Brand loyalty in 2025 is expected to decline. Explore the challenges brands will face and what you can do to retain customers and thrive.
TL;DR:
Brand loyalty is set to decline as consumers search for less expensive options in the face of rising prices, and brands are leveraging unconventional strategies to attract and retain customers.
Personalization is one way to combat price sensitivity — and you can capture first-party data to fuel personalization through quizzes, surveys and other interactive experiences by Jebbit.
Most brands admit to having siloed data, but you can enable personalization by breaking down silos, unifying data, and creating comprehensive customer profiles through the BlueConic customer data platform.
Loyalty programs are one of the best ways to keep customers coming back — and with Jebbit, BlueConic, and Yotpo working together, you can offer dynamic, highly targeted rewards and incentives that increase conversions.
In the coming year, expect to see brands investing more in personalization, loyalty programs, customer insights, and AI technology, including AI-driven data analytics and AI-powered recommendation engines.
How will you approach brand loyalty in 2025? According to forecasts, there will be challenges ahead. Consumer prices are high, which is encouraging customers to shop around for better deals rather than sticking with any one particular product or brand.
However, in 2025, savvy marketers will know what to do in order to overcome this challenge. What’s their secret? Predictions point toward investments in data unification, personalization, and integrating personalization into loyalty programs.
While we can’t tell you exactly what will happen — we’re not fortune tellers, after all — we can show you how you can leverage Jebbit, BlueConic, and Yotpo to get deep customer insights, unify your data, and create powerful loyalty programs that keep your customers coming back. Read below to discover what the experts are saying and learn how you can stay competitive in a difficult marketplace.
Forecasted Challenges for Brand Loyalty in 2025
According to Forrester, investments in tech stacks designed to unify data for loyalty building and marketing efforts are expected to triple. Why? It’s a complex situation that boils down to the fact that prices are higher than ever — and consumers are sensitive to that.
For example, food prices alone have risen 22% since the pandemic. When faced with the choice of sticking with the same brand out of loyalty or going for the cheaper option, many consumers will opt to save money. In fact, Forrester has found that this is one of the top five reasons why consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia will try a new brand.
That’s the challenge that brands are facing when it comes to loyalty — but how are brands responding? It depends on the brand.
In China, big names like Starbucks and Apple are offering steep discounts.
Discount retailers like SHEIN and Temu undercut competitors with super low prices.
Elsewhere, loyalty programs are on the rise — especially when brands can use them to offer immediate value through instant discounts or loyalty currency like points and miles.
According to Forrester’s predictions, brand loyalty will decline by 25%, but as people seek savings, loyalty program usage is set to increase. For brands, this means that traditional loyalty strategies like sales or on-point messaging won’t be enough in this competitive landscape. Instead, modern brands will need to offer something more — and we’ll explore what that means.
Tackle Challenges With These Brand Loyalty Strategies
So what’s the solution for maintaining brand loyalty in 2025? When it comes to brand loyalty strategies, there is no one magic trick — but with investments in the right technology, you can build much more meaningful customer relationships.
In other words, you need to gather the right kinds of data, unify it, and then put it to work for personalization, loyalty programs, and other techniques designed to foster customer retention.
Enrich Data With Jebbit
In many respects, building a following of loyal customers is not that different from playing the dating game. Successfully wooing the ideal people requires learning about them on a deeper level. In both dating and marketing, that means going past surface-level information by asking questions about the things that really matter.
To foster a deeper connection with your customers, you need to know about their motivations, aspirations, wants, needs, and how your products can fit into their lifestyles. These are the kinds of details that allow you to create rich customer profiles that enable the kind of personalization that helps your customers form an emotional connection with your brand.
So how do you get this kind of high-quality information? You only need to ask the right questions.
This is where Jebbit will prove invaluable as part of your tech stack. Jebbit is all about helping you enrich data through engaging interactive experiences. Depending on customer needs and preferences, there are a variety of approaches that you can take:
Create surveys to learn more about customer needs and wants.
Use personality quizzes to discover customer preferences, lifestyle habits, or aspirations.
Engage customers with gamified experiences that offer incentives.
Provide a personalized purchase pathway through product finders and product recommendation quizzes.
As customers interact with these experiences, you’ll be able to capture rich insights — and that translates into data that you can use to fuel marketing personalization.
Break Down Silos and Unify Data With BlueConic
Data by itself isn’t enough to bring up retention rates or encourage repeat purchases. The next step in raising brand loyalty is to unify customer data and break down silos. Doing so will give you a 360-degree view of the entire customer journey across all touchpoints — and that will enable you to understand how to more effectively engage your customers.
Here’s another finding from Forrester: In the United States, 78% of U.S. marketing executives admit that they have silos in their marketing and loyalty technologies. The problem is, consumers want consistent, engaging, and rewarding customer experiences — and if they can’t have that, then price sensitivity will drive them in search of another brand.
Another Forrester finding reveals that eight in 10 U.S. B2C marketing execs use separate data for loyalty and marketing. However, these days, building brand loyalty is a huge part of successful marketing. Keeping the customer insights that power your loyalty initiatives separate from your marketing efforts represents a huge lost opportunity. Breaking down these silos enables you to improve customer interactions, expand personalization, and cut the costs of overlapping infrastructure.
This is where BlueConic comes to the rescue. It’s a customer data platform that allows you to unify data from across all platforms and stores — Jebbit included. From there, BlueConic consolidates data into comprehensive, privacy-compliant customer profiles so that you can activate it in real-time. This platform eliminates silos while driving both marketing and loyalty initiatives together.
BlueConic also provides what you need to enable personalization — and not just any kind of personalization. Through the BlueConic personalization engine, it’s simple to create both content and product recommendations based on fully unified customer profiles. Real-time segmentation, profile updates, and lifecycle orchestration tools within the platform let you deliver contextually relevant experiences that will keep your customer base coming back for more.
And when you can deliver tailored, highly relevant experiences through personalization, customer satisfaction goes up, conversion rates rise, and customer retention increases. In short, it’s one of the best ways to build loyalty in a competitive marketplace where price-sensitive shoppers are trying to get the biggest bang for their buck.
Create a Powerful Loyalty Program With Yotpo
Loyalty programs are a fantastic way to boost brand loyalty, especially now that consumers are becoming more budget conscious. Up to 55% of adults worldwide say that offering points or reward systems are the top way to encourage them to return. It’s even better when you can award those points instantly to incentivize a quick conversion rather than making customers wait (and possibly forget) about their rewards.
Loyalty programs are versatile. You can offer more than points or other monetary rewards. If you have much-hyped new products getting ready to launch, for example, then you can offer perks like early access.
You can also combine loyalty programs with personalization to create a truly powerful motivator for individual customers. That’s what dynamic rewards and contextual offers are about.
Consider retailers like Ulta, who famously offer two times or five times points opportunities on specific brands tailored to individual customers. This is an example of how you can combine real-time data activation, rich customer profiles, and loyalty programs to send out highly relevant, hyper-targeted offers that both entice people to convert and increase customer satisfaction.
If you’re working with Jebbit to gather data and BlueConic to unify that data, then you should also consider Yotpo Loyalty, which integrates with both. This platform allows you to create custom earnings rules that trigger for a variety of events — including the Jebbit experiences that you’ve created.
Looking Ahead to 2025
So what will 2025 bring? Here’s what we think:
Consumer prices will remain high — and that means brands will need to maximize personalization and integrate it with loyalty programs in order to provide the kind of customer experience that can build brand loyalty.
Data and technology will continue to be the cornerstones of marketing, especially where AI is concerned. Expect to see a rise in things like AI-driven data analytics for insights as well as AI-driven personalization engines.
Brands will invest heavily into gathering customer insights — and they’ll leverage tools like Jebbit to engage customers and learn more about them, all while ensuring compliance in a privacy-first marketing world.
Customer data platforms like BlueConic will become a necessity as brands seek to break down silos in order to get the most from their collected data.
For marketers, there are big challenges ahead as consumers look for ways to save money — but if you invest in the right technology, those challenges are easily surmounted. Use Jebbit to gather rich insights into customer behavior, then unify all of your data on the BlueConic customer data platform to create real-time audience segments, comprehensive customer profiles, and more. With these tools, you can use apps like Yotpo to create a loyalty program that sets you apart from your competitors.
Want to learn more about how Jebbit and BlueConic can help in the coming year? Schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert today.
