Loyalty360 published its 2026 State of Customer Loyalty research in early August, built in partnership with consulting firm Baesman Group and drawing on responses from more than 160 brand marketers. Trade coverage of the release has mostly reached for the headline stat about experiential rewards and moved on. The more useful read is what the survey shows about the gap between brands that say they’re changing their loyalty programs and brands that already have — because that gap is where the actual strategic decision sits for anyone building a 2027 loyalty roadmap right now.
What the Report Covers
The research is framed as a 38-page assessment of where brand-side loyalty teams stand on rewards strategy, technology integration, program maturity, and member engagement. It sits alongside a companion Customer Loyalty Readiness benchmarking framework that Loyalty360 built from the same data set, scoring organizations across five dimensions — organizational structure, strategy, technology, measurement, and customer experience — and comparing them against industry peers.
That benchmarking layer is worth noting on its own. A framework that lets a loyalty team score itself against sector averages, rather than against vague best-practice checklists, is a more actionable deliverable than most annual survey reports produce, and it signals that Loyalty360 is positioning this research as a recurring diagnostic rather than a one-time snapshot.
Brands Are Already Changing Their Rewards, Not Just Planning To
The most operationally relevant numbers in the report are a pair: 64 percent of surveyed brands are interested in adding new reward options over the next year, and 63 percent say they have already updated their rewards within the last 12 months. Those two figures sitting almost even is the signal. This isn’t a market where most brands are contemplating a first move — it’s one where the majority have already made one and the remainder are lined up to follow. A loyalty program that hasn’t touched its reward structure in the past year is now behind roughly two-thirds of the field, not ahead of a cautious majority.
For a brand marketer building next year’s budget case, that reframes the argument. The question isn’t “should we consider updating our rewards,” it’s “what happens to member perception if we’re visibly one of the brands that didn’t.”
Experiential and VIP Rewards Are Where the Money’s Going Next
Among brands planning reward changes, 61 percent are specifically looking at experiential rewards — travel, live events, and exclusive access, as opposed to points-for-merchandise or straightforward discounting. That’s consistent with a broader shift loyalty programs have been making for several years: commoditized discount rewards are easy for competitors to match, and increasingly easy for members to shrug off, while access-based rewards are harder to replicate and carry higher perceived value per dollar of program cost.
Two other categories drew equal interest at 42 percent each: instant-win and surprise-and-delight mechanics, and tiered or exclusive rewards aimed specifically at VIP members. The pairing is worth reading together rather than separately. Surprise-and-delight mechanics work on unpredictability and short-term engagement; VIP tiering works on predictable, sustained differentiation for top-value customers. Brands citing both at equal rates suggests most loyalty teams are not choosing one lever over the other — they’re building programs that need to do both jobs at once, which has direct implications for how much internal build complexity a 2027 program redesign is actually going to require.
The Two Problems Nobody’s Solved
The challenge data is where the report gets less flattering. Sixty percent of respondents named technology integration as their top loyalty program challenge — the highest-cited obstacle in the survey, ahead of budget, ahead of member acquisition, ahead of measurement. That is a difficult number for the industry to sit with in 2026, given how long “integration” has been a stated pain point in martech generally. It suggests that for a majority of brands, the reward-strategy ambitions described above — experiential perks, VIP tiering, surprise mechanics — are being planned against a technology stack that the team running it doesn’t fully trust to execute them.
Separately, nearly a third of respondents said they struggle to attract and integrate younger generations into their loyalty programs. That challenge sits apart from the technology one; it’s a design and value-proposition problem, not an infrastructure problem, and the report doesn’t offer brands a shortcut around it. Younger members respond to different reward structures — the experiential and surprise-mechanic categories above are part of the industry’s answer — but structuring a program that serves both a loyal long-tenure base and a demographically different new cohort inside one loyalty architecture is exactly the kind of problem that technology integration challenges make harder to solve quickly.
What Program Age Tells You About Who’s Struggling
One more data point deserves attention: 39 percent of surveyed brands have run their loyalty program for 10 years or more, while fewer than 25 percent have programs that are five years old or less. That skew toward mature programs matters for interpreting every other number in the report. A brand with a decade-old loyalty program is more likely to be carrying legacy technology decisions, a reward catalog built for a different member base, and organizational habits formed before experiential and surprise-and-delight mechanics were standard toolkit items.
The practical takeaway for a brand marketer or loyalty program manager reading this research is to sort the findings by program age before applying them internally. A newer program chasing the 61 percent moving toward experiential rewards is making a build decision. A decade-old program making the same move is more likely making a rebuild decision, layered on top of the technology integration problem 60 percent of the field already says it hasn’t solved. Both are the right move directionally — the data supports that clearly — but they are not the same project, and treating them as identical is the fastest way to blow a 2027 loyalty budget on a redesign the existing stack can’t actually support.
