Zsuzsa Kecsmar is the Co-Founder of Antavo AI Loyalty Cloud, one of the leading SaaS platforms in the world.”
Practically every company these days feels the need to have a loyalty program of some kind. Anything to keep customers coming back.
With so many programs out there, all more or less cut from the same cloth, loyalty fatigue often sets in amongst customers. They’re always quick to enroll for the points, discounts and perks – why wouldn’t they? – but then they go dormant shortly after when the rewards turn out to be underwhelming.
Member activation is a persistent challenge for most loyalty marketers, exactly because there is so very little difference between one program and another, apart from the reward mechanics. “Spend this much to get this much in return” is the standard pitch. While the form of reward varies by industry – flights, stays, perks, freebies, cashback, etc – the value exchange is almost always purely transactional. The value of joining is reduced to a savings calculation. How long will it take me to earn my reward, and will it be worthwhile? Customers know they are being bribed with their own money – but better than being ripped off, they figure.
This reward model has stood the test of time through two distinct eras – the trading stamp craze of the 1950s and 60s when 80% of households avidly kept stamp books which they redeemed for merchandise – and the modern points-based era that began when the airlines used their reservation databases to enroll frequent fliers. Ever since then program designers have stuck to the same proven “Give-to-Get” playbook.
With the sudden rise of agentic commerce, however, there is an urgent need to improve the perception of program value amongst members – to go beyond rewards. For one thing, brand loyalty is in decline. Today people feel they are nothing more than pawns on a chessboard – paying more to get less – treated like an ATM machine. They feel caught on a “hamster wheel of debt”1, leaning on credit to make ends meet. But thanks to AI shopping assistants, power is finally shifting to them, as these personal agents boil brand choice down to the most nutritious facts, no matter what the rewards-to-point ratio may be.
If a brand’s citable attributes – price, features, Reddit reviews, 3rd party ratings – don’t stand up to scrutiny – if the brand is easily substitutable, with no distinctive claims – it will never make it past the starting line, disqualified from even competing. The only countervailing strategy, aside from being noticeably best or better at something, is to augment the value proposition – more personalized experiences, more active customer recognition, more compelling entitlements – to do whatever it takes to make customers feel the brand actually cares about them. As the new Kraft Heinz CEO recently said, “Consumers are literally running out of money toward the end of the month. Being there with the right offering at the right time has never been more important.”2
That’s why more money is being pumped into loyalty programs than ever before. The global market is expected to grow at a CAGR of almost 11% over the next 7 years. Loyalty is finally being seen as a growth driver – as a business imperative. Loyalty databases are deemed a strategic asset – the key to unlocking future cash flow. What’s more, the program ROI is easier to prove than ever before. Centralized loyalty engines that capture the full extent of customer interactions are now crucial to not only driving customer engagement and repeat purchase but revealing distinct and actionable behavioral segments. But before the full potential of loyalty programs can be realized, brands have to first ask themselves this question: “What would make a customer choose them if there were no rewards attached”?
The answer, according to the 5th annual Antavo Global Customer Loyalty Report, is to go beyond rewards and make every interaction feel valuable. Antavo is a London-based loyalty technology company that got its start 14 years ago and has since grown into one of the major platform suppliers in the market with clients across many different B2C sectors in Europe and elsewhere.
As Antavo points out in the report, customers don’t feel as valued as loyalty marketers would like to believe. Loyalty programs can break out of the sameness trap and deliver more rewarding experiences by mapping the data they have to the preferences of customers.
The report, brimming with facts and insight, is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. One of the main authors of the Report is the Hungarian-born Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Zsuzsa Kecsmar. She was named Personality of the Year at the 2024 International Loyalty Rewards, and named by Forbes as one of Europe’s top 100 female founders in tech.
I started by asking Zsuzsa how she was able to make the leap from an early career in radio journalism to the world of martech.
<
Zsuzsa Kecsmar(ZK): Uh, it’s a great question and thanks for asking. I think simply I understood that I’m not talented enough for radio. That’s, that.
SS: That’s hard to believe.