Brands have known what customers want from loyalty for a decade. Acting on it is the hard part.

They want early access, exclusive events, personalised recognition, community membership. The kind of things that make them feel known, valued, part of something.

The brands know this. They've known it for years. And they keep sending discount codes anyway.

This isn't a data problem. The data has been pointing in the same direction for at least a decade. It's an organisational problem, and a specific one that I think is worth paying attention to.

The path of least resistance

Simply, discounts are easy.

They're quick to approve, quick to deploy, and quick to measure. The finance team can cost them. The marketing team can automate them. The board can see the short-term redemption rate and call it loyalty.

Experiential rewards are none of those things. Early access requires coordinating with product. Exclusive events requires someone to design and run them. Personalised recognition requires knowing something vital about a customer as an individual. Community membership requires believing your brand is worth belonging to.

Every one of those is a harder conversation internally than approving a 20% off voucher.

So organisations reach for the voucher. Not because they think it works better, but because it's the thing that requires the least cross-functional effort and produces the most legible number.

What customers are saying

When a customer says they want experiential perks over discounts, they're telling you something specific. They're telling you that the price transaction is not the centre of the relationship for them. They already bought the product. What they want now is to feel that the brand sees them as more than just a revenue unit.

Personalised recognition is not complicated in principle. It means knowing that a customer has been with you for seven years and acknowledging it. It means noticing that they always buy a certain thing or category and giving them access to something relevant before anyone else. It means treating loyalty as a relationship and not as a cost centre.

Early access and exclusive events take it further. They say: you matter enough to us that we're going to give you something we're not giving everyone. That's a message with real emotional weight. A discount says: here's money back. Early access says: here's belonging, and we'd love you to be in.

The difference between those two things is not a marketing question. It's a strategic one. It's about whether you've done the work of understanding what your customers actually value, not as a segment, not as a demographic, but as people who have chosen to spend their money with you.

The organisational problem

Most loyalty programme decisions are made inside the wrong conversation. They live in the commercial team, or the CRM team, or wherever the retention budget sits. The people making the decisions are measured on short-term redemption and incremental revenue. The things that would build the kind of loyalty the data describes, the emotional, relational, experiential things, don't show up cleanly in those metrics.

So they don't get prioritised. Not because nobody knows they matter, but because the organisation isn't structured to act on them.

This is the same structural problem that sits behind most failures of customer strategy. Brand teams and CX teams operate in separate silos. Neither has a full view of what customers value or why. Decisions get made on the basis of what can be measured rather than what matters.

Loyalty is the most visible symptom of that problem. The discount code is the output of an organisation that hasn't had the harder conversation about what its customers ultimately want from the relationship, and what it would take, organisationally, to deliver it.

What doing this properly looks like

We've been working with brands on customer value for nearly 40 years. The organisations that build loyalty that holds, the kind that survives a competitor price promotion, that generates word of mouth, that produces customers who actively choose to stay, have one thing in common.

They understand what their customers value. More than at the level of survey data. At the level of genuine, deep engagement with customers as people. What matters to them about this brand. What would make them feel recognised. What belonging looks like to them in this category.

That understanding comes from being willing to ask harder questions and act on the answers, even when the answers require cross-functional effort and can't be reduced to a single metric.

The gap between what UK shoppers say they want from loyalty programmes and what they actually receive is not a gap caused by ignorance. Every brand marketing director in the country knows experiential beats transactional. It's the fact that experiential requires organisational courage. And discounts don't.

As Peter Drucker famously said: 'Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.' I urge you to be that someone.