Best of the Back Catalogue: An Award-Winning Loyalty Story with AS Roma (#758)

March 31, 2026·41 min·4 clips

How did a football club's loyalty program win three awards by treating one superfan as worth 30 normal fans?

Paula Thomas starts with the awards angle. She remembers judging the Loyalty Magazine Awards and being caught off guard by a sports loyalty entry that felt fresh, mostly because fan loyalty is so often treated as obvious before anyone checks it. AS Roma gives her a cleaner test case. The Advice Group's work with the professional football club becomes the episode's center, with three awards behind it and a pretty direct point: loyalty mechanics still have work to do in sport. Laura Cagnacci keeps the conversation grounded. Her explanation of CVI, the customer value index, gets past the usual labels and looks at interaction frequency, social information, and proactive participation. The value can move. It rises or drops as each fan behaves over time, so the club gets a changing view of fan value and database potential. That makes clustering less lazy. The database is not just a pile of fixed audience boxes. It can connect behavior, engagement, and marketing activity in real time. The Prince Charles example does the job. Laura puts him beside Ozzy Osbourne to show how traditional clustering can put very different people in the same bucket because they share surface traits. That is where the mistake becomes practical. Send two unlike consumers the same commercial communication and the brand has mistaken easy data for useful understanding. Paula keeps the thread moving with short prompts while Laura works through the mechanics. The lesson is familiar, but sharper here. Fan value depends on observable behavior, timely participation, and better information for marketing activities. Sports loyalty still needs design, even when the love looks obvious.

As heard by us

A sports loyalty case turns dynamic fan value and smarter clustering into a practical lesson for loyalty marketers.

Sports loyalty gets a sharper test through AS Roma's work with The Advice Group, the Italy-based loyalty marketing agency where account manager Laura Cagnacci works.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get to test the easy assumption that sports fans are already loyal, with AS Roma as the case.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Let's Talk Loyalty