Before we get into the reasons why HENRYs are the most important subset of millennials, you might be asking yourself what millennial HENRYs are and why you should care.

When speaking with brands on loyalty program strategy, it’s clear companies know they should be gaining consumer insight and personalizing the user experience, but there is often a barrier of hesitation to openly treat customers differently. This hesitancy is rooted in the fear of ostracizing a portion of their consumers who are deemed “less valuable”. Why can’t we simply strive to provide every customer the same high-end treatment that they deserve? Well, because they don’t deserve it.

At Maritz Motivation, we are making a commitment to AI. This is not a “here today, gone tomorrow” trend. It’s going to become an invaluable tool which transforms industries. Loyalty is one of those industries. In fact, loyalty presents some unique opportunities, which makes it ripe for AI functionality.

What’s better than free money? 

Actually, when it comes to reward and recognition programs, quite a few things may be. So says a new study by the Incentive Research Foundation, Award Program Value & Evidence.

The Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) released its annual trends report, and as is always the case with IRF offerings, it includes plenty of pertinent and interesting information. The 10 trends with implications for incentive travel and reward and recognition programs include: 

Worker confidence increased a bit in the last quarter of 2017, according to a recent annual study by HRO Today magazine and Yoh Recruitment Process Outsourcing. The Worker Confidence Index (WCI) measures U.S. employment security from the perspective of the employees themselves, based on approximately 3,000 online interviews per quarter. 

For the past few years, an incalculable number of words have been expended on the woeful state of employee engagement, both domestically and worldwide. A prominent milestone in all the back-and-forth was Gallup’s pronouncement of a worldwide employment engagement crisis, noting, among other things, that the percentage of engaged employees in the U.S.—call it 33—has remained roughly the same since Gallup started measuring engagement levels in 2000. 

There is a famous quote, attributed to anonymous, "We are the middle children of history, born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the stars." Fortunately for us, we were born at the perfect time for Artificial Intelligence. A few years ago, AI was technologically impossible. A few years from now, all of the low-hanging fruit will have been picked. But right now, in most industries, if you can apply AI to your business, you might be the first person in history to do so. That's awesome to think about.

With the ever-increasing pace of change, organizations are not only under pressure to perform and transform, but they also face increased competition from all directions as they do it. And that doesn’t even include leadership changes, M&A activity, reorganizations or any number of typical crises that surface from time to time. Any of these pressures can result in bad behaviors and disengaged employees driving down performance, increasing turnover rates and eroding financial performance.