Most loyalty schemes are designed to encourage you to spend more and get a little back. More interesting ones reward you for bringing a bag, staying home, returning a stolen lamp, or handing over a rival's points. The prize may be a free pizza or a few hundred miles. What matters is what earns it: make the qualifying action say something about the brand that an ordinary discount never could.
- Reward the Desired Behaviour
- Turn Compliance into Reward
- Reward the Opposite Behaviour
- Reward Category or Rival Behaviour
- Turn a Problem into Redeemable Value
- Make Redemption Immediate or Useful
- Gamify Earning or Redemption
1. Reward the Desired Behaviour
Tie the reward to a verified action the brand wants to encourage, so value comes from doing rather than buying.
The Rewards Bag — Ta-Ta, VML Uruguay, 2025
Uruguay banned free single-use plastic bags in 2018. Shoppers bought reusable bags, then forgot to bring them, and many left with only what they could carry by hand. For Ta-Ta, Uruguay's most popular supermarket chain, that meant smaller baskets. VML started from the one thing shoppers never forget: discounts. Each reusable bag was linked to the shopper's loyalty ID through a unique code. Scanning it at the entrance brought up personalised offers based on that person's purchase history, and scanning it again at checkout applied them, with no paper coupons. Remembering the bag now paid.
Sales of new bags fell 92%, suggesting shoppers brought the same bag back each visit. — VML
2. Turn Compliance into Reward
Reward people for following a rule or safety measure they would otherwise ignore or resent.
S-Drive — Samsung, Leo Burnett Sydney, 2014
One in three young Australian drivers crash in their first year on the road, and smartphones make the problem worse. Years of shock-tactic road safety ads had told young drivers what not to do. Samsung tried the opposite in a pilot around Newcastle, New South Wales: it paid them for doing the right thing. Drivers placed their Galaxy phone in an NFC cradle that launched the S-Drive app and switched the phone into a safe driving mode. Every kilometre driven without touching the phone earned points, redeemable for rewards such as rugby tickets, cinema vouchers and fuel coupons, and friends could form Drive Teams to earn bigger prizes together. The device that caused the distraction became the one that tracked good behaviour and rewarded it.
