Sweetgreen announced its new loyalty program this week: Sweetpass, available both in a free version and a subscription-based premium version that costs $10 per month.
It’s not the fast casual’s first crack at a loyalty program. Cofounder and chief brand officer Nathaniel Ru said the brand has had a few loyalty iterations, beginning in the early days with a physical punch card and then eventually a points-based system managed through the brand’s mobile ordering app.
Ru said that points-based program, launched in 2013 around the time Sweetgreen opened several New York City locations, worked well at the time. But eventually it became clear that Sweetgreen’s most loyal guests were looking for something else.
“It wasn't necessarily incentivizing the right loyalty behavior,” he said. “A lot of it was pretty much discount driven. And what people got more excited about than just the discounts itself were the actual status tiers, of going from green to gold to black status. … And in the middle of COVID, we decided essentially to sunset our program, and we actually have spent the last year and a half or so rebuilding it from scratch.”
Ru joined the latest episode of Take-Away with Sam Oches to walk through the process of developing Sweetpass and to discuss how the brand continues to maintain its status as a technology innovator even as it increasingly strives to bring its food forward.
In this conversation you’ll learn more about:
- You should look beyond traditional marketing to tell your story
- Your most loyal customers should be your focus group for brand evolution
- Some of your guests want deeper access to your brand — and a loyalty program can give it to them
- Great brands turn a simple transaction into an opportunity to build community
- There is no tech solution for bringing your food forward
- Leveraging data to make brand decisions is both an art and a science
- Points-based loyalty programs are out; subscription-based programs are in
Contact Sam Oches at [email protected].
