It’s been over a year since the CCPA hit the statute books and CMOs face a turbulent landscape while third-party cookies are crumbling and at the same time customers demand more value and deeper personalization. To thrive, loyalty programs must evolve beyond points-for-purchase schemes into robust ecosystems that benefit both customers and your bottom line.

The Anatomy of Consumer Loyalty

• Trust: Consumers remain loyal to brands they believe in. Transparency, ethical practices, and aligning with customer values create a foundation of trust, especially as targeted advertising becomes less reliable.
• Advocacy: When consumers consistently recommend and champion a brand, a powerful bond is forged. In a cookieless world, these organic advocates become essential for attracting new customers.
• Habitual Engagement: Loyal customers continually interact with your brand through content, communities, and social channels. This engagement provides valuable data and strengthens the relationship.
• Emotional Investment: A true emotional connection makes customers resistant to competitors and more likely to engage actively with your brand, further fueling their loyalty loop.

Value Exchange is the Currency

By offering more than just discounts, your loyalty ecosystem delivers:

• Privacy-Friendly Data: Gain rich behavioral insights by customers opting in to share data in exchange for relevant experiences.
• The Peak End Rule: consumers remember the high point and the last point of engaging with your brand. If you send them a request for feedback as they leave the event they booked with you 3 month
• Long-term Growth: Focusing on retention, referrals, and advocacy fosters a sustainable business model less reliant on costly customer acquisition.

There are some great examples of how brands are adding value to their customers with what we think is the main purpose of the collaboration::

• Retention: Starbucks and Spotify found a great way to partner to offer mutually extended value to their customers that created a win for all parties.
• Data-Driven Marketing: booking.com famously test every aspect of their customer experience with continuous experimentation giving the customer ultimate say in the product roadmap.
• Advocacy Amplified: One of the best examples of two brands working together to create a community that aligns with both brands is Go Pro x Red Bull.
• Extended Reach: A number of fashion brands are now working with rental partners to extend their addressable audience in a sustainable, circular way.
• Offer the full package: Amex Travel Services have long been the leaders in offering a partnership model, with a combination of flights, hotels, cars and more recently the Live Events Site for Amex® Card Members.

The Benefits of Behavior-Driven Loyalty

So far, the focus has been on the benefits derived by the consumer for deeper loyalty programmes. But how do they benefit the orgainisation too?

• Organic Growth: Loyal customers become ambassadors, attracting similar individuals to your brand; a crucial strategy in a cookieless environment.
• Resilient Brand Perception: Emotionally invested customers are more forgiving and less easily swayed by competitors.
• Actionable Insights: Monitoring consumer behavior patterns provides a rich understanding of your customer base, fueling improvements in everything from product development to marketing.

How does Tickitto Help?

You probably didn’t miss the shameless plug of our own partnership with Amex Travel Services as one of the examples in a previous section. Yes, we are the partner that provides somewhere in the region of 90,000 events and experiences for their Card Members as they travel the world (or, in fact, when they want to stay close to home too).

This is the version of our web app where there’s a handoff from the primary brand (which owns the customer relationship) to us as the partner who provides the service. This could equally be provided as a white labelled or jointly branded web app. We’re easy - our service and partnerhip philosophy is deeply embedded and the same across all.

Footnote

This is part of a series of papers considering consumer loyalty in the context of the increasingly competitive digital market. Please let us know if you’d like us to highlight the next ones to you (throw us a permission and build a relationship … why not?).

This paper was researched and collated by the team at Tickitto as part of a series which we want to share with clients, partners and anyone interested in the travel and events sector.

If you would like us to share future research with you directly.