“There is no ShoutEm app,” says Viktor Marohnić. It’s an unexpected thing for him to say, considering how he is the CEO of ShoutEm, a company that launched a new app of their own dedicated to consumer loyalty. But part of ShoutEm’s mission has always been to be invisible, to create an experience so seamless that their main users aren’t even realizing that they’re using it. In a market concerned with branding, ShoutEm is walking down the road less taken: one where the user experience comes before their own logo, and their product’s work is finished as soon as possible.
Founded in 2011, ShoutEm has roots in both New York and Zagreb, Croatia. It’s a common mistake to not associate Zagreb with cutting edge tech. Back in 1968, Zagreb was the focal point for the New Tendencies artistic movement, which promoted concepts of “thinking machines” and the idea of visualizing research in artistically.
“For a brief moment in time,” according to a book on the movement, A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art, “Zagreb was the epicenter of explorations of the aesthetic, scientific, and political potential of the computer”. Marohnić and ShoutEm have continued this revolutionary tradition, he says: “ShoutEm was one of the startups that broke the ice and showed that a global tech startup can be started in Zagreb and Europe. Most of these new startups [from Zagreb, such as PhotoMath and BellaBeat] see us as role models.”.
About a year and a half ago, ShoutEm decided to survey its customers and see what they needed most, loyalty was at the top of the list. This is hardly a surprise, considering how most of ShoutEm’s clients are smaller and medium sized businesses, or the smaller brands of larger companies. Without a large presence loyalty can be tough to get, considering the vast competition both brick-and-mortar and online companies face. And the path to getting loyalty is filled with challenges, like understanding the customer’s personal journey to your product and how they see you as the solution.
In creating a solution for the loyalty problem, ShoutEm faced two competitors: other loyalty apps and the classic loyalty card. They felt a distinct advantage over the latter, simply based on personal experience. “I mean, I get those loyalty cards and I lose them right away. They’re not helpful,” says Marohnić. The greater difficulty came with the glut of competition.
In order to stand out, the new app needed to be special. “It took a while to build out the features because we wanted something really robust, flexible, customizable”. Those features range from store variety in rewards to incentivization, and the pay-off for the app is substantive. ShoutEm also noticed that once other loyalty cards started getting used, customers would be looped into their own network. In their survey, ShoutEm found that companies wanted “to control their interactions with their customer base without any outside involvement”, so a closed loop their app became.
Loyalty cards are often associated with restaurants, and while ShoutEm is “interested” in the restaurant business, its sights are much larger — helping businesses of any variety, from a hardware store to a winery, to create a brand on its own terms. And with that branding, they can start to accumulate data on customer patterns. And in return for that data, ShoutEm is giving their companies, which range from cigar stores to Gannet’s smaller newspapers, a chance to swing at bigger companies.