This year’s Loyalty Expo Keynote Session features noted speaker and cultural diplomat Ravi Hutheesing who will discuss, among other topics, customer loyalty in relation to millennials. While some are critical of that generation, Hutheesing is supportive and understands the challenges they face as well as the issues brands encounter in both marketing to and hiring them.
 
Hutheesing’s interest in brand loyalty stretches back to the days when he was a professional musician. “I was a guitar player for Hanson back in the late nineties,” he reveals, “and we were the top selling band in the world, which was an amazing experience. I got to do everything I ever imagined in the industry: perform on Letterman, Saturday Night Live, playing at the White House for Bill Clinton and the first family. Just an amazing dream realization experience.”
 
It was at that time that he began writing entrepreneurial-oriented articles for business magazines. The inspiration to do so came from what he describes as his first experience with retail, which was purchasing his first guitar. “It was at a store that remains the epitome of customer service and creating customer loyalty,” he recalls. “A family-run operation even all these years later. When I go back to Connecticut I still visit them. It’s the experience in that store that spawned my writing columns about how to create that kind of loyalty in a retail environment. Not just in a store environment, but from a brand perspective.”
 
For Hutheesing, the guitar was a way to live out his dreams and transform his life. And it’s not just musical instruments that can affect people in that way he adds. Other products can do the same. “They’re products, but they’re products that make dreams a reality and there are so many people who will be at the Expo who are also manufacturing a product or providing services that help people achieve their dreams and make life more enjoyable.”
 
His interest in Millennials surfaced as the music industry declined and he found the time to pursue another life-long dream, that of becoming a pilot. While learning to fly, he noticed something odd. “I couldn’t understand why such a cool thing like flying airplanes wasn’t connecting with the millennial generation,” he says, “and this is where I became interested in millennials and helping businesses connect with them. And that’s what I’ll be talking about too, is how do we bridge that generation gap?”
 
His writing lead to a speaking career, mostly lecturing on topics related to the music industry. However, he caught the attention of the U.S. State Department who hired him to speak at universities and other institutions around the world. “I speak at a lot at universities to millennials, so my global sense of what the millennial generation is like has been heavily influenced by that opportunity,” he says.
 
That in turn has given him insight into customer loyalty. “We traditionally look at customer loyalty as ‘how do we get consumers to be loyal to our brand?’” he begins. “But I think the conversation has to shift to ‘how can customers feel that the brand is really loyal to them? That’s what’s going to earn brand loyalty. When a customer can say ‘this brand is going to make what I need time and time again,’ that’s what customer loyalty, today, is all about. Customer loyalty needs to be earned not bought.”
 
Hutheesing explores how this relates to millennials by first recognizing that the various generations have more similarities than differences. “Their underlying values are the same,” he says.
 
He also reexamines the notion that millennials are, by their very nature, tech savvy. “I don’t think they’re that tech savvy,” he argues, “and that’s one of the things I’ll talk about. We somehow get caught up, and even derailed, with the idea that they’re so tech savvy we have to meet them at a tech-savvy level.”
 
Another key topic Hutheesing will discuss is what he calls the Millennial Conundrum.
 
“We can look at all the data and analytics, many of which contradict each other, and what this generation is about and what they want,” he says. “But there is a conundrum. What they want is not always what they are able to do. There’s a disconnect and this goes back to the way that they have been educated.” While they are the most educated generation in terms of raw numbers, millennials are often unprepared for the working world.
 
It’s these factors and more that Hutheesing will cover in his address. “It sounds complex, but we will unpack all that so we can understand the basic building blocks of human nature. There are consistencies from generation to generation.”