I would wager that, within 24 hours of reading the words “loyalty” and “program” in this article, you will independently hear “sustainable” emoted at work. Hypothetically, I’d like to build a construct for you that puts these words together to build something more meaningful: “earning sustainable loyalty” or more properly “sustainably building loyalty.” A really important part of this will be to execute on the idea using our current talent pools — that is, the people we have on hand. First, let’s take a cook’s tour of where we are now and how we got here.

A few years ago, the chief marketing officer I reported to casually carpet-bombed me with an “everything we do in marketing is in support of new business” sonic boomlet. My ears still buzzing, I fumbled for the “Exit World Now” safety release.

Out the window went all my pretensions of searching for multiple grails of expression to build loyalty to our brand without seeming to be selling it overtly. Loyalty started at home and high-touch aesthetic enhancements were a way of life to motivate our company’s elite cadre of professionals — not to mention making our own marketing team feel good about themselves and the brand. And that was just the internal stuff; we weren’t even at the client loyalty dilemma yet.

We need a little backstory here regarding the external loyalty that marketers were seeking from clients a few years ago. All paths were valid: intellectually alluring stats sent in emails; the promise of data-driven ideation briefs; old-school charm applied at tragically hip Ivy League events; sponsorships; conferences; thought-leadership articles … wait! Got it! This is just great marketing looking for clients for whom to do outstanding work and then — and only then — would we engender their loyalty. It all comes together … it takes a village.

Really? That seems more like two villages doesn’t it? Maybe two villages perched on their respective edges of a stream … no, make that a seasonally-adjusted river. Do not click-away at this moment because I would like to add a few more layers of complexity while you are considering the riverfront property on which you used to lounge. Adjust your Photoshop brush-palette settings to broad and let’s build our playlist together:

• Our Changing World (prosaic dub)

• Technology (trance mix)

• My Generation (Pete Townshend)

• Transparency (Le Must club mix)

• Talent (free swim dub)

• Juggle (198 beats-per-minute version)

• World Economic Tumult (WET)

It is complicated, isn’t it? It can be challenging. But this is going to be key to the hypothesis coming soon. So, let’s run backwards up the list since it seems like everything else in our lives is backwards right now.

WET stands for World Economic Tumult, and it just means we’ve all gone through the sheep-dip multi-tumults together. We’ve gotten WET. You’d think this would forge community, but it seems to be making Boomers inured to world- or marketing-variety news, and, sadly they’re a bit skeptical.

However, a quick look through any number of Ipsos Loyalty studies and a clear pattern is that Boomers were more seriously financially impacted by WET than Gen X, or Gen Y. So, they approach moving from old-school to new-school with some caution. Still, they represent the larger group of decision makers, so we have to skew towards their needs and foibles. (Look, don’t feel bad now, it’s too early in this article and besides we’re talking about you…)

Juggling … what’s to talk about? Did your parents tell you it would be like this? No. Because life wasn’t in hyperdrive for them but now you can’t divert your eyes from the ring-road for a second. That, plus you factor in getting WET and Technology to boot, and hey, you’ve already got so many flaming ninja death-stars in the air that one sneeze and you’d take out a server farm.

A few years ago, Herman Miller, a company where loyalty to product borders on fanaticism for real reasons, not marketing reasons (you’re likely sitting in one of their products), realized the enormous strain that was starting to occur with telecommuting, SOHO, et al, and started an e-zine appropriately called Jugglezine. Not a ’zine of commiseration, but one that offered tips and ideas to take the villager forward along the path.

Why is this important? Well, it was corporate altruism and simply helpful to a lot of people. It didn’t talk about Herman Miller furniture; it talked about how people were getting the best situations for themselves with telecommuting, and how to make their lives smoother if they were going SOHO. Some companies just have this in their DNA; the rest must now acquire it rapidly and with great transparency.

Talent Free-Swim. This is an area where loyalty looks more like interpretive dance and has taken root strongly among Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials. Remember the villages? Talent Free-Swim occurs several times a year when the villagers free-associate in the river and show off transparent supply-chain water sport clothing (swimwear).

Under the stars and masquerading as a luau (because the villagers are a teensy bit embarrassed about having accepted a free breakfast at an Economist conference) Gen Yers free-swim in the river from village to village to see what the world is like. They are apt to stop where they think they can make a difference.

They’ve fooled Gen Xers into keeping tiki torches lit near the waterside as directionals, but this is only because they feel sorry for the Xers and know that giving them a task is the best way to manage them. You see, Ys can communicate with dolphins underwater, so they actually would prefer a network like that, their own VPN with no access for others. This just validates the well-accepted research that each generation needs its “secret garden.”

Talent Free-Swim is helped out by Technology with virtually every imaginable social platform known to mankind. Since this group eschews traditional mid-market recruiters, preferring LinkedIn or the chat room at the Surfrider Foundation, they are the salvation and the nightmare of talent retention.

Tip to peers in Talent: skip parties, giving to charities in their name (unless you involve them in the choice), or painting yourself as clueless with shotgun communications where you reveal all of their email addresses to each other.

If you retain them: kismet. If they find truly transparent mentors in your org: karma. If they become innovative team leaders, ask them about being the Red Cross coaches for the Boomers who aren’t sure about getting back in the water. That might be half of your management team and you need to keep them breathing rhythmically.

My Generation. When Pete Townshend penned the lyrics to “My Generation” in 1965 he could hardly have expected that 50 years later multiple audiences would continue to reflect on its relevance aided, no doubt, by a fantastic Wikipedia analysis that leaves no stone unturned. But that is good because if “Just do it” was a cry of Boomers, “Why do it?” is the cry of Gen Xers. When given tasks they approve of, Xers usually excel brilliantly and find new truths and helpful insights along the way. But it would be somewhat better if they had more ability to kick-start independently. Still, they want to learn. We need to build on this.

Technology and Our Changing World. Hopefully, throughout your career, you have not been scared of the former and have instead loved and embraced it. Regarding the latter, with any luck you have rolled with the punches. You are probably a Boomer, smart-to-brilliant, motivated, upper-management, have two vehicles, one sustainable and the other not so much. You’ve got NPR programmed on all the station positions in one of the cars because your daughter knows it’ll be Freaky Friday if you can’t find Fresh Air at any given moment of the day. You know which car to drive when.

When the new Starbucks with a drive-through hit town, you viewed it suspiciously until the first day you had your child with you while driving the recast hybrid Highlander. While struggling with your BlueAnt Supertooth settings, you veer left a bit too early because Dusseldorf has just joined the call. You wing a support pole and the staff refuses to serve you because they care that the roof might collapse on you while they are blending your drink.

Dusseldorf, you are painfully aware, is hearing every pin-drop of the altercation, so calm is the order of the moment. Because the ’bucks is staffed 100 percent by Millennials who cannot find other work, you realize you can probably negotiate with them. Somehow, if you can get the vehicle out of the way of everyone else… but while doing that, the Supertooth picks up the last of the drive-through air-to-air dialogue and you, Dusseldorf, and your seven-year-old all hear the barista respectfully inquire: “Was he driving a hybrid…?”

Score: Howard Schultz, Starbucks, and seamless brand engagement=1, you=0. Worse, they offer you a complimentary chai “because it soothes your nerves.” (What nerves? Face it: you’ve been incapable of a neural response since your first boss screened Morning in America for you.) Compounding things, the ’bucks crew politely ignore the fact that you have whacked their open-barely-48-hours canopy to the tune of $10,000 in structural damage. You elect to pay all repairs to your vehicle out-of-pocket because you admire all Millennials so much for their unflappable brand delivery.

Lessons Learned. So, my takeaway on our new brandscape is this: Why haven’t we as a marketing community learned some of the lessons that practically everyone else on the planet has learned, post-recession, and is executing? We look curiously at carrot mobs — boycotts in reverse where people organize shopping sprees to reward socially-responsible companies — but we don’t pull the best parts of that movement out consistently for marketing and selling.

While still doing our day jobs, let’s integrate them into a real community. This can’t be so hard, as we build and sell the architecture for this daily. During that free-swim, we are letting ideas cross-pollinate through job switching. What if we didn’t have to wait that long and feel the pain of it all?

Recently, I participated in a knowledge-sharing conference developed by Monotype Imaging, a venerable brand in our industry, but not a power seller. Their idea? Start creating communities for the next wave of logical work-teams to remove the awkwardness of first meetings and inject something meaningful into the mix as glue (in this case, fresh thinking from speakers on a difficult design-technical area).

They brought client-side brand managers together with agency-side interactive designers and creatives, along with designers and programmers, and crafted work-teams. All easy. All pretty altruistic. And they’re taking it on the road. Hmmm … let’s see, that seemed to cut heavily across every one of the generational verticals, clients, agencies, holding companies… oh, oh, hands on ears! I’m feeling a sonic boomlet again, and it’s a good thing.