Whether you’re a concert venue, a sports club or a theme park, you’ve probably thought about the potential of being able to match in-venue consumption to customer profiles. This would enable you to analyze customer segments and sales channels, and do segmented campaigns and loyalty programs based on ‘total spend’ and not just the ticket purchases.

Although most would find this very valuable, the question has always been…how?

For festivals and theme parks, various solutions have been to involve wristbands or similar “hardware”, but for one-off concerts or sports events the practicality and costs of similar solutions have been prohibitive. They have then turned to apps or membership cards, but the challenge here has been that this introduces an additional process when buying (payment and identification) which doesn’t really fit when trying to make transaction speed more efficient.

The solution may be found in a Danish bakery chain.

What the bakery chain has done is set up a loyalty programme where customers – through an app – input their credit card details and allow the bakery chain to link purchases to the customer account. In Denmark, retailers are not allowed to get payment card information, so this matching is done by a 3rd party, enabling the connection of purchase and profile without the retailer ever having to know the payment card details. Customers can even input multiple cards and have all purchases add to their benefits.

This leads to a number of advantages:

  • It doesn’t add time to transactions (in fact, it might even push customers to pay with credit card instead of cash)

  • It doesn’t require customers to carry around another card

  • It entices loyalty

  • It enables the company to track and analyze spending patterns and preferences

  • It enables targeting of specific customers with high-relevance campaigns

So could this be the best solution for tracking in-venue purchases? It definitely meets a lot of the key requirements!