From rewards to habits: How brands become part of customers' everyday lives 

Discounts, vouchers and points might sound appealing, but they rarely create the kind of value, or everyday connection, that keep customers coming back to a brand. So how do you offer rewards that become part of customers everyday habits? Kim Walsh, Managing Director at TLC Worldwide delves into this topic, and considers the role that Australia’s coffee habit could play, particularly for subscription brands…

Think about the rewards most subscription brands offer today. A discount off a purchase. Points every time you transact. A voucher at renewal time.

Each of these creates value, to a degree, but that somewhat clinical value tends to be episodic. It appears at a particular moment, delivers a small spike of interest, and disappears until the next time the brand needs something from you. It doesn’t have a lasting impact. It doesn’t make you feel anything.

Now compare that to the moments that genuinely punctuate people's lives. The coffee on the way to work. The Friday night takeaway. The weekend activity with the kids. Movie night, date night, the lunchtime yoga class.

All of these moments have frequency, familiarity and emotional meaning built into them. Nobody needs to be persuaded to do them – they're simply part of how people live.

They're established habits. In other words, they're rituals – and rituals already have something brands spend millions trying to create.

In our latest white paper, we argue that the strongest customer propositions start with the behaviour a brand wants to influence. But habits are a shortcut, because the behaviour already exists with four built-in advantages:

1. Frequency
   A habit happens again and again. Every repetition is another opportunity for a brand to be present, without having to manufacture a reason to show up.
2. Relevance
   Brands don’t have to create demand for the activity, because the customer has already demonstrated that it matters to them.
3. Simplicity
   Because the proposition fits into something people already do, it's immediately understood. There's no new habit to learn, and no complicated mechanic to explain.
4. Association
   This is where habits really come into their own. When a brand adds value to a moment people already enjoy, again and again, it has the potential to create a lasting association between the brand and that positive feeling. This nurtures a deeper connection that’s harder to break.

So instead of trying to create a new behaviour, how could you add value to a moment that already matters? That’s how you earn a place in the customer's everyday life.

Few habits are as deeply woven into Australian life as the daily coffee. The Australia's Daily Brew 2026 report, authored by Hey You and powered by Westpac DataX, estimates that the Australian café category is worth $10.15 billion a year.

But look a little closer, and the data tells a more nuanced story.

In June 2026, total café spend was $749.9 million, down 1.4% year-on-year. Transactions fell 2.6%, from 43.0 million to 41.9 million, and the number of active customers fell 1.3%.

Yet spend per customer was virtually unchanged, at $87.73 compared with $87.79 a year earlier. And the average order value actually increased by 1.2%, from $17.68 to $17.90.

In other words, Australians haven't fallen out of love with their coffee. They're simply going a little less often, with orders per customer dipping from 4.96 to 4.90 over the month. Café owners have noticed too, with 83% of the more than 600 surveyed, saying they'd seen a drop in visits.

So coffee still matters to Australians, but the data points to a more value-conscious customer. And that's exactly where a brand can step in.

Crucially, though, the opportunity isn't really about the monetary value of a free or discounted cup. It's about the experienced value – what that coffee actually means. Time out. A well-deserved break. A catch-up with a friend. A weekend treat.

Help a customer enjoy that moment more often, and the brand becomes part of something they genuinely care about.

Every age group under 55 saw café visit frequency decline, with the steepest falls among under-35s. Between June 2025 and June 2026, transactions among 18–24-year-olds fell from 5.05 million to 4.72 million, while those among 25–34-year-olds fell from 9.91 million to 9.50 million.

At the other end of the market, visits among 65–74-year-olds increased by 1.9%, and among those aged 75 and over, by 4.0%. And older customers aren't just visiting more often – they're spending more when they do.

As the report puts it: "the customers setting the trend and the customer generating the most value are not the same person."

For brands, that's a useful reminder. The same habit can mean different things to different customers, and the value a brand adds needs to reflect that. For a younger customer cutting back, it might be the difference between skipping a coffee and keeping the habit. For an older customer, it might simply make a favourite moment feel even more special.

To stick with the coffee trend, one of our favourite examples comes from the UK, where telecommunications provider Three set out to give customers a reason to engage with its Three+ app every week.

Rather than inventing a new behaviour, Three looked at one that its customers already had. Working with TLC, it launched the £1 Local Coffee Network, giving customers a barista-made coffee for just £1, once a week, redeemed instantly in the app.

To make sure the reward fitted naturally into customers' existing routines, TLC built a first-of-its-kind network of more than 1,000 independent and high-street cafés nationwide. That meant customers could enjoy their coffee at their own neighbourhood favourite, not just the obvious chains.

The proposition ticked every box:

• Frequency. A weekly reward, matched to a habit that already happens weekly or even daily.
• Relevance. Coffee was already part of customers' lives, so there was no demand to create.
• Simplicity. One coffee, one pound, once a week. No points to collect and no thresholds to reach.
• Association. Every week, Three became part of a small moment its customers genuinely looked forward to.

The coffee network became an integral part of the Three+ always-on loyalty proposition, encouraging frequent, habitual engagement, alongside its existing Three+ Eats program, also designed by TLC. Its innovation was recognised with a Supplier/Vendor Innovation award at the European Loyalty Awards 2025, and has been a major talking point in the European subscription economy – not just the telecoms sector – since.

The important point is that the pleasure of coffee was already an established behaviour. Three simply gave its customers another reason to enjoy it, and in doing so, gave itself a recurring role in their ritual.

For Australian brands, and particularly subscription businesses such as banks, telcos, insurers and utilities providers, there isn’t the ‘heavy lift’ you might perceive.

You don't need to persuade customers to adopt a brand-new habit. You don't need to manufacture demand. The rituals that matter most to your customers already exist – the morning coffee, the Friday night takeaway, the weekend with the kids, the movie night.

All you have to do is earn a place in them.

So, as you think about the opportunity for your brand, start with three questions:

1. What moments already matter to your customers?
2. Which happen often enough to create an ongoing role for your brand?
3. And how could you make that moment a little more valuable?

Coffee is just one example. Answer those questions honestly, and the possibilities are endless.