The New Loyalty Equation: Value, Recognition and the Race for Relevance
As loyalty moves beyond points and discounts, Loyalty & Reward Co’s Srikrishna Mohan and Philip Shelper explain why relevance, behaviour and measurable value will define the next generation of loyalty programs.
A loyalty programme used to be something customers accumulated. Points sat in an account, status climbed a tier, and the promise of a future reward kept the relationship alive.
That model is beginning to feel strangely slow.
In MENA, where consumers move between digital wallets, apps, marketplaces and brands with little patience for friction, loyalty is becoming less about what has been saved and more about what can be used now. The customer wants to see the value of the relationship while the relationship is happening.
But there is another shift underneath it. Brands are asking what behaviour the programme should create, whether that behaviour is genuinely incremental, and whether the economics can be proved.
Srikrishna Mohan, Loyalty Director (MENA), Loyalty & Reward Co, and Philip Shelper, CEO & Founder, Loyalty & Reward Co, see the change from different angles. Together, their views point to a loyalty industry moving away from the points balance and towards something harder to manufacture: Behavioural Value.
When Loyalty Starts Looking Like a Wallet
The modern loyalty member increasingly expects the programme to behave less like a membership scheme and more like money.
“Increasingly treat loyalty as an extension of their payment apps rather than a separate destination,” says Srikrishna Mohan. Customers want to move points, redeem instantly at checkout and understand their balance without having to navigate a separate loyalty journey.
That expectation is particularly visible across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where loyalty increasingly sits alongside everyday digital transactions.
- Instant value: Rewards are expected to appear close to the moment of interaction.
- Low friction: Multiple redemption steps can turn a benefit into a chore.
- Shared value: Family and household account sharing is common and needs to be designed into the programme.
- Visible fairness: Members compare programmes openly, making the perceived value of points increasingly important.
The implication is larger than convenience. A programme can have an impressive earn rate and still lose relevance if customers struggle to understand what those points are worth.
Mohan puts the shift plainly: “Loyalty is shifting from a card in a wallet to a real-time value exchange.”
That changes the job of loyalty. The programme is no longer waiting patiently for a customer to accumulate enough value to return. It has to demonstrate value quickly enough to make the next interaction worth having.
The Reward Has to Change Something
A discount can reward a purchase. Loyalty, properly designed, should influence the next one.
That distinction sits at the heart of Philip Shelper’s definition of the category. “We define a loyalty program as a ‘desirable behaviour stimulation program’,” he says.
The phrase sounds clinical, but the idea is surprisingly human. The best programmes are built around an understanding of what customers might do more often, differently or earlier if the right incentive existed.
Shelper argues that sophisticated programmes combine consumer psychology with rewards and benefits to influence acquisition, spend, engagement, retention, cost-savings, advocacy and data collection.
That means the starting question cannot simply be: What reward should we give?
It has to be:
- What behaviour are we trying to stimulate?
- Why would the customer want to change it?
- What value does that behaviour create for the business?
- Can the resulting change actually be measured?
Mohan’s experience across Shukran, Blue Rewards and Nuhdeek points to the same principle from another direction. The mechanics differed, but the common driver was relevance to the category.
Pharmacy customers responded to frequency-based value, while multi-brand members could be more responsive to aspirational and status-based rewards. The reward works, in other words, when it has a reason to exist beyond the reward itself.
Personalisation Is Becoming the Price of Staying
Customers increasingly understand that their data has value. What they expect in exchange is not necessarily another generic coupon, but evidence that the brand remembers the relationship.
“Customers are increasingly demanding a personalised experience, and are demonstrating they’re happy to switch brands to get it,” Shelper says. “Consumer realise their data has a value, and what they expect in return is personalised communications, offers and experiences.”
That expectation makes personalisation less of a premium feature and more of a condition of relevance.
Recognition can take many forms:
- Tier status that makes a customer feel known.
- Exclusive access that gives membership a tangible privilege.
- Priority treatment that rewards commitment.
- Surprise-and-delight benefits that create moments of appreciation.
- Family-oriented benefits that reflect how households actually make decisions.
The last point matters particularly in MENA. Shelper notes that non-Western cultures, especially across the region, are often more family-centric, creating greater openness to programmes that benefit an entire household rather than a single member.
The result is a more complicated definition of “the customer”. A loyalty account may belong to one person while the value is experienced by several.
That is why personalisation cannot simply mean inserting a first name into a message. It has to reflect the context in which loyalty is actually lived.
Gamification Works When It Becomes a Habit
Gamification has an obvious temptation: make the app lively, give customers something to tap, and watch engagement rise. But activity is not necessarily loyalty.
Mohan has seen personalised challenges and progress-based rewards perform more sustainably because they connect the mechanic to behaviour customers already have.
“Personalised challenges and progress-to-next-level rewards hold up because they tie into a habit the member already has, such as a weekly grocery run.” That distinction separates a useful game mechanic from digital decoration.
A milestone challenge with a small guaranteed reward can reinforce an existing shopping rhythm. A spin-the-wheel mechanic may generate a burst of activity, but if there is no meaningful connection to the underlying transaction, the effect can disappear just as quickly.
The same applies to badges and leaderboards. They may produce app opens, but without a path back to a purchase or another desirable behaviour, the programme risks optimising for movement rather than meaning.
The better question is therefore not whether gamification is engaging. It is whether it gives the customer a reason to repeat something the brand values. When the game disappears and the behaviour remains, gamification has done its job.
The Hardest Part of Loyalty Is Proving It Works
The loyalty industry has spent years getting better at rewarding customers. It has been less consistent at proving whether those rewards actually created additional value.
Shelper is unusually direct about the gap. “It is shocking, but most loyalty programs in operation are unable to effectively measure their ROI, therefore they have no way to know if the program is working or not.”
The problem begins with programme design. Brands need to identify the behaviours they actually want to stimulate, invest against those behaviours and then measure whether the investment produced an incremental result.
That requires a different discipline from simply counting redemptions or tracking member activity.
A customer who would have bought anyway is not necessarily evidence of loyalty programme impact. Neither is a points balance, an app open or a coupon redemption in isolation. The measurement loop has to connect design, behaviour, financial impact and optimisation.
Mohan makes the hierarchy similarly clear: “The value proposition comes first.” Experience follows, then data closes the loop, while partnerships extend the proposition. That architecture matters because technology cannot rescue a weak reason to participate.
The next generation of loyalty may therefore be judged less by how many members it has and more by whether it can answer a harder question: What changed because the programme existed?
The answer will increasingly determine where loyalty budgets go.
And there is another complication coming. Loyalty is moving beyond the boundaries of individual brands, even as AI-driven commerce could make direct customer relationships more valuable than ever.
The programmes built for the next decade may have to do both: participate in broader ecosystems while still giving customers a compelling reason to stay close to one brand.
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