Diamond Card Discount Card Malahide..why bother?

A good idea with poor application. Hot on the heals of blogs and social networks that inhabit the virtual world is the influx of loyalty/discount cards in the physical world. All preach community, but loyalty/discount cards while commendable in many cases are more often then not a white elephant. One such example of this is Diamond Card in Malahide, North County Dublin. For a successful shopping card scheme to exist you need two major elements, number 1, you need businesses to participate, and number 2, you need customers you use it. Sadly the operators of Diamond Card have only pushed the side of signing up participating businesses. It costs 100's of Euro's a year for a business to be involved, so you can see why this side of the scheme has taken up all of their focus.

What this means is that you have over 100 local businesses paying a combined amount of over €10,000 euros a year to be part of a scheme that no punters are signed up to. The story that these businesses sign up for is that Diamond Card holders will be inclined to shop at their stores to benefit from the special offers, and these businesses pay good money every year to be part of the scheme. So when 90% of the population of Malahide have neither being asked or have no interest in paying €20 a year to be the holder of a card, what benefit does this loyalty scheme have to the participating businesses? None!

Diamond Card have no structure or plan in place for signing up shoppers, its too hard a sell. People don't want to pay €20 for a card that they have no real reason to use. Local shops such as Eurospar, Super Value have free loyalty schemes. The Diamond Card specials offers that are offered by most of the participating businesses like Blue Moon, Bossy Boots, La Sirena, Village Books, Camille Boutique are really no different to the regular offers, Facebook offers, early birds or sales available in all these places to the general public without the need of a card. Diamond Card know they can't shift their cards, so they focus on selling what definitely sounds like a plausible story to the local businesses instead. So what you have is a discount card scheme with no cardholders, only participating businesses? ...so these businesses are handing over money effectively for nothing. They are conned by the term 'Exclusive card' totally unaware that no-one will be using these cards.