Some Historical Context for Non-Monetary Points

While John Jack was at BI WORLDWIDE[1], there were plenty of products he developed, but the big two were AwardperQs® and GoalQuest®. For fame-seeking product developers and product marketers, John's story contains many replicable parts and deserves a full airing. But truth be known, nothing can replicate John Jack.

Early Inspiration

John was a dreamer.

John was inspired by a desire he had as a child to acquire something he couldn't purchase for himself: a spy decoder ring from a cereal box. The rules on the back of the box were simple: save up enough cereal box tops and have the ring.

The decoder ring enchanted him. It engaged his motivation so much that he coerced his mother into buying that cereal several weeks in a row. This was all so that John could voraciously tear through the box tops until he met the required minimum.

"Did you like the cereal?" I asked him. "I don't remember. I'm not even sure if I ate it. That wasn't the point. The point was the decoder ring needed box tops, and everything else was just noise," he said.

Once he had the box tops – the media or currency as we might call it – he stuffed them into an envelope with the redemption form and waited impatiently for days. Interestingly enough, the incremental sales of cereal effectively paid for the decoder ring one household at a time. John saw this as foundational: "The reward was paid for by someone other than the recipient and the box tops had no explicit value," It was an anecdote he frequently shared.

Years later, John would mimic the cereal box model to generate motivation in sales reps:

1.     Make sure the prizes were indulgences without an explicit dollar value.

2.     Sell the points to the clients as the points were issued, not when they were redeemed.

Career Work

John was a seller.

A notable period in his career was as a sales rep for the Hamilton Watch Company in the 1960s. There he acquired first-hand knowledge of the power of contests and non-monetary awards (awards where the value was not explicit). He was frequently one of the top salespeople and the recipient of extravagant trips and tons of high-end merchandise for him and his family.

(“Tons” is not an exaggeration. “One Christmas,” he told me, “we bought all of the kids’ presents from the points I’d accumulated. I never would have bought some of that stuff with my own money, but hey, they were just points!”) 

After going to work for Maritz Corporation[2] in the 1970s, John witnessed the incentive industry beginning to devolve as buyers of point programs wanted better deals on the briefcases and trips they were buying. He concluded that the best way to improve profits and to grow revenue was to change the game. As a sales rep at Maritz, he was not responsible for developing new products, so he took the next best route: sell programs that specified rules and rewards to John’s liking. Then let his coworkers figure out how to deliver them. (This would become one of his specialties.)

In the early-1990's, John was in a position to actually develop new products. The incentive industry was loping along in the footprints of Elton MacDonald. He is often credited with creating the incentive industry by convincing a sales manager at National Cash Register to reward his reps with prizes from MacDonald's dry goods store in Dayton, Ohio. That was nearly 100 years earlier, and little had changed.

Above all, MacDonald’s model was simple and effective, and it appealed to John.  John saw the brilliance in MacDonald’s concept that latent motivation could be unlocked in sales reps when the prizes contained three inherent qualities:

1.     The reward needed to elicit emotional desire in the reps.

2.     The reward needed to be so important that reps would focus on it

3.     The reward needed to be something the reps wanted but wouldn't buy for themselves 

The properties were in awards all along, but it took John Jack to reveal them with a new light in his work at BI WORLDWIDE (BIW).

[1]: https://www.biworldwide.com/.

[2] Maritz: https://www.maritz.com/