🥁Modern loyalty programs are in danger of becoming a race to the bottom, where brands confuse true loyalty with perpetual discounts and cashbacks that simply buy the next transaction.
🥁When loyalty is reduced to cheap membership fees, free deliveries, and endless offers, companies erode margins, train customers to chase deals, and turn what should have been a strategic moat into a tactical price weapon.
🥁Using Indian ecommerce as a live test case, the presentation shows how programs like food delivery, quick commerce, and large marketplaces have slipped into a “Prisoners’ Dilemma”
🥁Each cut forces a deeper cut from competitors, while benefits are quietly trimmed and customer expectations harden around “almost free” loyalty.
🥁Discount addiction, broken trust when benefits are reduced, operational gaps that boomerang into churn, and boardroom pressure that chases GMV and active users at the cost of unit economics and long-term brand equity.
🥁Loyalty needs to shift from transactional bribes to emotional engagement, powered by data, AI, and design that makes customers feel known, recognized, and part of a community, not just a coupon list.
🥁Winning programs reward a broader range of behaviors, align with brand identity, create tiered status and experiences, integrate seamlessly across channels, and put operational excellence behind every promise so that loyalty becomes an outcome of value and trust, not a line item in the marketing budget.
🥁Readers are invited to rethink loyalty as an experience-first, profit-smart strategy that builds long-term fans instead of bargain hunters, moving from “How big is our program?” to “How deeply do our best customers care about us?”
🥁As Ken Blanchard reminds us, “Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If we really want a booming business, we have to create long-term fans… When the customer comes first, the customer will last.”
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