Sun care brand Sun Bum is working with rewards platform Rediem on The Bum Club, a loyalty program that netted nearly 14,000 sign-ups during a recent soft launch. The Bum Club looks to trade the transactional nature of traditional loyalty programs for a fun, community-building approach.
“Loyalty is something that we thought of for a extremely very long time,” said Vanessa Lhotsky, executive director of digital, direct-to-consumer and e-commerce for the brand. “The challenge was that the massive ones on the market seemed very transactional and not very customizable or unique, and, truthfully, just felt really boring.”
Sun Bum wants to interrupt the mold of loyalty programs by rewarding points (or “bananas,” inspired by its ape mascot) to consumers for a spread of activities beyond simply purchasing its self-care products, including: sharing pictures of a sunset, educating themselves about skin cancer prevention, participating in website scavenger hunts and even doing nothing in any respect. Rewards include a personalised welcome kit, discounts on partner brands and an appearance on a billboard within the brand’s hometown of Encinitas, California.
The actions and rewards elevate what the brand has already done and seen its customers do. It previously put a 12-year-old super fan on a billboard and has seen fans tattoo its logo on their bodies. Plus, the concentrate on skin cancer prevention allows Sun Bum to construct its core brand values into the program.
“Doing things which might be definitely different by way of loyalty, but knowing that our consumers were already doing that form of stuff… how can we fold that right into a loyalty program that really feels unique?” Lhotsky said.
Building a loyalty program for the brand also presented a challenge faced by other CPG corporations: learn how to capture consumer attention for a product sold at major retailers, including Walmart, Target and CVS, in addition to its own direct-to-consumer channels, while being true to a “be big, feel small” ethos.
“Having that basically direct, one-to-one consumer connection is absolutely essential to us as we grow and scale,” Lhotsky said.
A platform optimized for mobile
To meet its loyalty program needs, Sun Bum tapped Rediem, a rewards platform launched in 2023 that raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, led by Ivy Ventures. The company was founded to handle the shortage of brand name alignment with many loyalty programs, especially in an era when storytelling-forward brands like Liquid Death and Oura are ramping up consumer engagement.
“All you possibly can do together with your points is money out for $10 in your next order, which doesn’t really foster any sense of loyalty. It’s this passive, turn-and-burn, collecting dust within the [website] footer,” said Regan Plekenpol, a Rediem co-founder. “We’re still in punch card land.”
To that end, Rediem created a platform that serves as infrastructure for community-first, omnichannel loyalty programs like The Bum Club, especially for brands like Sun Bum that will not be online-only but retail-everywhere.
“We have this mechanism of rewards, actions and challenges, and then the brand can go crazy,” Plekenpol said. “If they wish to reward you for doing jumping jacks in Times Square, they will do this.”
Whether doing jumping jacks or writing messages in sunscreen, Rediem’s loyalty program turns consumer actions right into a community feed of user-generated content. It can also turn the experiential activations which might be having a post-pandemic revival into measured traffic and traceable consumer data, from purchases to SMS numbers.
While The Bum Club is currently a web-based widget, around 85% of usage was mobile in the course of the soft launch. For now, Sun Bum will keep it that way, quite than joining an app-based landscape that’s crowded with some great but many bad loyalty apps.
“The integration with our current tech stack really helped, by way of Shopify, SMS and email,” Lhotsky said. “We do have a fairly small, lean marketing team, so I feel it’s something we’re all the time going to take a look at… How can we proceed to enhance it?”
Read the total article here
