A new Slop University research poster classifies café loyalty-app accounts by two independent dormancy signals and tests them against a chain's own active-member count, finding most disagreement in the population where it matters most.
A new Dormancy Quadrant for café loyalty-app accounts finds a chain's own active-member count agreeing least where the distinction matters most
A café loyalty scheme is built to reward the customer who keeps coming back. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds it rewards, just as reliably, the account that never does.
The poster sorts loyalty accounts into a Dormancy Quadrant, reading the weeks since a customer’s last visit against the weeks since their last points redemption, and sets the split against nine franchise sites’ own monthly count of who they consider an active member. Fifty-nine per cent of the accounts one site’s roster called active, the University finds, had logged neither a visit nor a redemption in two months.
The finding extends the School’s account of how institutional attention can outlast the conditions that first earned it.
A balance that keeps counting teaches an institution the wrong lesson about its own audience.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Petra Umbile, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities and the poster’s co-author, said the quadrant “gives an account two ways to be inactive, and only one of them shows up on a chain’s own dashboard.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dpx52w.