| Name: | di overton |
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| Current Position: | Director | |
| Current Organisation: | wheredidyoubuythat.com |
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| Previous Position: | Director | |
| Previous Organisation: | @1 Limited | |
| Previous Position: | Partner | |
| Previous Organisation: | Di Overton at Dizzy's | |
| Background: | The daughter of two active communists, expelled from school at 15, married at 16, two children by 20 and a successful knitwear designer by 28. I fell in love with the man who owned the advertising agency I used and joined him in the business at 34, the year after our daughter was born. That’s my previous history in a nutshell.
Since 1986 Harvey Roll and I have run an advertising agency - @1 Limited. It is truly a family business in that my daughter Sara is a Director and my son Garry is the Buyer. In 1998 we were asked by one of our biggest clients to set up an aspirational loyalty programme for them. We were asked to offer products that people would aspire to rather than the usual cameras and kettles offered on other schemes. This we did, with careful analysis, and increased their market share by 28% in the first year! This and other programmes we operate have their own web sites. Members of the schemes can redeem and spend points there and via printed catalogues (becoming increasingly replaced by web-only programmes). The world did not beat a path to our door quite as rapidly as we hoped it would. When on holiday in Tuscany my partner came up with the ingenious idea of us becoming our own customer. The gifts we were offering on the loyalty programmes were all designer-lifestyle products for the home, office and travel. We had an advantage over other e-commerce sites in that we had a warehouse, call centre, database and web designers in house. We even had an in house photographer. Hence the birth of www.wheredidyoubuythat.com. We now use wheredidyoubuythat.com as a case history as it too has its own loyalty programme – www.viployalty.com. The path is now our very own highway. Wheredidyoubuythat.com was launched in the latter part of 1999 and originally featured an interactive doll's house. We placed room sets in the image of the house and products were available to buy by rolling over the images and clicking. The web site was received with much acclaim by the press and was voted “web site of the week” by The Independent and was referred to by one magazine as “verging on retail porn”. Alas the world was ready but not bandwidth. We simplified the site and just hung on in there whilst the “dot com bubble” burst all over us. Due to my history and background I have developed a bloody-minded tenacity and a belief in the fact that anyone can do anything if they put their mind to it. The Internet has enabled me to be the successful person I so desperately wanted to be, not only for me but also for my children and grandchildren. The experience @1 has gained from running loyalty programmes is that service is of the utmost importance. We always advise our clients to get their customer service sorted before even putting a toe in the water. The Internet is now my lifeline. I buy on it, I educate myself on it. I promote myself on it, I communicate on it and I can no longer imagine a life without it. |
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| Current: | We are continuing to build traffic and acquire customers for wheredidyoubuythat.com with e-mail marketing, PR and paid for advertising. And recently launched www.viployalty.com is an online loyalty programme for wheredidyoubuythat.com customers.
We are also rolling out both sites to businesses, offering corporate accounts so that companies can use the sites to provide incentives and rewards without the need to set up a full scheme. This is seen as a very useful way to test the principle before committing to a full scale loyalty programme.. Parent company @1 Loyalty Programmes is bringing to market new levels of interaction and sophisticated database and e-commerce systems for on-line loyalty programmes for UK businesses and offering a series of free white papers to read on-line or download. They are designed to help companies understand the theory of loyalty and database marketing. And how to capitalise on the 13 times as much it costs to acquire a customer as it does to keep one. (Royal Mail Research 2002) |
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