Co-founded Pointshogger, a loyalty miles and points blog, with my good friend Matthew as we wanted to educate fellow Canadians on how to travel while spending as little as possible. Seeing the world does not need to cost a fortune; all it takes is a little organization and persistence.
OUR STORY
While Matthew, as the miles and pointes expert, takes care of the content I took on everything else to help get the word out for Pointshogger: from designing the brand, to setting up the website, to managing the social media for our online marketing strategy, to interfacing with readers. As for taking our marketing strategy offline, the inevitable action to take is travel by redeeming points so we can learn and share with our audiences. Occasionally, I would act as the Pointshogger brand ambassador and hop on a plane, go somewhere, and let our readers follow my journey on social media to interesting places in hopes of inspiring them to explore… A cut-out of the mini Pointshogger logo never leaves my side, whether flying to my destination or driving across Canada!
NAME & DESIGN CONCEPT
As literal as they come, the “P” wraps itself around a red “point” (hogging it, in effect) while the colour scheme reflects the national colours of Canada – an important way to differentiate us from our myriad American counterparts.
We do not call ourselves “luxury travelers” with miles and points. In fact, we opted to target those individuals who collect points for quantity of trips and thus who seek to maximize their winnings on everyday spending, instead of those focused on quality of trips (e.g. traveling business class or staying at top-tier hotels) like road warriors and religious points collectors, as they were an underserved segment… I personally would choose Airbnb and visit as many locations as I can over 5-star hotels any day, for example, and found few sources catered to me.
As a designer, it has been great to develop the brand across channels. And as a marketing professional, I also love being exposed to the more strategic pieces: selecting target markets, determining how to tailor our content (type, message, frequency), joining a community of bloggers with similar interests, forging relationships with partners, etc. It is all very energizing!
