Gwilym’s Disloyalty Card – Consumerist Counter-Culture

Not to paint a bad picture, I actually love the idea of Gwilym Davies’ (current World Barista Champion) dis-loyalty card, but for everything I love about it, I also find it, for all its harmless fun, kinda missing the point.  What point is that?  You might ask.

Maybe there is no point to it and it is just for fun, but it’s an interesting commentary and view on the whole notion of loyalty and loyalty cards in particular.  For everything one can hate about loyalty cards, they are not the only part of building loyalty with customers, but they form an easy part of thanking those customers who do grace your business with the pleasure of their repeat business.

I wrote, not so long ago, a piece about customer loyalty and how to generate it, and though this is a fun idea and might drive traffic initially, I don’t think it is a great way to enhance long term visitor numbers through the door of specific businesses, and surely at the point where it sits on all the counters of the grouped coffee shops it just becomes another loyalty card.  Perhaps the disloyalty card is just like one of those wicked design ideas that look awesome but when it comes to their real world application rather fall flat.

On the flip side though, I like the idea of diversity, especially when it means highlighting quality, and diversity, rather than being spotlighted in a 60’s counter-culturist fashion should be celebrated and that, by ganging together in a ‘coffee panthers’ kind of way, the caffeine percolating one-stop-shops could offer something more solid and cool to their new and existing customers.

In reality though, I am likely over-analyzing the entire shebang and of course the notion of this collective dis-loyalty will spark the public imagine and be a run away success.  We all know how subversive and zany those Shoreditch, Dalston and East End types love to be!

So really.  Who does have the best coffee house in the ‘hood? Replies below …