Every few years the retail trade produces a list of loyalty trends for the coming season, and every few years the list says much the same thing in slightly newer language. This year’s, a round-up from the trade site EXEIdeas, is as good a specimen as any, mainly because of what its conclusion admits.
The piece runs through the familiar eight: AI-powered hyper-personalisation, first-party data, omnichannel, real-time rewards, gamification, paid membership tiers, mobile apps, and loyalty wired into the point of sale. “The future of loyalty,” it concludes, “is not a card. It is a relationship.” True enough, but it skips a more useful sentence: the card was never really about loyalty either.
The list rewards the shopper who tells you things, whether or not that shopper loves you. Read plainly, every item on it is a way of extracting first-party data at the moment of purchase: what you bought, when you came in, what you nearly bought and walked past. The points are the fee the retailer pays you for that information, and the discount is the receipt.
This matters more in 2026 than it did in 2016 because the signals retailers used to rent from the open web are drying up. Third-party cookies are going or gone, the walled gardens charge more to reach your own customers, and the privacy rules have tightened around everything in between. First-party data, the kind a shopper hands you willingly in exchange for a reward, is now the one asset a retailer owns outright and no platform can repossess. That is why the trade press keeps circling it, and why the loyalty programme has become the last piece of ground a retailer controls.
It is also why the “relationship” framing misleads if you take it at face value. The EXEIdeas list treats paid membership, the Amazon Prime model of charging shoppers for the privilege of being loyal, as just another trend, when it does a different job. A points card buys data from the many. A paid tier sells status to the few, and in doing so tells you precisely who your most valuable customers are, because they have raised their hands and paid to be counted. One programme is a net and the other a filter. Retailers who run both without knowing which job each is doing end up with a bulging database and no idea who in it matters.
All of this data collection assumes the shopper is doing the choosing, and increasingly they are not. When a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy, the answer is likely to turn on price, availability and whatever the assistant can read about the product, with the points in your scheme counting for little. The retailer’s hard-won first-party data sits inside a loyalty silo that is probably out of the agent’s sight, and nothing suggests it would carry much weight if the agent could see it. You can know everything about a customer and still lose them at the moment a machine makes the introduction on your behalf.
The list never asks what all that data is for when the thing forming the impression that decides the sale is no longer a human you can personalise an email to. Loyalty data was built to win the shopper, and the contest is moving to winning the shopper’s agent, which takes a different skill.
What to watch. See whether any loyalty platform starts exposing its first-party signal outward, to the agents and assistants doing the recommending, rather than hoarding it inward for email campaigns. A programme that makes its data legible to the machine without handing away the margin has understood where the moment of truth has moved.To the Machine Moment of Truth. One still counting app downloads has not.
The Roth Read. If you run a loyalty programme, stop asking how to make customers feel loved and start asking what, precisely, you are buying with every point you give away. Data you can act on is an asset. Data that dies inside your own app, probably unseen by the machine now choosing on your customer’s behalf, is a cost dressed up as a relationship.