Every few years, loyalty comes under renewed scrutiny. Customers are described as fickle. Switching costs are low. Attention spans are shrinking. The story is familiar: loyalty is no longer realistic in a digital, price-sensitive world.
That framing is convenient and mostly wrong. Loyalty didn’t disappear. Brands diluted it — slowly, deliberately and often unintentionally — by substituting gimmicks for value and mistaking engagement for commitment.
That’s why Volute Group’s prediction that 2026 will be the year loyalty becomes a competitive advantage again feels less like a forecast and more like an inevitability. The market is forcing corrections.
The loyalty illusion
For more than a decade, loyalty programs have been designed to look effective rather than be effective. Points programs and gamification have increased. Promotions became perpetual. Dashboards filled with activity metrics — enrollments, redemptions, clicks, opens, streaks — all signaling momentum. What they didn’t show was whether any of it actually produced incremental, durable value.
In many organizations, the hunt for loyalty became performance art. The underlying assumption was simple: if customers are engaged, they must be loyal. But engagement is not loyalty. It’s behavior — often rented, sometimes subsidized and frequently reversible the moment incentives disappear.
From a measurement standpoint, this was the original sin. Loyalty programs were rarely designed around causal impact and were never built to answer complex questions like:
- Would this customer have stayed anyway?
- Did this reward change long-term behavior or accelerate a purchase?
- What happened to margin-adjusted lifetime value?
Instead, brands optimized for what was easiest to observe and not what mattered economically.
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The gimmick era collapsed when its economics stopped making sense. Retail programs inflated point issuance without improving the experience. Redemption costs rose while incremental spending flattened. Programs quietly became discount engines, compressing margin under the mask of loyalty.
Subscription businesses layered perks and short-term incentives to slow churn without addressing pricing friction or product fatigue. Churn stabilized briefly, but lifetime value declined as retention costs rose faster than retained revenue.
Gamified engagement programs boosted activity metrics that had no causal relationship to repeat purchase or advocacy. Dashboards looked busy. P&Ls did not improve.
Even travel and financial services — once the gold standard for loyalty — trained customers to distrust the system through repeated point devaluations. Loyalty turned into arbitrage. Preference gave way to optimization.
Customer behavior reflects changing values
There’s a persistent tendency to blame customers for declining loyalty. They’re impatient. They chase deals. They don’t value brands anymore.
That explanation is unfair. Customers today are paying more for less. Prices have risen as service levels have fallen. Long-established brands have been slow to reinvest to remain relevant, stretching the cash cow model to its limits. A recent WSJ article on declining loyalty for Kraft Mac and Cheese illustrates the point, but Kraft is hardly alone.
Brands continue to speak the language of customer centricity while behaving in increasingly extractive ways. Seen through this lens, customer behavior isn’t emotional — it’s rational. Loyalty, from the customer’s perspective, is an investment decision. It requires confidence that the exchange will remain fair over time. When brands erode that confidence, customers don’t revolt. They reallocate. What looks like disloyalty is often value rebalancing.
One of the most damaging marketing misconceptions is treating loyalty as something that can be launched. Loyalty emerges from consistent value delivery over time. Strong loyalty brands rarely talk about loyalty programs. They focus on fundamentals: pricing discipline, service reliability, friction reduction and trust preservation. Their customers do the loyalty work for them.
Weak loyalty brands do the opposite. They build increasingly elaborate programs to compensate for deteriorating experiences, hoping mechanics can substitute for credibility. They can’t.
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The measurement gap no one wants to own
Loyalty programs persist not because they work, but because they’re rarely held accountable to financial outcomes. Most organizations can tell you how many customers enrolled, how many redeemed and how often they engaged. Far fewer can tell you:
- What was the incremental retention lift?
- How did margin-adjusted CLV change?
- What was the payback period?
- Which behavior actually drove profit?
Without those answers, loyalty becomes a cost center masquerading as a growth strategy. This is where the CFO lens matters. Loyalty only becomes defensible when it’s treated like capital allocation: clear hypotheses, disciplined measurement and accountability for return. Anything else is theater or, even worse, wasted resources.
Aligning loyalty with value and accountability
Economic pressure has a way of clarifying what actually works. As margins tighten and customers become more selective, loyalty efforts that don’t produce measurable financial returns will become increasingly difficult to justify. Engagement without economic impact won’t survive sustained scrutiny.
That’s why 2026 matters. Programs built on optics rather than outcomes will become unaffordable. The brands that succeed will simplify — reducing reliance on discounts, tying rewards to behaviors that matter and measuring loyalty as a profit driver rather than a participation metric. The question will shift from how to increase engagement to how to increase lifetime value.
This kind of loyalty requires long-term thinking. It depends on leaders willing to defend investments that compound over time, even when they don’t deliver immediate payback. Founder-led and privately held companies often perform better here because they can prioritize consistency over extraction and value over optics. Public companies can do the same, but only when loyalty is treated as an enterprise growth asset rather than a marketing expense.
Strip away the platforms, points and terminology, and loyalty is straightforward. It rests on fair exchange that is consistent, reliable, respectful and valuable. If 2026 becomes a turning point for loyalty, it won’t be because brands discovered something new. It will be because they finally aligned customer value, brand behavior and financial accountability — and stopped mistaking gimmicks for growth.
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