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Instead of branding individual products, and incurring the cost of promotion for each product, one brands a retail outlet, and reduce the institution advertising cost as a percentage of revenue. institution This institution is what Walmart does, without any hassles of cards. Affinity cards are part of this branding. They exist to remind the customer of the shop, and may limit the customer choices due the inconvince of carrying multiple cards. For the purpose of data collection such cards are hardly neccesary, as most of us do not use cash. Sales can be matched to most customer through payment accounts. In fact stores that primarily want to gather personally identifiable information can do so without the need of affinity cards. In the end customer service is about knowing your customers. What we are talking about here is not really customer service, but customer expansion. That is, knowing what your customers might want, and knowing what those who are not yet your customers want. The megastores provide a service for the consumption hungry person in the west who will drive thier SUV 20 miles and load it up with stuff they don't really need.
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