Abstract

"Reimagining Membership. Loyalty Cards, Commercial Surveillance and the Intimate Relationships of Marketing"

Orsi Husz, Uppsala University (orsi.husz@idehist.uu.se)

My paper examines the emergence of store loyalty card schemes in Sweden in the 1980s and the socio-technological imaginaries and business practices of a new kind of marketing, based on commercial surveillance. Linking personal identification to transactional data, loyalty cards paved the way for marketing technologies such as personalisation. My main interest lies in the narrative and conceptual framing of these new practices. How were loyalty cards and programmes made sense of, explained and justified within the retail sector and to consumers upon their introduction? The few existing historical studies of computerised reward programmes (Lauer 2020; Turow 2017) focus on the US and on the 1990s and 2000s. The early Swedish story highlights how new marketing ideas and a new view of the consumer brought about a cultural reframing and commercialisation of the concept of membership.

The paper builds on two empirical cases. One concerns the so-called SELMA system, a technical solution proposed in 1982 for registering and using transactional data for marketing purposes, designed specifically for the Swedish Consumer Cooperative Union’s grocery stores (Konsum, Coop). It shows that loyalty cards blurred the distinction in public consciousness between “actual” membership, such as membership in a cooperative, and commercial quasi-membership. The second case is about the Ikea Family Card, one of the world’s earliest and largest loyalty schemes, which was launched in Sweden in 1984 and internationally in 1986. Ikea Family introduced a vocabulary of intimacy instead of the exclusivity typical of the earlier department store account systems or even of the international pioneer of loyalty reward schemes of the data age, the American Airlines’ Frequent Flyer Programme (1981). The Ikea Family Card brought together a rhetoric of familiarity and folksiness with a new device of commercialised intimacy, training the public, already before the internet era, to give up personal data.