The Mix Tape, Vol. 73
The Mix Tape, Vol. 73
Hello and welcome to this week’s Mix:
🗓Annual digital reset
💰Loyalty isn’t about loyalty
📝More notes on Notes
🍔BK’s new look
Annual digital reset
Anil Dash, on his annual practice of reviewing and reducing shrinking his digital world:
even just making a few positive changes can get you feeling a lot better about all the time we spend with our thumbs on the glass of our phones, or sitting behind a keyboard.
Dash walks through his process for reviewing apps, email subscriptions, and his social accounts.
We collect a lot of digital clutter throughout the year. I like this idea of being mindful about the apps we keep and social accounts we follow.
More notes on notes
This Tweet drew a lot of interesting comments:
I used the note-taking app Roam Research for about six months. I even took a class on how to use its deep feature set.
Roam’s coolest feature is the ability to tag content at the paragraph level, which allegedly creates all kinds of serendeptidous connections when searching notes later on.
Except, that never happened for me. I put things in Roam and rarely accessed them again.
So I went back to good old Apple Notes. In the Apple ecosystem, Notes is quick, simple and always there on every device.
One of the best ways I use Apple Notes is to capture articles on Safari to read later. An iOS Shortcut makes that process easy through the iOS share screen.
If you’d like to try that shortcut, here it is. Let me know how it works for you.
Loyalty is not about loyalty
Edward Nevraumont with a fascinating look at business loyalty programs:
The theoretical benefit of loyalty programs is straightforward: if a brand gives its customers a reward, those people will demonstrate greater loyalty to the brand.
Nevraumont, with deep experience in loyalty programs, argues this isn’t true. He believes many loyalty programs destroy value, because they, in effect, work as cash discount programs for customers who already plan to spend the most money with you anyway.
He does have exceptions, such as hotels and airlines. Business travelers make decisions about who to fly with and where to stay, but employers ultimately pay the bill.
Business travelers have less price sensitivity: they will choose more expensive services if it best serves their loyalty program interests.
Starbucks’ loyalty program also works, but for very different reasons:
Starbucks is using its loyalty program to increase customer convenience, while paying for it through no-interest loans and breakage.
Starbucks amasses $1.6 billion dollars in prepaid services via its app and gift cards. Breakage—money the company keeps because a percentage of the prepaid funds are never redeemed—provides additional financial lift for the company.
Fascinating analysis. Many companies have loyalty programs, but they may be looking at the wrong metrics when determining whether they are successful.
BK’s new look
My last Burger King meal was consumed after stumbling out of a mid-Michigan bar sometime in the mid-1990s.
That said, Burger King’s new retro brand identity looks great:
It’s the fast food company’s first brand redesign in 20 years, and it includes a new logo, packaging, restaurant merchandise, menu boards, uniforms, restaurant signage and decor, and social media, digital, and marketing assets.
You can’t say this isn’t distinct:
There is practicality to BK’s new identity as well:
Burger King’s redesign comes at a time when major brands across sectors are flattening and simplifying their look so that it’s functional and legible in digital spaces.
I can’t say I’ll be downing a Whopper any time soon, but I do like the way BK has separated its look from competitors.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)