Loyal Beagle

Loyal Beagle is a digital loyalty platform that helps independent businesses keep their customers — digital loyalty cards, rewards, cashback and customer insights that live in a customer's phone (including Apple and Google Wallet). The company had powerful technology (a white-label partnership with a proven loyalty infrastructure) but was still early: the offer was essentially "loyalty software for small businesses", which describes a category, not a customer.

Two questions stood between the product and a market:

1. Which businesses, exactly? Independent traders and small businesses are not one market — a café, a hair salon and a tradesperson run loyalty very differently.
2. What do their customers actually value? Consumer loyalty behaviour is noisy — points, discounts, exclusivity and simplicity pull in different directions depending on the customer and the business.

The team needed research to answer both before doubling down on brand, marketing and product direction.

As the freelance UX & market researcher, my brief was to lay the research foundations for the business:

• Define the target market and build user personas for the platform — both the business owners who would run loyalty programmes and the consumers who would hold the cards.
• Establish the online brand identity on the basis of that understanding.
• Work closely with the design, marketing and development teams so research directly shaped the brand, marketing site and product decisions.

I ran a mixed-method research programme across both sides of the platform:

• Business-owner research (the "business" side): interviews and surveys with independent business owners about how they currently handle repeat custom — from paper loyalty cards to nothing at all — to understand their motivations, effort thresholds and what would make them try a digital loyalty programme.
• Consumer research (the "consumer" side): surveys and interviews with everyday shoppers about loyalty behaviour — which programmes they actually use, why they abandon cards, and what rewards feel worth it — to ground the consumer experience in real behaviour.
• Market and competitor analysis: mapped how the platform compared with alternatives (BoomerangMe, PassEntry, Loyalzoo, Yollty, Perxo and others), identifying genuine differentiation — simplicity, speed of setup, and UK-focused support for independent businesses — rather than inventing differences.
• Live user testing: ran testing on early web experiences and flows, watching real users attempt real tasks, to catch friction before launch.
• Synthesis into product/brand inputs: translated findings into personas, a defined target market, positioning and messaging principles that the design, marketing and development teams used to build the brand identity and website.

I worked embedded with the design, marketing and development teams throughout, so insight flowed into decisions week by week rather than landing as a one-off report.

• A clearly defined target market and research-backed personas for both business owners and consumers, replacing guesswork with an evidence-based view of who the platform serves.
• A brand identity and online presence built on that understanding — positioning that speaks to the actual pains of independent businesses (keeping the customers they've already won) rather than generic loyalty features.
• Product and marketing foundations — the personas, differentiation and messaging fed the marketing site, homepage direction and product prioritisation, giving the team a coherent story to tell customers and investors.

Early-stage research is about deciding what not to be as much as what to be. The most valuable moment was the market/competitor work: it stopped the team defaulting to feature comparisons and refocused us on the businesses who were underserved — those who wanted simple, fast, supported loyalty without an enterprise implementation project. Working embedded rather than at arm's length was the right call; by the end, research questions were coming to me from marketing and product before they were even fully formed.