Customers nonetheless need loyalty, rewards, and digital worth. Weak engagement will not be a requirement downside. It’s a supply downside.
The loyalty business has a cushty clarification for softening engagement: fatigue. Customers are enrolled in too many applications, uncovered to too many presents, and now not motivated sufficient to take part.
It’s a tidy analysis. It is usually unsuitable.
Antavo’s 2026 information exhibits that 43.2% of shoppers usually tend to be part of a loyalty program than they have been a yr earlier, and 65.9% say loyalty applications are actually a part of their lives. A market in retreat doesn’t produce numbers like these.
The attainability information tells the story immediately. Antavo discovered that 49.1% of shoppers say rewards take too lengthy to earn, and 41.1% say rewards expire earlier than they can be utilized. Greater than 1 / 4 of factors earned — 27% — go unspent. One other 12% expire in applications that use expiration guidelines. However probably the most telling determine is that this: 74% of members quietly give up after two months, slipping into inactivity whereas holding their membership. Solely 3.4% actively decide out. The supply is damaged.
The patron logic behind that is extra sensible than the business typically admits. The identical analysis discovered that 70.8% be part of loyalty applications for money-saving advantages — coupons, vouchers, cashback. Free services and products matter to 46.3%, and personalised presents to 41.6%. Solely 15.1% cite VIP therapy and conveniences.
The dominant expectation will not be status. It’s usable worth. And usable worth, by definition, requires a system that makes use simple.
That’s the place the business’s actual downside turns into seen. Friction in loyalty isn’t just a nasty interface. It’s lengthy incomes cycles, expiring balances, awkward onboarding, inconvenient apps, and disconnected touchpoints.
Comarch’s 2026 analysis places numbers on it: 32% of shoppers cite lengthy or tough onboarding as the primary impediment to participation, 28% abandon due to inconvenient apps. The actual difficulty will not be which channel wins. It’s whether or not recognition and worth stay accessible as the buyer strikes between them. When they don’t, the system loses the member quietly — not by lively rejection, however by accrued inconvenience.
Gaming is helpful right here as a reference level for loyalty — not as a novelty comparability, however as a mature business class already coping with the identical underlying downside at scale. Gaming is now not a distinct segment exercise. Newzoo says 85% of shoppers have interaction with video games in a roundabout way, 80% play them, and greater than 90% of Gen Alpha and Gen Z have interaction with video games.
The worldwide video games market is forecast at greater than $188 billion in 2025, with cell alone accounting for about $103 billion. For youthful shoppers specifically, gaming is woven into on a regular basis life — and lots of the similar shoppers manufacturers try to retain by loyalty are spending vital time inside digital leisure environments the place worth is instant, seen, and constantly bolstered.
What makes gaming immediately related to this argument is the place its progress now comes from. Development is now not primarily about discovering extra gamers. It’s about deeper monetisation of those already there. Gamers more and more count on equity, transparency, and value-for-money. How an organization monetises now issues greater than whether or not it could purchase.
That shift ought to sound acquainted to any loyalty operator. The problem is now not attain. It’s how successfully present consideration, saved worth, and consumer identification are carried ahead and transformed into ongoing engagement.
That is the deeper overlap between the 2 fields. Loyalty and gaming are more and more serving the identical broad client inhabitants, and each are being formed by the identical shift in expectations. Gaming has largely solved the issue loyalty remains to be combating. The business discovered, by direct business consequence, that engagement dies when worth is invisible, distant, or laborious to succeed in — and rebuilt its product philosophy round making progress legible, reward steady, and the trail from participation to payoff as brief as potential.
Customers now spend extra of their lives inside digital techniques that practice them to count on worth to be instant, legible, and moveable. When loyalty nonetheless asks them to attend too lengthy, restart too typically, or tolerate an excessive amount of useless worth, the system begins to look weaker than it truly is — not as a result of the proposition is unsuitable, however as a result of the supply fails the expectation the broader digital surroundings has set.
The strongest loyalty applications is not going to be those with the biggest enrolled bases or probably the most elaborate reward catalogues. They would be the ones that shorten the gap between curiosity and use.
The enrolled base is already there. The demand is already there. What the information constantly exhibits is that the system is shedding folks between the second of curiosity and the second of felt reward.
Customers haven’t stopped wanting worth. What they’re rejecting is the trouble required to succeed in it.
That’s not fatigue. It’s friction.
Concerning the Writer
Olli Kallioinen is CEO and Founding father of LoyaltyPlays, the corporate behind the anyplay co-branded card designed completely round digital-native client existence. He has spent twenty years constructing manufacturers and platforms that join loyalty, funds, and digital leisure, together with the world’s first premium digital leisure redemption platform, serving 50 million members throughout international loyalty applications. He’s a Pink Herring International High 100 Most Modern Firms and Loyalty Awards Greatest Partnership recipient.
