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Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo (Digital Reset Foundations Episode 513)

Woman with a tattoo that says "I heart brand" to illustrate the idea of why nobody has a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo

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I’ve seen plenty of Harley-Davidson tattoos on people who love that brand. I have never once seen a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo.

The room laughed when I said that at a hotel conference. Then it got really, really quiet.

Afterward, one person after another told me some version of the same thing: “We spend so much time on loyalty. We don’t really know our guests as human beings, though.”

That’s the dirty little secret behind many loyalty programs. They’re about points, rewards, perks, and status. Real loyalty is about identity. It comes from customers who feel that your brand is part of who they are and who they want to be.

That Harley-Davidson versus Bonvoy line isn’t just a joke. It’s a warning.

When AI assistants and agents choose businesses on a customer’s behalf, they will evaluate the criteria they can measure. Price. Location. Availability. Points. Brands that never build anything people care about risk becoming commodities.

Your customers provide another path. They can teach AI that you are the one they love, the one they want, and the one that makes them feel like who they believe they are. That’s what it means to build a brand customers ask for by name.

In Digital Reset Foundations Episode 513, Tim Peter looks at the difference between a loyalty program and actual loyalty, how data fluency and good judgment create memorable experiences, and why the future belongs to businesses that use smarter machines to give their people more room to be human.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Why points, perks, and elite status rarely create real loyalty
  • How brands become part of a customer’s identity
  • Why the Harley-Davidson and Marriott Bonvoy comparison serves as a warning
  • How AI assistants can reduce brands to price, location, availability, and other measurable criteria
  • What “Your brand is the prompt” means for companies that want customers to ask for them by name
  • Why data fluency requires more than the ability to read reports
  • How the same customer data can create an experience that feels cool or creepy
  • Why technology integrations must put useful data in front of people with good judgment
  • How great people and great technology help businesses avoid commoditization

Key Data Points

  • Most loyalty programs reward transactions. Real loyalty grows from identity and belonging.
  • AI assistants and agents evaluate the criteria they can measure, which can reduce an undifferentiated brand to price, location, availability, or points.
  • Building memorable experiences requires two steps: develop data fluency among your team, then invest in technology integrations that put useful data in front of them.
  • The same data can produce a welcome experience or a creepy one. Human judgment determines the difference.
  • Businesses that underinvest in both people and technology risk becoming commodities that nobody loves.

Digital Reset Framework: Loyalty, Identity, and the Brand as Prompt

Real loyalty starts when customers see your brand as part of their own story. That connection gives them a reason to choose you, ask for you by name, and teach their AI assistants and agents to do the same.

Data and technology help your team recognize what matters to an individual customer. Data fluency and human judgment help them use that knowledge in ways that feel useful, respectful, and genuinely personal. The goal is a memorable experience that strengthens the relationship every time the customer comes back.

What You Should Do Now

1. Give Customers a Story About Themselves

Look beyond the transaction, the points, and the perks. Ask what your brand helps customers say about who they are or who they want to become. Build that idea into the experience you provide and the stories you tell.

2. Develop Data Fluency and Respect the Creepy Line

Teach your team to use customer data to curate better experiences. Make sure people across the organization understand the difference between using data to be helpful and using it in ways that feel invasive.

3. Put Better Information in Front of Good People

Invest in the technology integrations that make useful customer information available when your team needs it. Pair those systems with people who have the authority and judgment to act. That combination creates experiences customers remember and brands they ask for by name.

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

Buy the Book: Digital Reset

Ready to build a brand customers ask for by name? Get Tim Peter’s book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, on Amazon.

See Tim Peter in Action

Watch Tim Peter join Rutgers Business School for a conversation about Digital Reset and how businesses can build direct customer relationships beyond Big Tech.

Want Tim to help your team turn customer data into experiences people remember? Learn more about Tim Peter’s speaking, workshops, and consulting.

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If this episode made you think about someone on your team or a brand you work with, send them a link and tell them why it stuck with you. That’s how these conversations spread.

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Technical Details for Digital Reset

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface.

Running time: 13:13

Transcript: Why Nobody Has a Marriott Bonvoy Tattoo

I said something at a hotel conference once that got a reaction I didn’t expect at all.

I said I’ve seen plenty of Harley-Davidson tattoos on people who love that brand.

I have never once seen a Marriott Bonvoy tattoo.

The room laughed and then it got really quiet.

Afterward, literally one person after another came up to me and said some version of the same thing.

They said, "We spend so much time on loyalty. We don’t really know our guests as human beings, though."

This is not just a hotel problem.

It happens with every business that has confused a points program with a customer relationship.

And in the age of AI, where customers can find any brand instantly, where switching costs are lower than ever, where AI is learning the brands your customers actually prefer, the difference between a loyalty program and actual loyalty has never mattered more.

This Digital Reset Foundations episode is one of my favorites that we’ve ever done on this show.

I think it holds up, and I think the question at the center of it, are you building something customers actually love or just something you’re paying them to use, is more urgent now than it was when we first recorded it.

I’m Tim Peter. This is Digital Reset Foundations, episode 513.

Let’s dive in.

Here’s the dirty little secret about "loyalty" in hospitality and in airlines and in retail, and lots and lots more.

Most loyalty programs are really about points. They’re really about how many rewards your customer’s going to get.

Real loyalty, though, real loyalty to your brand, is about identity. It’s about customers who feel like you are a part of them, who feel like you belong with them… or not.

That Harley-Davidson versus Bonvoy line isn’t a joke. It’s a warning. People don’t get tattoos about discounts or perks or elite status. It’s just not a thing that actually makes them feel seen.

What do they tattoo? Who they believe they are.

In my book, Digital Reset, I share the story of how I realized that fact about brand tattoos.

I used to go to this local brew pub near where I lived. I didn’t live at the brew pub, though it probably felt that way some days. But, you know, on nice Sunday afternoons, we might stop by.

And there was a group of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts who would pull in after enjoying their weekly ride. This was something they did all the time. The group were, generally speaking, contractors and construction workers and folks like that, you know, tradesmen… and as I wrote in the book, "one dentist with the heart of a rebel yearning to break free."

But the thing is, that’s not a joke. That guy believed in the concept of "live to ride, ride to live." He lived it, despite his otherwise, well, dentist-like demeanor. He didn’t "like" Harley-Davidson. He lived Harley-Davidson. This guy was a Harley-Davidson rider, just like I’m a Fender guitar player or a Martin guitar player. Those speak to me.

And many hotel brands, hell, many, many brands overall don’t give their customers a story about themselves. They give a transaction.

There are absolutely exceptions to this rule.

Margaritaville Hotels and Resorts does this really well, as I am well aware. 21c Museum Hotels, I think, does a great job of this. Very high-end luxury hotels like the Ritz in London, the George V in Paris, or the Metropole in Monte Carlo, along with independent hotels like the Drover in Fort Worth, the Acoma House in Denver, and my friends and clients at the Wentworth Mansion, John Rutledge House Inn, King’s Courtyard, and Fulton Lane Inn all do this brilliantly.

There are loads of examples outside hospitality too, of brands that customers adore, even though some aren’t very large companies.

All of which should signal that it’s possible to do this, no matter who you are or how big your company is. And that should give you hope because AI makes the fact that most businesses don’t do this perilous for their long-term prospects.

Why is this perilous to your business? Why does this matter so much?

Well, when an AI assistant or agent chooses your business, it chooses your company, it chooses your hotel, if you’re a hotel, it’s not going to ask who has the best vibes. It’s going to ask which business meets criteria it can measure.

Your brand runs the risk of being reduced to nothing more than price, location, availability of your product or service or a room… or the points that you offer.

You get turned into a commodity. Your brand becomes invisible. All that matters is some very specific, tactical, practical, measurable summary… and that’s what scares me. Not AI. But what happens to brands that never build anything that people care about?

I’ll repeat a mantra you’ve heard me say before: "Your brand is the prompt."

There’s actually a follow-on to that I never really say out loud because if you don’t hear this, you should: "Your brand is the prompt or you won’t exist."

That’s a huge, huge thing you need to be conscious about.

Because the other way you will get found by AI assistants and agents is for your customers to teach them that you are the one that they love, you are the one that they want. You are the one that makes them feel like who they believe they are, who they are meant to be.

Now, part of doing this well depends on having great data. That’s absolutely true. It matters for the AI too.

But making this happen depends on two big steps.

The first is you have to drive data fluency among your team. And by data fluency, I don’t mean the ability to read reports. I mean that your team uses data about your business and about your customers to curate great experiences for those customers. I’m going to have more to say about this in a minute.

As part of that data fluency, it’s critical that you help your team, whether they’re on the front lines, in the C-suite, or anywhere in between, to understand that when they’re putting data to work, they really, really, really have to be very conscious of the difference between being cool… and being creepy.

You’ve undoubtedly heard me talk about "the creepy line" before and why it’s so dangerous to get too close to that line, or worse, cross it.

But the example I always use is this. Let’s imagine you’re visiting a resort with your favorite traveling companion. It doesn’t matter who it is, but you’ve opted in.

When you get to the resort, you opt in to receive updates while you’re at the property. And your first full day on the property, you get an alert for two-for-one margarita specials at the pool.

Now, when you get an alert that pops up on your phone that says, "Hey, we have a two-for-one special on margaritas," do you think that’s cool? Or do you think that’s creepy? Remember, you opted in to receive these alerts.

Most people when I ask this question will say, "No, that’s cool." Oh, occasionally some will say, "I don’t know. That’s a little creepy." Right?

Okay, I’m going to give you the same scenario again. You’ve opted in, all that jazz. You say, "I want this. I want to hear this." And then you get an alert that says, "Hey, we saw that you and your traveling companion each had seven margaritas last night. How about a Bloody Mary to help you recuperate from that decision?" Is that cool or is that creepy?

Usually people find this one creepy… even though the business’s ability to execute that experience relies on essentially the exact same data as the first one: "We know you like margaritas."

But you can see how the first one demonstrates data fluency in action. The second one demonstrates that your company… is full of creeps.

Only when you get that first part right does it make sense to do the second thing that you have to do, which is invest in technology integrations that put that data in front of your team so that they can demonstrate good judgment and demonstrate good value to your customers.

Now, I can’t speak to every industry on this next point. But I can say that hospitality’s biggest flaw, and biggest superpower, has always been its people.

Hotels and resorts have notoriously been behind the curve on technology. The technology investments sometimes lag, particularly when you’ve got a lot of hotels to deal with in your company.

We hide that limitation behind human beings. We’ve been using people to paper over broken systems and still provide great experiences to guests for as long as I can remember.

Other industries can actually learn a lot from hospitality in that regard because you need to invest in great people or you need to invest in great tech.

If you scrimp on both, that all but guarantees that you are going to end up as a commodity that nobody loves because they will never get a great experience.

They may get a terrible experience and tell all their friends and family and fans and followers on social media about it, and then you’ve hurt the next generation of consumers, the next generation of customers.

Oh, and what are the AI tools going to know about you? That you do a really bad job. So that’s a lose, lose, lose proposition.

Now, what gave me the most hope after this session at this event I attended was how many of the event attendees came up to me at the book signing and said, "We want to do this better."

These weren’t cynical, burnt-out execs or disgruntled frontline folks. These were sharp, sophisticated business leaders who care so much about doing right by their customers.

And leaders in this case had nothing to do with their job title.

It had everything to do with their commitment to creating brand experiences that their customers will remember always. That customers will ask for by name. And that customers will teach their AI assistants and agents to choose each and every time.

The future of your business is not about smarter machines. It’s about whether you use those machines to give your people more room to be human.

I can’t guarantee your customers will rush right out and get their brand tattooed on their bodies. But you might just build a brand your customers will ask for by name, and that’s pretty damn good too.

If this episode made you think about someone on your team or a brand you work with, send them a link and tell them why it stuck with you. That’s how these conversations spread.

You can find the show notes for today’s episode and the full archive at timpeter.com/podcasts.

If you want to go deeper on this, my book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, expands these ideas into a practical framework that you can apply. Links are in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate you doing that. This show would not happen without you.

And until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

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Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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