TOP Food & Drug Tests Enriched Rewards Card

This is certainly a step in the right direction. Personalizing other benefits and amenities could be next. Imagine discount tickets to the art opening cocktail hour for singles. Or discounts for the nearest water park, for families with children under 15.

I love the GEO part of it too. Could this work outside of the store by placing "messages" in other places the shoppers may visit? Very cool. I believe this may manifest differently on cellphones in the future.

Liz Crawford, President, Crawford Consulting

Loyalty programs that offer just discounts are not loyalty programs. There has to be more to offer the customer to get them to sign up. Most things I've seen are newsletters that are specific to the industry. Grocery stores are at an advantage because they could literally fill 20 pages with recipes and other resources that people use everyday.

Now I must say, I love TOP's idea. Those extra services will differentiate themselves from pretty much everyone else at this point in time. Recall notifications are important and customers will appreciate automatic alerts in this day and age. Price guarantee? I love it! Now there is an excellent customer service gesture. Buy it and don't worry if it goes on sale. It's a no brainier. The spoilage refund is probably the best add-on I have seen so far. This will really build confidence and get customers coming back especially if all the credits are loaded onto the card.

Doron Levy, President, TheMortgageMachine.ca

This is an interesting gimmick. The most valuable feature might be the low price guarantee, but overall, the program should be more robust and offer consumers more features. One feature should be a consumer's ability to load electronic coupons on the card at home and have the discount automatically applied at the store. Or how about connecting the card to a consumer's preferred method of payment?

Max Goldberg, Founding Partner, The Radical Clarity Group

Any time a retailer gets beyond simply equating a "loyalty card" with discounts, it is a step in the right direction. When the card proposition systematically provides not only the value guarantee (yes, a price discount mechanism) but also begins to impact and create an easier shopping experience, it is taking much larger steps.

Integrating customer communications (e.g., the $5 off $25 offer) is another important step in connecting what the customer does in-store with relevant communications that will drive incremental visits.

This is a striking illustration of the fact that consumers will opt-in for RFID tracking if the merchant delivers the right value proposition around it. Well done!

Phil Rubin, CEO, rDialogue

This effort sounds exactly like the customer interactive proposition that loyalty cards were designed for originally! Kudos to Haggan for having the foresight to offer more than everyday discounts to their customers.

The possibilities for customer communication, tie-in-marketing opportunities with other business partners and other yet-to-be-discovered programs are endless. I hope Haggan finds a way to prove there is an ROI on what can be a large resource investment.

J. Peter Deeb, Partner, Deeb MacDonald & Associates, L.L.C.

Very interesting stuff and a way to get beyond the usual percentage-off discount. But if you really want to create long-term loyalty, shouldn't you be doing these things for all shoppers?

Len Lewis, President, Lewis Communications, Inc.

Kudos to TOP for helping customers avoid that cat-and-mouse game of finding the lowest price! Let's hope that this new concept spurs other retailers to examine ways to provide value-adds to their best customers.

Cathy Hotka, Principal, Cathy Hotka & Associates

Definitely a step in the right direction. I look forward to hearing their assessment of the results and plans for the future.

Camille P. Schuster, Ph.D., President, Global Collaborations, Inc.

Other retail outlets that have loyalty programs should take note. TOP is clearly ahead of the curve and their shoppers will benefit. Not having to worry about getting the best price each week builds incredible trust between TOP and their shoppers. The recall notification is also a strong benefit that builds shopper confidence.

Future benefits could incorporate savings on prescriptions since loyalty for that department is extremely high. It would also be interesting to see if their system could review a consumer's shopping list and offer a recipe that includes a few additional items, increasing the shopper's basket. Nice work TOP!

John Boccuzzi, Jr., SVP National Retail Sales, Affinion Group

I’m still unclear why this really cool system can only be delivered via RFID. What does that have to do with it, and is this system inherently limited due to the relative infancy of RFID? Why can't these services be delivered with universally-available technology like bar codes? These TOP services have been referenced as "possibles" for decades via conventional loyalty programs. Loyalty guru Brian Woolf has been predicting and recommending these and other advanced services since before the term "CRM" was coined. Unfortunately, few if any retailers have had the vision to offer them. Contrary to the implication of this discussion topic and the referenced CPG News article, "loyalty program" does not have to mean "discount program." Conventional programs have not been limited by pre-RFID technology, but by weak-kneed retailers.

M. Jericho Banks PhD, President, CEO, Forensic Marketing LLC

I agree with the others here--that is definitely a great advantage and differentiator over the competition. I get a little nervous with the automatic refund for lower prices, though. That is breaking marketing rule #1; don't give discounts that the customer didn't ask for. However, that could be said for most loyalty programs. You get to the POS and the cashier tells you that you saved $20 by using the card. Hey, you would've bought most of that stuff anyway.

Bottom line, I like the program. It could/should be incorporated into the customers' cell phones. Especially those with GPS. The stores could send custom offers via text messages to the customer when they approach a TOP store or even one of their loyalty partner stores.

Ralph Jacobson, Global Consumer Products Industry Marketing Executive, IBM