Retail media may excite the execs, but loyalty is where the real revolution is happening
Loyalty programmes have changed dramatically in the past five years and serve as a yardstick for the digital transformation of grocery retail.
By Ben Davis
Go back to 2018 and there’s an Aldi Australia ad campaign that sums up the old world of grocery loyalty schemes. The discount supermarket’s humorous TV spot poked fun at ‘pointless points’ and featured a seemingly entranced till worker informing a shopper that “you have been loyal for many moons and earned thousands of points”, at which point a cultish crowd of blissed-out shopworkers appears, chanting the word “points” in unison.
In Marketing Week that year, journalist Ellen Hammett contrasted the loyalty landscape to the early days of Clubcard in the 90s, opining that: “Increased competition has since made it more difficult for loyalty schemes to cut through, while macro-economic pressures have introduced the perennial dilemma of balancing customer incentives with the cost to the business.”
Fast-forward to 2024 and competition, cost of living and technology have all contrived to change the picture considerably, with loyalty schemes now an integral part of the value proposition at the big four and beyond.
