It’s official, loyalty is waning, a new report suggests, with shoppers now more likely to choose where to buy based on fulfilment and customer service.
More than a quarter (27.4%) of UK and US adults now feel no loyalty to any brand, while only 6% feel loyal to an ecommerce brand, according to The Loyalty Paradox Report from digital transformation consultancy Kin + Carta and customer data specialist Edit. It questioned 2,000 adults in the UK and US Censuswide about their attitudes to loyalty, hyper-personalisation, relevancy and customer experience.
Loyalty to ecommerce brands was, indeed, below that shoppers felt to food and drink store retailers (21.5%) and finance (9%). Rob McGowan, joint managing director at Edit, says: “These results suggest that while the ecommerce sector is now booming and here to stay, brands would be wise not to confuse habitual purchasing with perceived loyalty.
“Outside of ecommerce, loyalty towards financial products increased with age and, unsurprisingly, with those who have an income of £75,000 +, with over 20% of respondents in this income bracket claiming loyalty to brands within the sector.
Some loyalty stats
Some 43% of respondents suggested a discount code or incentive would persuade them to sign up to brand communications, while 25% would like ‘exclusive products or first opportunity to purchase’, and Gen Z consumers saw “exclusivity” as particularly appealing, with nearly a third (30%) interested in ‘first opportunity to purchase’.
Rewards were seen as an appropriate trade-off for sharing personal information, but more pragmatic considerations remain the most important consideration to younger audiences. Operational and customer service communications outweighed rewards as a ‘return factor’ for younger generations. 34% of Gen Z respondents and 32% of Millennials said that they would be deterred from making another purchase if they cannot contact customer services via [their] preferred method’.
Karl Hampson, chief technology officer of data & AI at Kin+Carta, says: “Our research shows that brands must not confuse repeat purchasing with “loyalty”. Instead, they should balance repeat transactional activity with how engaged the customer is across all interactions.
“Data will be key to this holistic measure, but equally brands must invest in the capabilities to understand the human behind the data. This means making data more accessible, insights easier to unlock and bringing your customer experience and data teams closer together so a shared understanding and strategy can be achieved.”
An important article to read on this subject is: Stop focusing on loyalty and start thinking about relevance
Further reading: how SwiftERM works.
loyalty: the current operational framework
loyalty can now be considered through SwiftERM’s autonomous individualisation. Product relevance is recalculated for each identifiable customer from that customer’s own behavioural and transactional evidence, rather than being assigned by a fixed segment, campaign or predetermined journey. This distinction matters because an individual’s interests can change between visits, purchases and periods of inactivity. A current decision therefore needs current evidence.
SwiftERM evaluates the products that are becoming most relevant to each person and applies that decision autonomously. The operating model does not depend on a marketer continually creating segments, selecting products or scheduling another campaign. It is designed to use first-party behavioural and transactional signals already associated with an identifiable customer, so the decision remains specific to that customer rather than a broad cohort.
For loyalty, the practical test is not whether a retailer can create more rules. It is whether the system can recognise a change in an individual’s buying intention, reassess the available products and act without waiting for a manual campaign cycle. The output must remain traceable to the customer evidence and the ecommerce catalogue used to make the decision.
Implementation also needs disciplined data handling. Product identifiers, availability and customer events must remain consistent enough for relevance to be recalculated. Existing ecommerce operations should retain control of catalogue truth, order truth and customer permissions. Autonomous individualisation then operates within those established boundaries instead of inventing a parallel customer record or an ungoverned product feed.
The commercial value of loyalty should be assessed through observed customer response, orders and turnover, not through the volume of campaigns produced. That keeps attention on whether product selection becomes more useful to the individual and whether the retailer captures demand that would otherwise remain unrecognised. It also separates autonomous decision-making from conventional automation that simply executes a previously written rule faster.
This current framework preserves the original article’s subject while bringing its explanation into line with SwiftERM’s present capability: one identifiable customer, individually recalculated product relevance, and an autonomous decision made from that person’s own changing evidence. The same principle applies as catalogue choice, customer behaviour and commercial conditions continue to change over time.
In operational terms, the retailer retains the commercial context while the software performs the individual calculation. That division is important: the catalogue and customer record remain governed business assets, while product selection responds continuously to evidence rather than to a static assumption made when a campaign was first configured.
