In an article I wrote about loyalty programs for the March issue of CRM Magazine, I examined the problem of customer loyalty programs. Namely, most of the time, the first mover in the market reaps the benefits for a spell, then competitors swoop in and clone the program. The result? Everybody falls through the floor to fight on more or less equal footing again, except now margins are lower across the industry. Intuitively, we know there has to be a way to attract and retain loyalty in differentiated fashion--and it all comes back to finding ways to make customers smile and believe that their experience has been a good one. In this model, the incentive is the foot in the door, not the actual payoff. I just stumbled upon one, an amusing innovation in the quest for search engine eyeballs.

Amazon is now tempting its users to find out how to save 1.57% on their purchases--a joke that, to my shame, I didn’t catch on to when I saw it. Amazon wants to split the “pi” (3.14) for people willing to sign in to their A9 search engine and browse around a bit, soaking up Amazon product tabs and miscellaneous banners in the process.

The part of the pitch I respect isn’t the fact that Amazon is willing to offer a “lost in the noise” discount in exchange for sitting through Web advertising--that form of online bribery has been around since the late 1990s and has only proven marginally effective and widely cloned. It’s the fact that I feel like some marketing executive has been dying to offer a fraction-of-pi incentive campaign for ages, just to get the pun on the books, and that’s a corporate spirit I feel good about dealing with. It’s not going to make me a regular A9 user, but it certainly made me smile, reminding me that it’s not just what’s in the hand being offered to the customer, but the style behind the gesture that counts. Whether it is backed by a confidence-boosting mastery of one’s industry, or a quirky math gag, there has to be a real relationship value created for the customers. It can’t simply be the equivalent of lobbing pennies across the room, because anybody can do that.

None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC for at least the past six months. Jason Compton was an employee of CRM Magazine within the past six months.