Everyone is chasing loyalty programme perfection, but we reached it years ago. It’s called a stamp card.

Go to your local cafe/hairdresser/artisan patisserie (must be nice). Take out your humble, well-worn piece of cardboard. Watch that satisfying little stamp complete a row. Enjoy your free coffee/haircut/pandan croissant. Perfection.

But now there’s activating an offer, checking which products qualify, calculating a points multiplier and discovering your reward expired yesterday. Sadness. Somewhere along the way, brands saying thank you became brands giving homework.

In a recent piece, Edith Cowan University academics Sanjit K Roy and Saalem Sadeque argued that trust, commitment and perceived value are key drivers of loyalty programme engagement. Ultimately, it’s about how customers feel.

Navigating multiple browser tabs and logging in to save five cents on an offer that requires a 26-minute drive is an act devoid of any feelings. Positive ones, anyway.

We spend a lot of time discussing what loyalty programmes can do for businesses. More visits, fuller carts, more in-depth data. But for customers, the reward is only part of the experience. There’s everything around it too: how easy it is to understand, how much work it takes and how it feels when it finally lands.

That whole journey is a signature brand moment. And in trying to make loyalty more sophisticated, we’ve engineered the fun right out of it. So let’s try and find it again.

McKinsey’s 2026 Australian consumer loyalty research puts quickly accumulating and redeeming points right at the top of customers’ list of priorities.

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