Designing Loyalty: Five Forces Reshaping Devotion.

Devotion Is the New Competitive Currency

Loyalty has shifted from a tactical program to a strategic necessity. The Lacek Group’s 2024 Trends: Building Brand Devotion report distills a reality most brands already sense: consumers no longer stay because it is convenient, they stay because it feels essential. The report frames five devotion drivers that will shape loyalty in the year ahead: delivering “wow” experiences, embedding AI as structural infrastructure, curating wraparound ecosystems, proving accountability under scrutiny, and building trust in a post-cookie economy.

This framework is not abstract. Each trend is backed by measurable data and live cases. Surveys from Salesforce, Sprout Social, YPulse, and others quantify the urgency, while brand experiments from Audible, Delta, Nike, and Peloton demonstrate the mechanics. Together, these examples underscore that retention today is about resonance, not inertia.

The implication for marketers is direct: engineering loyalty requires cultural fluency, technological readiness, and operational courage. Brands must earn devotion every day across multiple fronts, or risk churn to competitors who are faster, bolder, or more transparent.

The following expanded analysis unpacks each of the five trends in depth, linking research findings to strategic consequences.

Trend 1: The Wow Factor Is Now Baseline

Experience has moved from a differentiator to a baseline expectation. Salesforce’s global survey shows 88% of consumers rank experience as equal in importance to product or service quality.

This rebalances loyalty strategy: delivering a functional product is table stakes, but consumers remember how the interaction made them feel.

The Belding Group’s research on “WOW” experiences found that 61.4% were more likely to share a positive experience than a negative one, confirming the viral potential of exceptional design and engagement moments.

The case examples highlight three different “wow” modes. Audible’s partnership with Elyse Myers demonstrates authenticity as wow, leveraging a real user’s unsolicited enthusiasm into a broader campaign around accessibility and mental health.

Eastern Mountain Sports’ Black Friday Campout illustrates community as wow, transforming a transactional shopping day into a participatory event, signaling inclusivity and accessibility in a category often coded as elitist. Virgin Atlantic’s space-flight loyalty prize is spectacle as wow, impossible to scale but powerful in symbolic capital, generating earned media and reinforcing brand daring.

Each tactic deploys “wow” not as gimmick but as amplifier of brand meaning.

The strategic consequence: brands must deliberately engineer these peaks into the journey. Micro-personalization, like surprise tier upgrades or exclusive event invites, keeps customers engaged between major milestones. Over-the-top activations signal cultural leadership.

Most importantly, the wow moment must be tethered to brand DNA. If the novelty is disconnected from core values, the impression fades. In 2024’s saturated landscape, “wow” has shifted from luxury to requirement, and brands that fail to supply it will dissolve into sameness.

Trend 2: AI as Loyalty Infrastructure

AI has shifted from optional to mandatory. Intuit Mailchimp’s 2023 report found 88% believe predictive AI must increase for competitiveness.

Predictive engines, recommendation algorithms, dynamic offers, have quietly powered e-commerce for years. The difference in 2024 is the simultaneous mainstreaming of generative AI tools, which expand brand control over creative iteration. Forbes projects the AI market to hit $407B by 2027, up from $86.9B in 2022 confirming structural integration rather than campaign experimentation.

The loyalty impact is clear in operational cases. Whole Foods’ Just Walk Out stores collapse checkout friction and turn mundane grocery runs into personalized, data-driven experiences. Shopper histories now inform future promotions, embedding loyalty logic directly in the transaction. Amazon’s generative image tool accelerates creative testing for advertisers, allowing faster discovery of what resonates. Both cases show AI not as bolt-on campaign gadgetry but as infrastructure rewiring the consumer journey.

Strategically, AI loyalty demands governance. Unresolved legal frameworks around copyright, bias, and transparency threaten consumer trust. Brands must design frameworks that balance personalization with privacy. The prize for getting it right is devotion built on effortless anticipation, customers feeling that the brand knows their needs without intrusion. The risk for laggards is structural disadvantage: if competitors deliver effortless personalization at scale, loyalty will shift rapidly.

Trend 3: Wraparound Ecosystems as Retention Multipliers

Loyalty is now amplified by ecosystem participation rather than isolated products. Visual Objects’ 2023 co-branding study found 71% enjoy multi-brand collaborations, while Amazon Ads’ 2023 purpose-driven brand research showed 81% are more likely to buy from aligned-values brands.

Consumers no longer see brand choice as siloed, they expect coherence across categories, partners, and channels.

Case studies demonstrate this shift. Delta’s Delta Sync ecosystem connects mobility (Lyft), lodging (Airbnb), lifestyle (Starbucks), and in-flight content (Paramount+, Spotify). The integration reframes travel as a seamless loyalty journey rather than a fragmented set of vendors. Nike’s ecosystem operates across digital (Strava integrations, Netflix workouts), physical (Nike Studios), and retail partners (Dick’s Sporting Goods). The connective tissue is not discounts but cultural belonging: participation in a fitness-driven community reinforced at every touchpoint.

The consequence: ecosystems create gravitational pull. When a consumer joins a well-curated brand system, the switching cost becomes cultural rather than financial. For brands, this requires partner selection that reinforces values, not just distribution reach. Misaligned partners fracture trust, while synergistic ones create exponential returns. Ecosystem architecture will define loyalty leaders in 2024, the winners will be those who design networks that reflect both functional convenience and aspirational identity.

Trend 4: Accountability as Core Currency

The accountability demand is quantitative. Sprout Social’s 2022 survey found 70% want brands to take public stands on social or political issues. Pulse’s 2023 study reported 87% expect brands that act offensively to be held accountable. These data points confirm that silence is no longer neutral, it is interpreted as complicity. Accountability has become loyalty currency, especially for Gen Z, who already account for ~40% of global consumers.

The Southwest Airlines 2022 crisis shows the stakes. After 16,000+ flights were canceled over 11 days, the brand issued rapid apologies, refunded tickets, and compensated with 25,000 frequent-flyer miles. This financial outlay was a loyalty investment: by acknowledging fault and compensating proactively, Southwest preserved long-term equity. Adidas, in contrast, hesitated after Ye’s anti-Semitic comments. The delayed response deepened financial and reputational damage, though eventual donations of unsold inventory proceeds partly restored credibility.

Strategically, accountability is now a design principle. Brands must articulate values up front, maintain monitoring systems for misalignment, and prepare fast-response protocols. Crucially, accountability is not just crisis management, it is proactive alignment. Brands that consistently act on climate, diversity, or fairness embed trust long before missteps occur. In 2024, loyalty is inseparable from perceived integrity: brands that move with speed and transparency will retain devotion, while those that equivocate will forfeit it.

Trend 5: The Post-Cookie Devotion Economy

The technical pivot is absolute: by end-2024, Google Chrome will retire third-party cookies.

Gartner estimates 75% of the global population will be under modern privacy regulations this year. The implication: behavioral surveillance is collapsing as a loyalty engine. In its place, zero- and first-party data, voluntarily shared by consumers or generated directly through transactions, will dominate.

The mechanics are clear in brand cases. Peloton gathers explicit fitness preferences at sign-up and delivers hyper-personalized workout recommendations, content, and offers. This zero-party model builds trust because the consumer sees direct benefit from disclosure.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program converts preferences, skin tone, and product use into tailored recommendations and exclusive events. The scale of engagement demonstrates that consumers will trade data for value when the exchange is transparent.

The strategic challenge is twofold.

First, brands must redesign customer journeys to capture useful data moments, onboarding flows, event participation, loyalty programs, that feel natural and rewarding.

Second, governance must match transparency expectations. Ambiguity around why data is collected or how it will be used will erode trust faster than regulatory fines.

The opportunity: brands that master voluntary, reciprocal data exchanges will create loyalty loops resistant to both regulation and competitor encroachment.

Bottom Line

This confirms that devotion is designed across five dimensions: engineered wow experiences, AI as anticipatory infrastructure, wraparound ecosystems, accountability as non-negotiable, and data transparency as trust currency.

Each trend is both risk and lever.

Brands that integrate these dimensions will graduate from transactional loyalty to cultural indispensability.