What's your choice of reward?

As an employer or a business, with what would you reward your employee/ customer/ channel partner: A water clock, a smart phone, a free pizza card, or a holiday? As the recipient, would you sneer at a backpack or a mobile phone that came free? Would you have rather got the water clock for its novelty value or gone on holiday, even it was not totally free?

According to Mr Girish Khare, Chief Marketing Officer of RewardPort, people want experiences as gifts rather than things. RewardPort designs and implements activation and loyalty solutions for a company's employees, customers and dealers. So far in B2B circles, it is now going B2C with its pizza/coffee cards, travel cards and catalogues. Mr Suvir Khullar, Founding Director of corporate gifting company Gifting Ideas, however, says most people would prefer a product that is tangible and can be used.

Ms Charoo Aggarwal, Managing Director, Grass Roots India, a company into effective employee/customer engagement, says, “If they are not interested in the reward, there will be no motivation.” Mr Khare of RewardPort says his company's research shows all that companies need to spend to keep employees happy, apart from their salaries, is just Rs 1,000.

Reward programmes are now going beyond the middle- and upper-middle classes. In Mumbai, residents of housing complexes built as part of slum rehabilitation projects are given incentives to ensure they live in the flats allotted to them and do not return to living in shanties after renting them or pre-selling them. (There is a lock-in period.) A spokesperson for a construction firm that builds such housing says they have designed reward schemes offering medical, educational and pilgrimage benefits.

The rewards and recognition business is estimated at Rs 10,000 crore and the loyalty and promotion business at Rs 13,000 crore. The market players are bullish about its future. In India, the business is quite scattered with a lot of regional players, though it has begun to attract investors — Payback of Europe, a bonus card services provider, has acquired an 86 per cent stake in India's largest coalition loyalty card provider, i-Mint. Mr Khullar of Gifting Ideas says, “It is a wise investment, as it is borne out of business or results already achieved, and motivates your internal or external customers to do more.”

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