Forget the discount trap: What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Value-Add Rewards

By Alex Javer, Chief Strategy Officer – TLC Worldwide

Ask any marketer in this region whether they'd like to offer customers more value, and the answer tends to arrive in two parts. First, an enthusiastic yes. Then, almost immediately: "…but we'd never be able to afford anything good enough to matter."

It’s a reasonable reaction, considering just how expensive discounts are to brands in Southeast Asia. Consider the calendar our customers live by. 9.9, 10.10, 11.11, 12.12. Shopee's birthday sale. Lazada's Online Revolution. CNY, Raya, Ramadan promos, year-end sales, payday sales and flash sales timed to the hour. Layer on free-delivery wars, bank-partner discounts and the picture is clear: this region has trained an entire generation of consumers to expect a price cut as the default expression of brand generosity. Many now plan major purchases months ahead to land on a sale date.

The data reflects it. Research from Bain & Company and NielsenIQ found that 42% of consumers across Southeast Asia are now seeking the same products at lower prices, and a quarter are switching to brands offering better value for money. Consumers here are not disloyal, they have simply been given very little reason to stay beyond price.

So the caution around building richer customer benefits isn't irrational. It's a reasonable response to having watched generic discounting go very wrong, very publicly, across several categories at once.

So let's park affordability for a moment — we'll come back to it and ask a more interesting question. If you could give every customer genuinely better value, what would it actually look like?

We're all customers, so this isn't hard. Most of us would want easy-to-access, genuinely exciting benefits that connect with the things we care about. And most marketers reading this would want to add one more condition: benefits that represent the brand properly, so the whole thing feels authentic rather than bolted on.

‘Easy to access’ requires a great UX and suggests an open buffet of benefits for everyone - which raises the first eyebrow from the finance department. On the UX part, it depends if benefits are sitting within a legacy ecosystem or a newer one, built for today’s consumer. But in 2026, clever APIs and engaging gamification can polish up even the dustiest of platforms. In markets where Grab, GoTo, Shopee and GCash have set the standard for what an app should feel like, that matters more than ever.

‘Exciting benefits’ that ‘connect with passions and needs’ instantly raises the finance team’s collective second eyebrow, since ‘exciting’ often means ‘valuable’… and value generally isn’t free. The second part relating to personalised relevance is arguably the holy grail of successful engagement and consumer loyalty - people stick around when they feel a stronger connection to what makes them tick. But how can one programme satisfy everyone?  My conviction is that if you try to be everything to everyone, then you are nothing to everyone.

This brings us nicely to part three: an approach that is both ‘authentic to the brand’ and ‘differentiated from others’. Remember, you already have an authentic and differentiated brand that you’ve spent a lot of time, money and market research creating. So, it’s the brand that remains your north star when building a benefits strategy, and it must simply be meaningful for the customers your brand exists to serve. If you’ve done a decent job with your brand, then you’re in fact serving a shared mindset and purpose rather than hyper-niche myriad personal quirks. Phew! You don’t need to boil the ocean to satisfy disparate consumer interests, you just need to authentically consider what’s their preferences. Be faithful to your brand and delight the people it was built for. 

Without insulting you with a marketing lecture or needing to pay royalties to the Harvard Business Review or Seth Godin, the continued growth of the Experience Economy (basically ‘doing more stuff that makes me happy’) and the age-old heuristic of ‘people like me, do things like this’, both prompt every marketer to aspire to multiply positive and relevant brand experiences that extend beyond the moment of consumption.

Back to the elephant in the room: affordability. How can you possibly afford to give every one of your customers more value, more joy, more often?

(It’s about time that I come clean! I’ve been a part of the TLC Worldwide team for 21 years, and we have a proven solution to satisfy your customers at scale, without bankrupting your business.)

Over 3 decades, TLC has helped some of the most ambitious brands on the planet grow their customer value proposition without discounting and without upsetting the finance department (!). All thanks to a proprietary rewards ecosystem, engineered to uniquely deliver affordable value, at scale. Meaning our customers can reward their customers, more generously, more often, and in a more personalised way... that also remains faithful to their brand.

We call this empowerment 'the value/cost paradox’; the art of rewarding more, for less. That distinction matters more here than it does elsewhere. Loyalty across this region has been built almost entirely on points, coins and cashback, rewards whose currency is still money off the next purchase. A point is a discount you've agreed to; an experience is a different thing altogether.

At the beating heart of this rewards ecosystem, spins an economic flywheel that delivers a win-win-win for brands, their customers and the thousands of partner businesses that supply the rewards for a fraction of the cost.

Imagine being able to offer all your customers travel experiences, food & beverage perks, fun activities with their kids, live events and home entertainment, personal wellness or pamper treats… the options are virtually limitless – if your customers want it, we can deliver it on your behalf, at a price you can afford.

Back to the marketing truths…

We all know that customers remember ‘how you made them feel’, that the path to proper loyalty is through ‘emotional engagement’, not through discounting or serving the lucky few, and finally, that retaining a customer costs a fraction of what it costs to acquire a new one.

We can enable marketers to reframe their thinking. With growing pressure to connect with consumers, enhance reputation, control budgets, drive down CAC, and maximise CLV, the question no longer needs to be “how can we afford to increase customer value?” but more “how can we afford not to increase it?!”.

But hang on a minute - discounts are proven to work! And as consumers ourselves, we all love a discount. But you’re not just consumers, you are also savvy marketers, and you cannot afford to kill your brand by falling into the Discount Trap!

Discounts may feel like a safe, controllable lever. Simple. Fast. Measurable. But crocodile-infested waters also look rather safe to a buffalo having a slurp...

 

As many brands have found out, the long-term economics of discount dependency tell a scary story, with unintentional - crocodile-deadly - outcomes emerging, that are harder to measure in the immediate term and don’t sit neatly in an Excel spreadsheet, like emotional engagement and brand equity.

When brands repeatedly reach for price promotions or cash offers as their primary engagement tool, they train their customers to wait or go elsewhere if there is no other reason to stick around. Over time, this conditions purchasing behaviour in a way that is difficult to reverse and the brand pays for it twice - once in the promotional cost itself, and again in the loss of customers.

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 better deal. They are simply opportunists the brand has trained to fall out of love with it. And in this region they leave faster than almost anywhere, because nothing slows them down. Switching costs are close to zero, two apps, two tabs, two taps, so a customer with no reason to stay beyond price meets no obstacle on the way out.

Sustained discounting trains customers to expect something for nothing, diluting your ability to command premium prices. There is also a less tangible but equally damaging effect on brand perception. While discounts and cash offers can drive short-term purchase intent, consumers exposed to this often perceive the brand 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 massive hidden cost - death of your brand!

As marketers offering discounts at every turn , you are effectively talking out of both sides of it - on the one side, you are saying that your product or service is better than the competition because of superior X, Y or Z that costs you more money or leverages your exclusive IP to deliver - and on the other side, you are saying that you can discount it very often.

This suggests that you are lying about the product’s value in the first place, or you no longer believe in the power of your brand yourself. The customer remembers the generosity as the platform's and stays with the ecosystem that hosted it, not the brand that paid for it. 

Value and cost are not the same thing.

All customers - that's you and me - seek the right solution for their needs, and therefore the correct value that they can afford; not ‘cheap’ for cheap’s sake.

This is an age-old fact, so I appreciate that I’m not stating anything new here. It’s why thousands of marketing leaders - unless you work for a discount brand that trades admittedly inferior products and services for lower prices - have made the shift away from margin-slashing price promotions or cash offers towards value-add strategies to engage customers.

Thanks to TLC’s rewards ecosystem, marketers can now play a more sophisticated version of added value - not just the monetary value of the rewards offered, but the exponential value of the consumer emotions that experiences can deliver and the memories they create.

• How much is happiness worth?
• How valuable is time with your family and friends?
• What is that feeling when you first jump into the pool on holiday?
• Would you remember that feeling for longer than a discount?

Beyond the value/cost debate, the other dimension to earning greater customer engagement is the frequency of the value on offer.

We all know that 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 more appreciated and valuable. That can be online or an instore moment, or in the packaging... So, to the same logic a brand that shows up with relevant, valuable rewards or perks week after week - or at whatever cadence matches the potential engagement rhythm - has a very fair right to expect greater customer affinity and the economic fruits that grow with it.

Which is worth weighing against how most brands here actually spread value across a year: almost all of it concentrated into a handful of dates, followed by a long stretch with very little to say. And on 11.11 you are competing for attention against every brand in the market, running the same offer, on the same day, to the same people, the most expensive date in your calendar is also the one where you are least distinguishable.

As an example, giving your entire customer base a weekly coffee or bubble tea from their local outlet for an entire year, for the marketing cost of a single burst of paid media, could make your brand the one everyone is talking about; enduring, much loved, and award-winning!

And data supports this emphatically, with long-cited industry research indicating that even a 5% improvement in customer retention can boost profits by between 25% and 95%.

But you know all of these data points and trends... the fundamental topic of this whole piece is that it’s only genuinely interesting to you, IF you can afford to do this properly in the first place.

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

Recognised for its innovative approach to customer engagement, emotional loyalty, and driving habitual customer behaviour with local relevance, this scaled program gives all customers access every week to a barista-made coffee for only £1! Moving from transactional mechanics, the initiative was purposefully designed to deliver consistent, feel-good value through an everyday ritual. Literally fuelling customers lives.

Elsewhere, in the US telecoms space, TLC collaborated with network giant AT&T to deliver best-in-market dining perks to many millions of customers. The success of this program didn’t just depend on our ability to deliver best in market food and beverage perks at the nation’s favourite local and national eateries, it worked because we did the customer mapping and customer research to ensure the right offer was served up in the most user-friendly way.

Sticking with the telecoms sector for a moment longer, Singapore’s largest mobile network operator Singtel, achieved a 30% lift in app engagement thanks to the introduction of TLC’s always-on dining rewards. Recognising Singaporeans’ equal love of food and travel, we further enhanced engagement by offering exclusive hotel perks, with 71% of customers redeeming multiple times within the first few months.

Beyond telecoms, we have solved the same challenge of increasing relevant customer value across financial services, retail, insurance and utilities, turning transactions into more meaningful engagement.

Ride hailing app Move It operates in one of Southeast Asia’s most competitive markets, the Philippines. They approached us because their customers were active but flipped to competitors within seconds when prices were cheaper, making it impossible to build longer-term loyalty. To tackle this, we launched a gamified rewards program that created opportunities to win exciting destinations with every trip. The strategy generated an 80% conversion rate, more than 2 million plays, and encouraged customers to stay more loyal to the app.

In FS, we’ve engaged the hearts, minds and stomachs of GenZ by offering university students who opened an account with Nationwide Bank dining perks valued at £120. And the data shows it worked, with Yahoo Finance reporting 80,000 new accounts opened, raising the bank from 5th to 2nd place in the national ranking.

Now, brands like yours can afford to offer all customers more value, more joy, more often. You can now have what you thought you couldn’t afford, thanks to TLC.

Always-on experience rewards are not a luxury reserved for brands with unlimited marketing budgets. They are a commercially smarter alternative to undifferentiated strategies that erode brand equity and CLV across every category.

In a market where every brand has access to the same platforms and the same dates, being able to offer something your competitors structurally cannot is worth more here than almost anywhere.

At TLC Worldwide, we’ve spent over 30 years helping the world’s most ambitious marketers transform customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty - on brand, at scale, and within budget.  If you’d like to explore what a smarter value-add strategy could look like for your brand, we’d love to start that conversation.