In recent years, retail has been operating in a scenario radically different from the past. Persistent inflation, geopolitical instability, supply chain tensions, and a growing fragility of purchasing power have put pressure on business models that for decades had relied on stability and predictability. In this context, customer loyalty, historically and mistakenly considered a relatively “inertial” variable, has turned into a decisive asset for a retailer’s success, losing its automatic component.
Consumers continue to build relationships with retail brands, but they do so in a more selective, attentive, and critical way. Loyalty is the result of a dynamic balance between convenience, perceived value, coherence, and experience. For retailers, this implies shifting perspective from defending market share to earning shopper loyalty. The desk analysis activities of the Loyalty Promotion Monitor therefore focused on understanding the drivers guiding this transformation, both on the consumer and technological sides.
A more rational consumer, but no less demanding
The contemporary consumer is often described as “more price-conscious.” This interpretation, however, risks being reductive and partly misleading. In reality, we are facing customers who have progressively refined their decision-making skills: they actively compare alternatives, select more consciously, filter information stimuli, and, when necessary, decide not to purchase. They reduce waste, rationalize the shopping basket to cope with inflation, and revise their purchasing habits, without entirely giving up what they perceive as relevant in terms of quality, health, sustainability, and overall experience.
This is not a contradiction, but a new behavioral synthesis. Purchasing decisions are no longer driven by a single dominant driver, but by the result of the simultaneous interaction of economic, functional, value-based, and emotional factors. This makes consumer behavior less predictable through traditional categories and requires a profound revision of interpretative models. Loyalty can no longer be read in binary terms (loyal versus disloyal), but as an adaptive relationship that changes intensity, modes, and duration over time depending on contextual conditions and the experience offered.
In this scenario, promotions continue to play an important role as a tactical lever, but on their own, they are no longer sufficient to sustain lasting relationships. Excessive reliance on promotions risks fueling opportunistic behaviors, making customers increasingly price-sensitive and less inclined to recognize a retail brand’s distinctive value. Management must therefore be able to integrate promotions within a broader and more coherent experience, combining economic convenience and experience, rationality and values.
In other words, price remains an essential component of the value proposition, but it can no longer be the only language of the relationship. Building loyalty today means being able to orchestrate convenience, perceived quality, and the value-based meanings of the experience in a balanced way, tracing a new frontier of value that goes beyond simple cost competition.
Digital marketing as a strategic infrastructure
It is at this point that digital takes on a central role. Digital marketing, too, is undergoing a profound and structural transformation, which concerns the way companies build, govern, and measure the customer relationship. Digital ceases to be a set of touchpoints and becomes a relational hub through which retailers collect signals, interpret behaviors, and translate data into strategic choices. From this perspective, digital marketing is not only about “reaching” the consumer, but about understanding them in a continuous, contextual, and dynamic way.
The most significant evolution is represented by the structural entry of artificial intelligence into marketing processes. AI now makes it possible to move beyond the logic of static segmentations, typical of retrospective marketing, enabling dynamic and predictive models capable of anticipating behaviors, recognizing recurring patterns, and modulating interactions in real time. This does not mean “hyper-automating” the relationship or replacing managerial judgment, but making it more relevant, reducing noise and dispersion. In this sense, the application of AI to advanced CRM systems is not merely a path toward operational efficiency, but a fundamental lever to increase decision quality and experience coherence across the entire customer journey.
The element of discontinuity, even more than the abundance of available data, is organizations’ ability to transform data into actionable insights. Predictive models, dynamic segmentations, and pre-churn analytics make it possible to move beyond a descriptive and retrospective view of marketing, orienting it toward an anticipatory logic. Personalization should not turn into increased communication pressure or a multiplication of messages, but into the ability to select what is truly relevant for the customer, delivering value through simpler, more recognizable, and more coherent experiences.
Digital, therefore, makes engagement selective. And for this very reason, it requires more mature governance, capable of integrating technology, data, privacy, and measurement into a unified vision. It is on this ground that digital marketing and loyalty meet, ceasing to be tactical tools and becoming structural components of retail’s competitive strategy. A strategy that does not aim solely to stimulate short-term purchases, but to build sustainable, measurable, and adaptive relationships over time.
Beyond loyalty fatigue
All trends converge on the need to rethink loyalty as a strategic architecture. Traditional loyalty programs today show evident limits in terms of engagement and differentiation. The so-called “loyalty fatigue” is the symptom of an offering that often can no longer stand out or generate real perceived value.
The new frontier is loyalty integrated into digital marketing processes, capable of combining personalization, simplicity, experience, and sustainability. This also requires an evolution in measurement: it is no longer enough to monitor redemption or purchase frequency. Behavioral and attitudinal indicators must be integrated, signals of disengagement must be read before they turn into churn, and the contribution of loyalty to brand equity and long-term corporate value must be assessed.
If these levers are not orchestrated coherently, the risk is adopting fragmented solutions devoid of an overarching vision. In a context where loyalty is no longer guaranteed, the ability to build relevant, measurable, and adaptive relationships becomes one of the main factors of competitiveness. Loyalty today is a choice that consumers renew every day, and digital is the ground on which this choice takes shape.
Castaldo, S. (2025). Digital loyalty. Leveraging digital touchpoints, big data, and AI to boost shopper trust. EGEA.
