Francesco Onorato

There is a moment, usually somewhere around year five or six, when a loyalty program stops being a growth story and starts being a liability conversation. It quietly creeps in during a quarterly business review, when someone in finance asks why the points liability line has grown faster than redemption. Then someone in marketing admits that the top tier hasn't had an actual new benefit since the program launched. This is the part of the loyalty lifecycle nobody writes about.

For more than a decade, retail innovation pursued a single objective: Eliminating friction. Faster checkouts. Fewer steps. Smarter recommendations. Less effort between intent and purchase. AI, personalization, and automation delivered on that promise. Buying is now close to instantaneous. But as efficiency reached maturity, something else eroded quietly: Memorability. This is the hidden tradeoff of optimization. When every interaction is engineered for speed, fewer experiences leave a lasting impression.

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