The cost of ‘always on’ – why aspirational rewards are more affordable than you think

By Kim Walsh, Managing Director – Australia & New Zealand

Ask most senior marketers whether they could sustain an always-on experiential rewards program and the answer is usually some version of the same thing – “we’d love to, but we can’t afford it.”

It’s a reasonable instinct, and not one that came from nowhere. For many brands, the default customer engagement tool – certainly for acquisition campaigns – has long been the discount. Drop the price, drive the sale.

To even contemplate offering year-round discounting would therefore carry well-understood risks – eroded margins, diluted brand equity, and mercenary shopping with no emotional attachment. So perhaps the caution around always-on investment is also a rational response to having watched generic discounting go very wrong.

But the answer to discount fatigue is not reward restraint. It is a smarter model entirely.

Aspirational rewards such as travel experiences, dining or family days out, carry a perception of high cost. After all, they offer the customer far more than a cash discount does. And in a world where marketing budgets are under more scrutiny than ever – with 59% of CMOs having reported insufficient budget to execute their 2025 plans according to Gartner – this perception reinforces the hesitation.

But the cost of discounts and the cost of experiential rewards are not equivalent. And the proven ROI associated with the latter soon solidifies the business case on closer inspection.

That’s why – with growing pressure to connect with consumers, enhance reputation, control budgets, drive down CAC, and maximise CLV – I urge marketing leaders globally to reframe their thinking. The question needs to be less about “can we afford always-on rewards?” and more “can we afford not to have them?”

Discounts feel like a safe, controllable lever. Simple. Measurable. Fast.

But the long-term economics of discount dependency tell a different story.

When brands repeatedly reach for price reductions as their primary engagement tool, they train customers to wait. Wait for the next offer. Wait for the sale. Wait for the email with the promotional code. Over time, this conditions purchasing behaviour in a way that is genuinely difficult to reverse and the brand pays for it twice – once in the discount itself, and again in the loss of full-price purchase occasions.

These customers are not loyal. They don’t have any real affinity with the brand, so there is no particular reason to stay if a competitor offers a marginally better deal. They are simply opportunists the brand has trained to behave that way.

As Ogilvy has noted, discounts train customers to expect something for nothing, diluting your ability to command premium prices. There is also a less visible but equally damaging effect on brand perception. Academic research published in Advances in Consumer Research (2025) found that while discounts can drive short-term purchase intent, consumers exposed to high-discount products often perceive them as lower quality – a direct and measurable hit to brand equity that takes time and investment to repair.

The race to the bottom, in other words, has a real cost – it just rarely appears on the same spreadsheet as the promotional budget.

This is an age-old fact – I’m not stating anything new. It’s why thousands of marketing leaders have already made the shift away from margin-slashing price wars towards value-added, ecosystem and partner-driven loyalty models.

Instead of discounting, offer something that feels more valuable than money – an experience or memorable moment.

Not only do such rewards engage customers emotionally rather than just financially. Critically, if the brand can provide these rewards via a partner network, the investment is far more sustainable.

A £100 cash discount is worth exactly £100 to the customer and costs the brand £10 to provide. It is rational, transactional, and although it may deliver a temporary dopamine hit, it is instantly forgotten.

Compare this to a £1 coffee from a local barista, offered weekly as part of a brand’s loyalty programme. It costs less but delivers something a discount never can – a ritual, a moment of pleasure, and a weekly reminder that the brand is on the customer’s side.

This is the value-cost paradox at the heart of an always-on rewards strategy. And it explains why the brands that have made this shift consistently outperform those still competing on price.

TLC Worldwide’s global reward ecosystem – cultivated over 30 years of deep partner relationships – is specifically designed to make this model commercially viable for brands of all sizes, by negotiating value at a level that individual brands cannot access alone.

There is another dimension to this that goes beyond cost per reward – frequency.

Emotional resonance with a brand is not built in a single moment. It is cultivated through consistent, repeated positive experiences that accumulate over time into something that genuinely feels like a relationship. A brand that shows up with relevant, valuable rewards week after week creates habitual engagement – the kind that becomes embedded in customers’ daily routines and resists competitive pressure in a way that a quarterly promotion campaign simply cannot.

Data supports this emphatically, with research indicating that even a 5% improvement in customer retention can boost profits by between 25% and 95%, and engaged loyalty program members demonstrate CLV increases of up to 25% compared to non-members.

Most senior marketers already know these trends. The challenge is believing that always-on rewards are operationally and financially achievable for their brand, especially in the current climate.

Only a few weeks ago, VodafoneThree and TLC secured major recognition at the International Loyalty Awards in Atlanta, with our teams taking home the prestigious International Loyalty Program of the Year Europe accolade.

Recognised for our innovative approach to customer engagement, emotional loyalty, and driving habitual customer behaviour with local relevance, this bespoke, fully-owned and scalable program gives Three customers access to a barista-made coffee for only £1, once a week, across thousands of the UK’s independent and high-street cafes.

Moving from transactional loyalty mechanics – quite common in telecoms – the initiative was purposefully designed to deliver consistent, feel-good value through an everyday ritual.

Elsewhere, in the US telco space, we collaborated with network giant ​​AT&T to deliver best-in-market dining perks for 90 million customers. The success of this program didn’t just depend on our ability to deliver live offers every month for local and regionally-loved eateries such as Blaze Pizza, Wingstop and Bahama Breeze. We also acted as an extension of the client’s team – experienced, nimble and equipped to do the ‘heavy lifting’ from ideation and customer research, through to execution.

Sticking with telco for a moment longer, Singapore’s largest mobile network operator – Singtel – has been a long-standing TLC client. Building on the success of the brand’s Always-On Dining Rewards program which delivered a 30% uplift in app activity, Singtel expanded its rewards to introduce high-value travel experiences that reflect Singaporeans’ enthusiasm for regular getaways. Within the first six months, 71% of customers who redeemed a hotel offer returned to make another booking, highlighting the value and appeal of the proposition.

Of course, telco is not the only sector to demonstrate always-on rewards success. We have multiple examples globally, across utilities, financial services, tech retail and transport, to name just a few.

Premier taxi platform Move It operates in one of Southeast Asia’s most competitive ride-hailing markets – the Philippines. When they approached us, customers were active, but loyalty remained highly transactional. Riders could switch between apps in seconds, making it increasingly difficult to build long-term engagement purely through pricing and promotions.

To tackle this, Move It partnered with TLC Worldwide to launch MILAMIG WINS – a gamified rewards campaign that created opportunities to win through everyday commutes. Built around a simple ride-to-win mechanic and highly relevant rewards, the campaign generated an 80% unique conversion rate, more than 2 million campaign visits, and encouraged riders to return again and again.

There is inspiration everywhere you look. I particularly admired Nationwide’s monthly £10 Just Eat vouchers for UK university students who opened a FlexStudent current account. What a brilliant way to engage the hearts, minds and wallets of GenZ during one of the most significant – and financially daunting – moments in their life. And the data shows it worked. At the start of last December, Yahoo Finance reported that over 80,000 students opened an account from July to October, and when the article was published, 62,000 were said to have registered with the building society’s Just Eat portal and downloaded 125,000 takeaway vouchers.

So, can iconic brands afford to sustain always-on rewards?

The better question is, as I alluded to above, is can they afford not to?

Always-on experiential rewards are not a luxury reserved for brands with unlimited marketing budgets. They are a commercially smarter alternative to the discount dependency that continues to quietly undermine brand equity across category after category, and they tend to deliver stronger results than shorter-lived campaign bursts that perhaps never truly keep competitors at bay.

The infrastructure to make it work affordably already exists. At TLC, we’ve spent over 30 years helping the world’s biggest brands transform customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty – simply, at scale, and within budget.

If you’d like to explore what an always-on rewards approach could look like for your brand, we’d love to start that conversation.