Teardown: The North Face's XPLR Pass Loyalty Program

Happy Thursday! Welcome to the first paid edition of Backstage Pass. Every Thursday, there will be a deeper dive into the world of customer engagement than I cover in the free version of Backstage Pass on Tuesdays. The free version of Backstage Pass will cover the ‘why’ of customer engagement, the paid version of Backstage Pass will drill down into the ‘how’.

Here in the paid version of Backstage Pass, I’ll be covering in depth reviews of some of the top loyalty programs, brand ambassador programs, voice of the customer, customer advisory panels and other customer engagement initiatives. We’ll break down what’s working, and talk about how you can apply these same tactics to help grow your own businesses. Whether you are the CMO of a Fortune 500 company or a soloprenuer here on Substack just looking to grow your audience, there will be something you can use to improve your efforts.

Let’s look at The North Face’s XPLR Pass Loyalty Program

A bit of a disclaimer as we begin studying loyalty, brand ambassador programs and other customer engagement initiatives. Typically, companies don’t want to share any more information on the performance of these programs than they have to. It makes good sense: If a company decides to launch a loyalty program and immediately sees strong growth, that strong growth can create a serious competitive advantage for the company, and it may not want to broadcast its successes for fear that competitors may try to copy what’s working. Recall in a previous issue about the wildly successful brand ambassador program that Maker’s Mark launched. CEO Bill Samuels Jr. saw it was generating positive returns soon after launching it, and his take was ‘Oh shit, it’s working…let’s not tell anyone!’

So with that in mind, we can still study the structure of XPLR Pass and get some insights into either what’s working for The North Face, or at least get some sense of what outcomes the brand wants from the loyalty program.

When it comes to analyzing loyalty programs, you can typically learn a lot from evaluating the rewards structure of the program. For instance, if the rewards are built