Loyalty programs offer unique opportunities for firms to personalize their marketing communications to consumers. However, limited attention has been paid to how consumers’ actions within a loyalty program can be leveraged to design effective personalized messages. Addressing this gap, the current research investigates how tier level and goal distance in hierarchical loyalty programs can dictate varying responses to cognitive vs. affective message designs. Through two lab experiments and one field study involving real email campaigns from an international frequent flyer program, we show that the two components work jointly through a Boolean-like mechanism to determine a consumer’s mental construal level. A lower construal level results from simultaneous low tier and distance, which leads to a more favorable response to affective message appeals. In comparison, when either or both of tier level and goal distance are of high magnitude, the resulting higher construal level favors more cognitive message appeals.

忠诚度计划为公司提供了独特的机会来个性化他们对消费者的营销传播。然而，很少有人关注如何利用忠诚度计划中的消费者行为来设计有效的个性化消息。为了解决这一差距，当前的研究调查了层级忠诚度计划中的层级和目标距离如何决定对认知和情感消息设计的不同反应。通过两项实验室实验和一项涉及来自国际飞行常客计划的真实电子邮件活动的实地研究，我们表明这两个组件通过类似布尔的机制共同工作以确定消费者的心理解释水平。较低的解释水平是由同时较低的层次和距离引起的，这导致对情感信息诉求的更有利的反应。