Loyalty is dead. Long live incentive optimization.

Spend five minutes browsing loyalty vendors and you’ll start to feel it: déjà vu with a different logo.

Points, tiers, gamification, emotional connection, customer delight, lifelong engagement… you know, all the stuff that sounds great in a pitch deck and dies the second it hits the checkout line.

Because here’s what actually happens: Customers get higher prices unless they sign up. Another app to download. Another email to ignore. Store staff turned into point-pushing NPCs: “Have you joined our loyalty program?”

It's a loyalty theater. A well-rehearsed performance where everyone knows their lines, but no one’s really buying it. Except, of course, the customer, literally.

And sure, it makes for great LinkedIn content. Meanwhile, on Reddit: “$5K spent, $30 in points”,“The app crashes”,“Why is the cashier begging me to sign up?”

The disconnect couldn’t be clearer. So yeah, we’re breaking the fourth wall. Not to add another act, but to end the play altogether.

Because loyalty was never supposed to be this. It’s not about collecting emails or building a branded mini-game. It’s about one thing: spend.

Spend now, spend again, spend often. Basic retail math. 

Loyalty tech is stuck in 2012

The market’s consolidating. Fewer vendors, bigger logos, same old tech. And we’ve seen what brands really get after all the hype: slow systems, bloated contracts, and underwhelming results.

Legacy platforms pitch “personalization” and “omnichannel” like it’s groundbreaking. But under the hood, it’s rules-based, rigid, and barely adaptable. Built for cohorts, not real people. Painful to use. Dependent on IT for even basic changes.

And because it’s enterprise-grade with the logo to match procurement gives it a pass. No one ever got fired for choosing Salesforce, right?

So retailers roll it out. Spend hundreds of thousands. Build gamified flows, email campaigns, dashboards. And then… customers ignore it.

Because it’s transactional. Impersonal. Just another opt-in for a one-time discount.

What comes next?

We’ve been at this for a while. Long enough to see how the loyalty and promotions space really works behind the scenes.

At first, we played along. Entered the ecosystem, joined the pitch cycle, answered the RFPs. Sat through the same meetings, the same buzzwords, the same checkbox demos. But it didn’t take long to see how most of it was just theater too. Procurement processes designed to justify decisions already made. RFPs built for vendors that already won. Roadmaps that promised innovation and delivered yet another admin dashboard.

We realized that the world wasn’t where real change was going to happen. So we took a step back. And started building something different.

Not another loyalty system. Not a better tier model. Not a punchier punch card.

We’ve been building an Incentive Optimization Engine, something designed from the ground up for how commerce actually works now, and how it’s about to work very soon.

Because the real unlock was never points or programs. It’s always been timing, context, and intent. The right incentive. For the right customer. At the right moment. And not just for people, but for agents too.

Because let’s be honest, the way people shop is about to change completely. We’re heading into a world where consumer agents, bots, assistants, call them what you want, start doing the heavy lifting. They’ll filter, compare, and purchase. They’ll optimize for price, convenience, or maybe even rewards.

And if your system can’t talk to them, can’t adjust in real time, can’t explain why this offer beats the next, it’s out of the running.

Incentives can’t be static. Campaigns can’t take weeks to launch. If you want to stay relevant, human or agent, you need to optimize constantly.

This means experimenting faster. Launching smarter. Connecting offers to real signals, like purchase history, behavior, business goals. It means orchestration across every channel, every touchpoint, every moment that could change a customer’s mind.

That’s what we’re building for. An engine where experimentation is built-in. Where optimization happens automatically. Where incentives are dynamic, contextual, and measurable. And plugging it into your stack doesn’t take a year and three consultants.

That’s the kind of tool we want to use. And we’re hoping to meet more teams who want the same thing.

If you’re in ecommerce, retail, services, finance or if you’re just tired of the theater and ready to build something that actually works, we should talk.