Correspondence: Pedro Reinares Lara, Department of Business Administration Area of Marketing Paseo de los Artilleross/n 28032 Madrid Spain. Tel: +34 91 488 76 40; Fax: +34 91 371 89 50; e-mail: pedro.reinares@urjc.es

¹holds a PhD in Marketing (UCM, Spain). He has occupied responsible positions in leading companies as well as in several Spanish Universities. He is the author of six well-known books in the fields of marketing and communication. Nowadays, he combines his work as resident teacher in the Department of Marketing at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid with his work as a consultant.

²is Assistant Professor, Marketing Department, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). He has a PhD in Marketing and Business Administration in Advertising by Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His work focuses on several issues related to Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Information Systems. His research has been published in refereed international journals. He is also an active marketing research consultant.

Received 29 October 2007; Revised 29 October 2007; Published online 3 December 2007.

Abstract

This work attempts to specify procedures to improve the management of loyalty programmes based on one of their structure elements: prizes or rewards. The starting point is the premise that the current classifications of prizes found in the academic literature focus on the offer, are reductionist, and only permit the establishment of eventual effects between such rewards and one part of the programmes (the monosponsor type). Therefore, from the programme users' viewpoint, we propose to contrast the importance of the rewards in comparison to other management elements. Subsequently, from a classification of incentives based on consumers' preferences, we will determine their interest in such rewards and establish the influence of these rewards on consumers' satisfaction with the programmes. The results will allow us to establish effective conclusions for the management of multisponsor programmes and will represent a basis of useful specific knowledge for future investigations focused on understanding this important marketing instrument.