In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What is giving top marketers fitful sleeps these days? This week, we caught up with Candice Troupe, SVP of marketing and partnerships with Scene+. She is responsible for the strategic planning, implementation and measurement of all things marketing and communications related at the loyalty program. Troupe also leads growth and development for the partners network at Scene+, which includes program owners Scotiabank, Cineplex and Empire and brands such as Expedia, Home Hardware and Rakuten.

Troupe also has experience delivering loyalty and data driven marketing programs for Presto/Metrolinx and LoyaltyOne. 

What’s keeping you up at night?

Honestly, I sleep well. I’m not being kept up at night. And, in fact, I look forward to getting out of bed every morning. Part of that is because I feel, as a marketer here at Scene+, I’m in a superprivileged position in terms of leading an incredible team. But also Scene is just this amazing growth story. It’s been a program that’s been around since 2007 so we’ve been in the market for a really long time, but we continue to transform and innovate.

And we have the backing of three pretty incredible owners as well: Iconic Canadian brands Scotiabank, Empire and Cineplex. So for me, I get to get out of bed every morning and lead an incredible team of marketers. There’s just over 100 of us and about half are the marketing team that I have the pleasure of leading. And the entire time we are thinking about how we get to make members lives a little bit more rewarding every day through the program. So it’s superexciting and it’s work that’s really, really inspiring and motivating.

What’s a facet of your job that’s unique to loyalty programs that maybe other marketers might not appreciate?

I would say that there’s two things. One is, just by the nature of loyalty, which is the notion that members earn points to get rewards, we have this incredible opportunity as an industry, and us as a program, to bring joy to them every day, to help them get to a reward, which leads to a pretty incredible experience. So I think that’s unique to the category and I think we do it particularly well at Scene. And the other piece, of course, is the fact that we have incredibly rich data as an asset and that enables us to know our members better than many industries, or know our customers better than many industries, but it also enables us to deliver a level of personalization and relevance that other industries just aren’t capable of.

Are there any subtle or distinct ways that new Canadians engage with points programs?

Yeah, so we know that, through our research and through industry research, generally, about three quarters of new Canadians tend to join loyalty programs [and] when they first arrive to Canada they’re attracted to brands that have loyalty programs. In the case of Scene we are still growing from a membership perspective. So we’re adding new members to the program every month and a good portion of those are folks who are new to Canada.

Back to my point earlier, we have this incredible opportunity that we can help them sort of start their experience in Canada by introducing them to the breadth of our program, places that they can earn, and helping them get to rewards.

But what’s even more exciting about that is the fact that we can tie our brand to some of those core, foundational memories and experiences that they’re creating as they as they come to Canada. And so, opening your first bank account, that’s something that you have to do as a new Canadian. But that is a path to accelerating your earn at Scene by having a Scotia product. And maybe that means you end up using your points to be able to go home and visit family after a period of time, discovering at an Empire location, like a Sobeys or Foodland, foods that feel familiar from your home country or your culture, while discovering new Canadian foods and dishes and ingredients and so on.

And from a Cineplex perspective, they do an amazing job, actually, of international content. So the ability to use your points to be able to see a movie that is related to, again, your culture or the country that you come from.

How do you strike a balance between experiences and earn and burn and has there been a shift in expectations?

I think the thing that’s really unique about Scene is that we have been all about memorable experiences from the beginning in that our our origin story, when we started back in 2007, was all about the movie experience.

So our program was owned by Cineplex and Scotiabank back in the day and so this notion of memorable experiences is not a shift for us. It’s really inherent in our DNA and who we are as we’ve grown. Our members have told us that they want choice in those experiences. And so we’ve responded as a program.

And so today we are so much more than a movie program and we offer members a breadth of rewards to create the experiences that really matter to them.

So, the way I would describe to you the transactional experiential thing is that, on one hand, you could look at redeeming it for groceries as a very transactional experience. So “I got $10 off my grocery bill,” but that $10 translates to, maybe, a beautiful experience of cooking a meal for your family at Thanksgiving.

Similarly, earning points on your credit card, while that feels transactional, translates to a girls weekend in New York City, maybe. And even with partners like Home Hardware, you have the opportunity to redeem for that Yeti cooler, as an example, that translates into you being able to elevate your summer barbecue experience. So that that’s the core of what we do.

I think what’s superexciting for us, back to my comment earlier around personalization, is we have this opportunity because we understand our members so well. We have an opportunity to ensure that that program and the experiences we put in front of you, or suggest to you are as relevant as they possibly can be.

To give you an example, we just finished up our Power Up promotion [game experience in August]. It’s the third year that we’ve done this and although we’ve continued to innovate it, we’ve repeated it because members really love it. We were able to completely personalize the game board and that promotion for every member participating so that the breadth of places that you could earn and the opportunities to redeem were individualized and curated for each member, as were the pricing components.

And the back end of that promotion is supercomplex. It’s driven by data, it’s driven by a complex gamification board, it’s driven by marketing technology. But on the front end, for the member, it just feels like a really simple, fun, highly relevant promotion. And, in and of itself, it’s an experience. Members just loved playing it.

What’s your take on the industry as a whole?

The loyalty space, in and of itself, has had incredible growth, right? And I think that’s really largely driven by the fact that brands and organizations really recognize that loyalty drives business impact. So it’s important to their brand. Loyalty is no longer an expense on the marketing line. It’s an investment in the organization in order to drive revenue and customer loyalty and engagement.

And so there are lots of loyalty programs and Canadians are members of many programs. We know that, and we definitely keep our eye on the competition. But honestly, our core focus is really paying attention to our members and listening to what they want and expect out of our program, and helping, of course, to deliver on business objectives for our owners through that.

So that’s what we stay really focused on and that strategy is really paying off in that, we are on the path to being Canada’s most loved loyalty program. And so I say to the team on a regular basis, “Don’t worry about what others are doing. Let’s just make sure that we are delivering on what matters to our members.”