loyalty

In Conversation: Jaume Miquel Naudí, Tendam

4 September 2026

The consumer wants to pay less. That is mathematics, not strategy.

Jaume Miquel Naudí, Chairman & CEO, Tendam · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Ask a retail chief executive what all their fragmented, unpredictable, endlessly-segmented consumers still have in common, and most will reach for a trend. Jaume Miquel Naudí reaches for arithmetic. “They want to pay less. That’s mathematics.” You can do whatever you want, he says, but the number bends one way.

Miquel is Chairman and CEO of Tendam, the Spanish fashion group whose loyalty clubs count more than 27 million members. That last figure is not a footnote. It is the whole thesis.

He frames the next few years as a film with all the spicy elements: fear, tension over pricing, the eruption of AI, and consumers seeking truth. But the discipline underneath the drama is where the value sits. Loyalty clubs are 75 per cent of Tendam’s business, so that is where the money goes. Not cost savings, which he will take but does not prize. Investment in what makes the business different: consumer behaviour, personalisation, pricing. On technology he refuses the single big bet, running instead a pyramid: infrastructure at the base, some 25 quick wins in the middle to keep the organisation excited, and the strategic projects on CRM, demand forecasting and margin optimisation whose payback comes later. “Momentum is important,” he says, and he means it as an operating principle, not a mood.

Then the human turn. Push everything to pure science, he warns, and you land in a world of one product, one car, one microchip. The job is to serve the dream as well as the infrastructure.

For any brand owner, the lesson is uncomfortable and clarifying. Know your one consumer, forget the rest, and earn the right to charge for the dream by first being true.

The Roth Read. If your customer wants to pay less and buy less, price is not your problem to solve, it is the condition you build inside. Decide today which one difference justifies your margin. If you cannot name it, your shopper already has: it is the price.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

Your loyalty card was built to persuade a person. Soon it must persuade a machine.

26 August 2026

For thirty years, the loyalty card had one job: to nudge a human being. Earn, save, redeem, come back. Now a colder reader is arriving at the counter, one that does not feel loved and cannot be flattered. The question is no longer whether your programme moves a shopper. It is whether it moves an algorithm.

That is the argument running through a set of recent pieces on where loyalty is heading. Writing in Inside Retail, the analysis is blunt: programmes built to influence human decision-making may now also need to influence machine decision-making, because an AI assistant weighing several retailers on a customer’s behalf will consider loyalty benefits alongside price, convenience and availability. The same study found 80.4 per cent of Australian retailers naming loyalty a strategic priority for the next 12 to 18 months, and 57.1 per cent still describing their loyalty capability as maturing. In Forbes, Len Covello of Engage People puts the shopper’s side plainly: “It’s not trophy value anymore. This is currency, and it’s something I expect to have utilization with.”

Hold those two shifts together, because they are the same shift seen from two ends. Points are becoming spendable money, and the thing deciding where they get spent is increasingly software.

Here is why it matters, and it is not the part the headlines reach for. The romance of loyalty was always the emotional bit: the tier, the badge, the feeling of being recognised. A machine strips that out. It does not care that you are Platinum. It cares whether Platinum can be read, priced and applied inside the answer it is about to give. As Denise Holt of Phaedon argues in Loyalty Magazine, the first piece of work is plain: your loyalty value has to be legible to the assistant at the moment it is comparing options. Legible. Not lovely. Legible.

That single word rewrites the brief. For years the loyalty team optimised for feeling. Now it must optimise for a data contract. Can an agent see the points balance without a human logging in? Can it tell that 4,000 points knocks a real number off a real basket, today, at checkout? Can it apply status the way it applies a coupon? If the answer is no, your programme is invisible at exactly the moment the sale is decided. The store did not lose the customer. It lost the introduction.

And there is a trap on the other side. The tempting response to a machine that shops on price is to feed it discounts. Monocle warns where that ends: perpetual 15 per cent off is not a loyalty programme, it is a subsidised promotion in a loyalty costume, training your best-looking cohort to carry your worst margins. Hand an agent nothing but a discount and you have taught it to treat you as the cheapest tab, not the preferred one. The moment your only signal is price, you have volunteered to be a commodity.

This is the machine moment of truth arriving in the one place retailers thought they owned outright: their own members. The relationship you spent a decade and a marketing budget building now has a translator sitting between you and the shopper, and the translator only speaks in structured data and applied value.

What to watch. Watch for the first retailer whose points become natively spendable inside an AI assistant’s answer, the way Engage People’s Access Plus already links balances to checkout at Amazon, BP and PayPal. When a balance is a payment option an agent can reach for without a human clicking, the programmes that stayed a walled garden of emotional tiers will find the agent simply reads past them.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether your customers love your loyalty programme. Start asking whether an algorithm can read it, price it and spend it in the three seconds it takes to answer “what should I buy.” A reward a machine cannot see is a reward you are no longer giving, and the emotion you built the whole thing on is the first thing the machine throws away.