One of my favorite websites is www.netpromoter.com. Lots of useful information about how to use customer loyalty in different ways to build a better business.
Since its necessary to know who your loyal customers are and why they're loyal, before taking action to leverage that loyalty, customer feedback management dovetails very closely with loyalty initiatives. In fact you need feedback management in order to accurately identify loyal customers.
At any rate, one of the netpromoter.com blogs talks in depth about how advertising is failing to produce desired results these days and how loyal customers seem to be the one group where advertising still seems to have an effect. It seems to me therefore that targeting marketing and especially direct marketing towards customer segments with higher loyalty makes a lot of sense. By doing so it would save on marketing spend at a minimum and potentially could provide a boost in business generally.
The entire article can be found at:
http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter_community/blogs/richard_and_laura/2009/04/22/how-to-win-customers-and-influence-buyers
