Loyalty trends for the 21st century

Abstract

Loyalty marketing programmes have been developed during periods of great change over the last 20 years, during the expansion of the travel industry in the 1980s and the technology boom of the 1990s. During the early 2000s, however, the value of loyalty programmes has increasingly been questioned. In this paper, the authors propose that this is due to a lack of understanding of the role and nature of loyalty programme development. Through an analysis based on grounded research, five loyalty marketing trends are identified and then tested against available evidence to highlight issues that must be considered in the future development of successful loyalty marketing programmes.