Not liking the design of it. When i first saw it, immediate thoughts were a cross between an everyday rewards card (the orange) and a wish gift card (heart & hands). The current maroon design rocks - looks wayyyyyyy more professional because it conveys "exclusivity" lol. When you pull that baby of your wallet/purse, customers reactions behind are like "woah, what is thhhhhhhhhhat?" haha
Anyways, the move definitely makes sense to consolidate the rewards card program with the staff discount entitlement (hence the streamlined orange branding). This is because many employees like myself never bothered to register the staff card with an everyday rewards program account. This previously meant missing out on a large number of "everyday saver - look for orange" sale items in the catalogue each week.
Taking a more sinister angle, also from personal experience, whenever there's very attractive sales on (popular product at half price or better) or when the 10% staff days roll around, Woolies Ltd employees are easily one of the bigger % of shoppers coming through the tills. So it makes sense for norwest office to extend the data collection and analytics to include all staff.
Overall though, will only be switching over to the 'WOW discount people card' (name just DOESN'T roll off the tongue) if they deactivate and force retirement of the old card.