ABSTRACT
The most important part of any customer loyalty programme is the benefit package that the members of the programme are offered. As a customer loyalty programme primarily aims at building up emotional relationships, the task of finding the right benefits becomes even more important. To measure the importance or value of specific features, customers have traditionally been asked directly which product factors were important to them or which benefits they wanted to have included in the customer loyalty programme. Looking at customer loyalty programmes in different industries, it is evident that the hard benefits are usually copied first, and that they are often not differentiated among competitors' programmes. Customer loyalty programme soft benefits are the special offers, the value-added services, the special treatment, the recognition and reward that the customer is looking for. As most of the soft benefits included in a customer loyalty programme are intangible, product-related, they are also less likely to be copied by the competition.
