly ridiculous! That doesn’t mean that we don’t think that merchandise awards are not great awards, they are! A gift card is nothing but a conveyance to get merchandise of every variety, shape, size, color, etc., at prices that are fair market retail so participants can receive real value for the company’s budget.

A great majority of incentive programs these days are points based electronic programs where the participants earn some form of “currency” or “points” that are banked for redemption on an ongoing basis or in the future. These bank programs include an “awards mall” that, in our perspective, should include as many different types of awards as possible to give the participant the choice of something that fits their lifestyle need of the moment. The categories can be many and varied. they can start with a catalog of traditional merchandise, have travel options, airline ticketing, special lifestyle awards such as days at the spa, or hot air ballooning and of course a very large array of gift card merchants such as found at Award of Choice.

When the traditional merchandise companies control the electronic platform they are very reluctant to add other categories for the simple reason that when they do, the vast majority of redemption will go to these other choices, especially gift cards. In these cases the companies will lose substantial profit.

But isn’t letting the participant choose the award that they really want the objective in the first place? All the major consumer loyalty programs do that, why don’t more companies do that for employee programs?

Be Well, Be Happy, Hug Someone!