The Samsung loyalty program is built on a simple but challenging premise: “Create love, not lock-in.” What this means is Samsung chose not to build loyalty through financial dis-incentives like points or walled garden ecosystems like our competitor. Instead, Samsung would build loyal behavior through high-quality engagement around personalized owner passions. Oh, and at scale. Like tens of millions of owners at a time scale.

Our strategy was: let’s deliver a custom always-on experience unique to each owner’s passion and in three focus areas.

One, how to maximize phone enjoyment and eliminate friction. Make support access easy. Tips on how to take better pics or make the battery last.

Second, deliver content people really want. Free album drops before they go on sale. Movie previews. Samsung offers no one else gets.

And third, cultural experiences based on your interests and in your city. A secret concert. A food truck. VIP upgrades at the big music festival.

But for this to work, we had to be right on with each owner. We had to know their interests, their identity, their geography and their point in the phone relationship. If we could manage the data right, we could deliver the love.

We delivered over 64M unique engagements throughout Samsung ownership journey's three big inflection points. First, during owner’s initial purchase and onboarding – a high contact and information demand period. Second, the ongoing ownership period – when we deepen as much goodwill and brand experience as possible. Finally, Samsung’s own product launches. The investment in individual engagement must pay off in repurchase as Samsung’s owners account for the majority of new model volume.

Through emails, push notifications on devices and microsites, we helped owners become device experts, and fed their personal passions with content and experiences that only Samsung offered.

We even choreographed their movement. We recognized New York owners loved music and food trucks, so we sent them to The Governors Ball and fed them waffles. In Austin, we recognized owners loved innovative technology and music, so we designed a co-creation event, alongside prominent street artists, at Austin City Limits.

The Samsung owner program generated incredible response and business results this last year. Our ability to turn data into desire greatly increased owner love for Samsung. And not just through social love notes, but real, big dollars.

The proof behind our data-driven insights, accurate content shaping and “right time, right place” delivery was the rate of engagement we tracked. On average, brands in our category only experience engagement (whether opted-in owners respond or interact with any communications or content) at around the 16% level. With this program, we generated engagement levels over 40%, or more than double the average rate.

Our ability to manage better always-on engagement meant that more owners were there to buy in again for their next phone. We experienced a 65% increase in new purchases, or 1.27 million new shiny smartphones. This is unprecedented success. And it completely outpaced any of the conservative models we had built in forecast. When the year was done, we calculated that investment in knowing our owners, really knowing what made them tick, and giving them what mattered most generated a whopping 40x ROI.

Just goes to show, the data doesn’t lie. The data knows the way to our owners’ hearts.