Some of the biggest brands with the most sophisticated loyalty programs don’t always have the most loyal customers. And some of the brands with the most loyal customers don’t always have a program at all.

That’s not an argument against loyalty mechanics.

A well-designed program is one of the most powerful commercial levers a brand has — with consistent performance data like a 50% increase in AOV, 10% increase in retention rates - not to mention, it costs far less to retain an existing customer than it does to acquire a new one. Loyalty programs, done well, are one of the best investments a brand can make.

Lately, I’ve been designing community strategies — and the connection between loyalty and community success metrics, such as increased repeat purchase rate, AOV, and CLV, keeps getting harder to ignore the chicken-and-egg relationship between the two.

How I design loyalty programs is using the Ogilvy framework, which is built around the four bonds that ultimately drive loyalty as an outcome. The four bonds of loyalty are rooted in fundamental human behaviours: value-seeking, habit formation, social belonging, and emotional attachment.

The four bonds are:

1. Financial bonds → Rational evaluation & reward-seeking
This is grounded in basic economic behaviour and reinforcement theory. Humans are wired to optimise value and minimise loss. Discounts, points, and perks trigger a cost-benefit calculation alongside a dopamine response when a “deal” is perceived. Financial bonds are not about loyalty in the emotional sense but about habit formation through reward loops.

This is also why financial bonds are effective, but rarely sufficient on their own. If a competitor improves on your 15% offer with 20%, customers with no deeper connection may switch easily. Incentive can drive action. Stronger bonds are what make it stick.

2. Structural bonds → Friction reduction & habit formation
This ties to cognitive ease and behavioural inertia. When a brand integrates into someone’s routines (subscriptions, saved preferences, connected ecosystems), it reduces decision fatigue. People default to what is easiest and most familiar. This is driven by status quo bias, habit loops, and the human tendency to avoid cognitive load.

3. Social bonds → Belonging & identity signalling
Here you’re in the territory of social psychology. Humans seek connection, recognition, and inclusion. Communities, memberships, and shared rituals tap into social identity theory and need for belonging. People don’t just use the brand, they associate with it and what it represents socially.

4. Emotional bonds → Meaning, memory & attachment
This is the deepest layer. It connects to how humans form attachments through experiences, storytelling, and values. Positive emotional experiences build affective memory, and over time this creates preference that feels instinctive rather than rational. This is where brands move from utility to personal significance.

The Instagram Broadcast Channel Opportunity

When I look at what Instagram’s Broadcast Channel is natively — a direct, opt-in audience hub where your most engaged followers choose to spend more time with your brand — I keep arriving at the same conclusion:

the conditions in which to activate all four loyalty bonds already exist inside the basic functions of a simple broadcast channel.

Not as a formal loyalty program.
But as a solid proof-of-concept that costs next to nothing to run.

Here are some ways I’d leverage the channel before kicking off the design phase formal loyalty program.

But First — What Is a Broadcast Channel, Actually?

If you haven’t used one yet, a quick orientation.

Instagram Broadcast Channels are a one-to-many messaging feature built inside the platform. A brand or creator sets up a channel; followers join with a single tap — no form, no friction, no purchase required.

Once inside, members receive messages directly in their DMs: text, voice notes, photos, polls, and video. They can react and vote, but it’s not a two-way chat.

That opt-in really matters.

Someone joining your broadcast channel is making a voluntary decision to spend more time inside your brand world. It’s not a transaction. It’s not an email capture.

It’s a signal: I want to be closer to this brand.

Why It Matters

Research backs the opportunity. Archrival found that 72% of Gen Z are more likely to remember a brand with an engaging social presence. While only 36% identify as actively brand loyal, 41% describe themselves as “kind of” loyal — open to a relationship, if brands show up for them.

A broadcast channel, done well, is exactly that touchpoint: low-lift, high-intimacy, and largely underutilised.

Every Channel Has a Role

TikTok is your top-of-funnel — high-reach, discovery-led.
Email is your retention engine — personalised, commercial, driving repeat purchase.
Instagram holds your more polished brand layer.

Your broadcast channel is something else entirely:

it’s a direct, real-time feed to your most engaged audience.

And - it deserves its own strategy.

Not a repost hub.
Not another highlight reel.
But a channel with a clear role in your ecosystem and a reason for people to stay.

The Four Bonds in Practice

The same four bonds we use to architect formal loyalty programs are all activatable inside a broadcast channel. Here’s how I’d build against each one.

🔴 Financial Bonds — Give It Real Value

The financial bond is about tangible reward — the feeling that being here pays off in a way you can actually measure.

Member-only discounts - Meshki’s Broadcast channel, called ‘Group Chat’ does this well. At seemingly random moments, Meshki drops into the channel with a celebratory offer — 20% off storewide for 24 hours, exclusive code, members only. No announcement on the feed. No email blast. The channel is the reward.

Gift-with-purchase testing Before you commit to 2,000 tote bags, gauge real appetite from your most engaged audience. Drop a poll. The market research is free. The buy-in, if it lands, is already built.

🟡 Structural Bonds — Make It Easy to Stay

The structural bond is about removing friction — making your brand the path of least resistance in someone’s life.

A consistent content cadence The structural bond in a broadcast channel is built through rhythm. Show up regularly with something worth opening — a weekly founder voice note, a Monday drop of what the team is into, a Friday cultural recommendation - (think where we’re getting drinks, matcha, taking hot-girl walks this weekend). Consistency is the mechanic. It makes your channel a habit, not a novelty.

Real-time problem solving Take the questions your retail and live chat team fields every day — the FAQs, the frustrations, the sizing queries — and answer them directly in the channel before customers have to ask. It reduces friction at the point of purchase and signals something formal programs often struggle to convey: that you’re actually listening.

🔵 Social Bond — Build the Feeling of Being In Something

The social bond is the one broadcast channels are arguably built for. It’s about belonging — the feeling of being part of an inner circle, not just a customer database.

Community voting on real decisions Colours, packaging, campaign direction, which creators you partner with next — bring your audience into decisions before they’re made. People champion what they helped build. This is social bonding at its most powerful: it creates genuine investment in the brand’s future.

New store and pop-up openings — turned into a moment If you're launching somewhere new, build a six-week teaser campaign exclusively in the channel — think daily clues, city-wide give-away moments like a product hidden in locations for people to find, then invite channel members to an early-access opening before the doors open to anyone else. You've turned a launch into an event, and your broadcast audience into participants, not spectators. That sense of being inside something — of knowing before the world knows — is exactly what loyalty programs spend significant budget trying to manufacture. Here, it costs a strategy and a fun reason to show up.

Early and exclusive product access Password-protect your next drop and release the code exclusively to your broadcast channel 24 hours before the world. Simple, repeatable, and it immediately signals that being here means something. Paige Lorenz’s Dairy Boy does this well — each new drop, broadcast members receive early access teasers in the days leading up, then a private password in the 24 hours before the official launch. The rest of the world waits. Members don’t.

A cultural point of view The brands people are genuinely loyal to aren’t just selling products — they have a perspective on the world. Use the channel to connect your brand to culture: the shows everyone’s watching, city guides if you’re multi-market, a recurring best matcha in Bondi / best coffee in Soho series. It turns your brand into a lens, not just a storefront. That’s social identity — and it’s one of the strongest loyalty drivers there is.

Summer Fridays does this well — regular prompts like what are we watching this week?, Friday plans polls, and café partnerships with the likes of Café Kitsune, Erewhon, and Fabrique, where special flavours and free samples for the first 50 to 100 customers are announced first in the broadcast channel. The channel becomes where members hear it first and feel part of the inner circle. They also extend that sense of belonging into shared action, using the space to organise initiatives like community beach clean-up days. It’s a strong example of social bonding in practice: culture, participation, and the feeling of being part of something beyond the product.

🟢 Emotional Bond — Make People Feel Seen

The emotional bond is the hardest to manufacture and the most valuable to hold. It’s about recognition, intimacy, and connection to something that feels genuinely human.

Voice notes from founders or the team Lo-fi, unscripted, human. A founder voice note lands differently than a caption — it makes someone feel like they’re genuinely on the inside. Because they are. This is the content that builds the kind of affinity no points currency can replicate.

Behind-the-scenes content Studio days, sampling sessions, the chaos before a campaign shoots. Easy to produce, high on intimacy. The content that, over time, makes someone feel like they know your brand — not just shop it. That shift — from customer to someone who feels known — is the emotional bond in action.

Member recognition — not influencer moments, member ones This is the one most brands get wrong. They spend the events budget on influencers and forget the people who show up every day without being paid to. Your broadcast channel members are your most self-selected, highest-intent audience — and they deserve to be treated like it.

REFY did this beautifully. They invited 30 community members — not influencers, not press — to a fully dressed - super chic ‘REFY Hotel’ experience in London. Guests were greeted by a concierge, offered a REFY matcha or coffee, then seated at their own spot in a masterclass featuring products that hadn’t launched yet. They left with a generous gift bag. And then — the part that made it genuinely powerful — those community members became the face of the campaign.

Think about what that communicates to everyone who was in that room: you matter to this brand more than reach does. That is emotional bonding at its most complete — recognition, exclusivity, intimacy, and belonging, all in one afternoon.

That’s not one bond. That’s all four, activated in a single afternoon. Financial value in the gift bag. Structural habit in the channel that told them to show up. Social belonging in the room. Emotional recognition in being chosen at all.

The Bigger Point

A broadcast channel isn’t a loyalty program. But community is the layer that makes loyalty programs work.

The brands I’ve seen extract the most value from their loyalty investment — where engagement is genuine, redemption rates are high, and members actively bring others in — are the ones that built community first. The program didn’t create the relationship. It gave structure to something that already existed.

Research across Gen Z and Millennials shows that brands wanting to earn real loyalty need to build an entire universe of content, events, and community. That sounds expensive. It doesn’t have to be.

It can start with something as simple as a channel, a point of view, and a reason for people to stay.

The best loyalty programs don’t create belonging. They scale it.

Five years ago, my colleagues at Ogilvy Paris introduced me to the term ‘liquid expectations’ — the idea that customers measure your brand against the best experiences they’ve had anywhere, not just your direct competitors. It’s still the most powerful insight I share in CX projects I lead — and it never fails to get that ‘oh wow’ reaction from clients.

I guess there’s a quiet arrogance in brand and marketing— the belief that your customer is only comparing you to others in your category. That if you’re a beauty brand, you're being compared to other beauty brands. If you’re an airline, it’s just you and the other carriers.

Wrong.

Today’s customer expectations are shaped by every brand they interact with. The brands that win hearts and minds — and wallets — are setting the standard for all categories.

• Amazon made customers expect the same or next-day delivery as the norm — so now anything slower feels like an inconvenience.

• Apple made them expect beautiful, intuitive UX with Apple Pay — so now clunky checkout flows feel lazy, annoying and eye-roll evoking.

• Net-a-Porter made them expect packaging that feels like a gift — so when your product arrives in a scrunched plastic bag, it feels cheap, no matter the price tag.

• Mecca made them expect hyper-personalisation — such as perfectly timed ‘refill your empties’ emails, so when you send a generic email blast, they tune out.

• Uber made them expect real-time transparency — from knowing their driver's name to watching their meal move live on a map — so vague shipping updates don’t cut it anymore.

• Loewe made them expect creativity at every touchpoint — from window displays to packaging to product storytelling, — so your templated seasonal campaign feels uninspired by comparison.

These are liquid expectations. They seep across categories. What customers experience in one industry reshapes what they demand in another — and it happens unconsciously. They’re not thinking, “Why doesn’t my insurance app work like Netflix?” But they are feeling it every time it doesn’t.

What this means for your brand

You are no longer just competing within your vertical. You're competing against the last best experience your customer had — with any brand.
That means:

• Your shipping updates are judged against Uber’s live map and ETAs.

• Your loyalty program is judged against Sephora’s community.

• Your payment flow is judged against Apple Pay’s one-tap checkout.

• Your app interface is judged against Apple’s fluid UX.

• Your emails are judged against Mecca’s timely, personalised comms.

Why most brands miss this.

They benchmark against outdated competitors, run “voice of customer” surveys in isolation, and measure themselves against what’s expected — not what’s exceptional.

But customers don’t think in segments. They think in standards — and those standards are getting higher every day.

So what do you do?

1. Reframe your benchmarks. Stop looking sideways at competitors. Start looking at the brands your customers actually engage with — fashion, tech, delivery, banking, entertainment.

2. Build Customer Mindsets for each segment. Personas capture who your customer is. Mindsets capture how they think and behave in different moments. They’re the “double click” of personas — sharper, more dynamic, and built around motivations, attitudes, and expectations. For example: the Efficiency Mindset expects speed and zero friction (think Amazon, Uber). The Indulgence Mindset expects beauty, theatre, and surprise (think Loewe, Net-a-Porter). Mapping these across your segments shows you which cross-category brands are shaping the standards you need to meet.

3. Raise the bar on basics. Fast delivery, clear comms, beautiful design, zero friction. These are no longer “nice to haves” — they’re entry tickets.

4. Connect across channels. If your app, email, and store feel like different planets, you’ve already lost.

5. Think human, not channel. Customers don’t care about “touchpoints.” They care about time, effort, emotions, and life moments.

What platforms & tools to use in discovery

There’s no handbook on liquid expectations. I’ve built my own approach over time, and these are the tools and steps I use to uncover a client’s cross-category competitors:

STEP ONE: Gather market, psychographic, and demographic data
Start broad. Identify the top-performing brands (local and global) across all categories your audience engages with. This gives you the wider universe beyond direct competitors.
Example: When working on Lululemon’s Membership program, I looked not just at Nike, Alo, and GymShark, but also at Mecca, Sephora, Errone, ClassPass, Barry’s, and Oura — because that’s where the same customers were spending time and money. People that are interested in activewear are also interested in fitness, in healthy food, skincare, wearable tech and so fourth.

STEP TWO: Run a SEMrush Competitor Analysis
With your cross-category brand list in hand, audit their e-commerce and digital marketing performance as a closed group. Compare website traffic, engagement levels, conversion rates, and email/social effectiveness. This reveals who is actually winning attention and driving performance.

STEP THREE: Use the SEMrush Brand Cross-Over Report
Take your top performers and input them (plus your own brand) into the Brand Overlap report under Trends. This shows the percentage of customers who visit both your brand and these cross-category competitors. The output gives you concrete data on audience crossover - hypothetical examples* - Mecca & lulumeon 16%, Barry’s & Lululemon 10%, Goop & Lululemon 17% etc.

STEP FOUR: Translate insights into liquid expectations
Now that you know where audiences overlap, dig deeper into those brands’ experiences.
Example: In Australia, I found a large crossover between Lululemon and Mecca customers. That meant Mecca — not Lorna Jane — was a more relevant benchmark for experience design.

Food for thought:

If your customer just stepped out of an Apple store, scrolled Loewe on Instagram, tracked their Uber, got same day delivery with Amazon — how does your brand experience hold up?

Because in the world of liquid expectations, everyone is your competitor.
Even Apple. Even Jacquemus. Even Amazon.

* % figures and cross-category brand examples are provided as illustrative hypotheticals. Accurate figures and brand crossover data have been intentionally omitted from this article.

Written by Emily Shum - A CX Strategist based between Paris and Sydney - specialised in loyalty, CRM, content, experience design and business growth. Emily has worked on brands like Lululemon, OMEGA, Coca Cola, IKEA and Michelin agency-side with Ogilvy. Client-side with Hilton and Virgin, and currently she’s with Richemont working on brands like Cartier, Chloe, Piaget and Dunhill.

Influence is shifting. Cultural capital now comes from what you read, the conversations you spark, and the communities you cultivate. From book clubs to pop-up libraries, from podcast interviews to literary merch, the smartest players in today’s culture are building something slower and more enduring than TikTok trends and same-same loyalty programs: culture and community. It’s a shift cutting across luxury fashion, retail, music, and celebrity and honestly, it’s creating a new kind of brand loyalty.

You can now walk into a Saint Laurent boutique and pick up a curated paperback, a linen-bound journal, branded lighter or an espresso cup, items that say less about fashion, and more about identity. Miu Miu is giving away Simone de Beauvoir at street kiosks. Acne Studios’ Acne Paper has opened a permanent gallery at Palais Royal in Paris, Dua Lipa is running a book club with playlists and podcast episodes. Kaia Gerber hosts live conversations with debut authors on Instagram, and Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy has made her the highest-paid woman in podcasting, with a $125 million Spotify deal and an audience of 10 million listeners per episode — all built on the power of conversation and community.

This isn’t merch. It’s media.
And the brands doing it well aren’t chasing relevance—they’re shaping it.

Acne Studios: From Fashion to Publishing

Acne Studios was the OG—or at least one of the first—to move from being a fashion label to a cultural one. Acne Paper, which launched in 2005 as a magazine, is now a series of coffee table books (think Taschen vibes). Edited by Thomas Persson, Acne Paper dives into topics ranging from 15th-century tapestry and LGBTQ culture to modern street photography and meditation—blurring the lines between fashion, art, literature, and culture.

Today, stepping into their Rue Saint-Honoré store in Paris feels more like entering an art gallery than a fashion boutique. The clothing is curated into intentional sectional collections along the outer perimeter of the space, while the central area is dedicated to bookshelves, seating, and open space that invites you to slow down, take it all in, and engage with the art, books, and the styling team. It’s not just about shopping—it’s a cultural experience.

Kaia Gerber’s Library Science: Beyond Celeb Vanity Projects

Take Kaia Gerber’s Library Science. What could have been another celebrity vanity project is instead one of the most authentic literary spaces on Instagram. She’s using her platform to highlight debut writers and underrepresented voices. Kaia doesn’t just post book recommendations, she’s actively building and engaging her community, hosting live chats with authors, reposting fan annotations, and host IRL meetups in cool venues across New York and LA. She’s also monetising the project, with cute merch, like library bags, baby-T’s and caps.

Miu Miu: The Aesthetic of Intellect

Miu Miu’s Summer Reads is deliberately tactile. Since 2023, kaleidoscope kiosks have appeared in Paris, New York, London, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Osaka, transforming parks into pop-up libraries and in some instances, like Paris, taking over actual libraries like the gardens at Bibliothèque nationale de France. Guests are gifted feminist classics—Simone de Beauvoir, Fumiko Enchi—wrapped in Miu Miu’s own dust jackets. There are bookmarks, ex-libris stamps, iced coffees, matcha and ice-creams. Guests are encouraged to hang out. To read, to meet others, to engage. It’s a slower, more deliberate connection between fashion and culture, less about spectacle, ads, influencers and more about presence.

The message is clear: intellect and identity aren’t just marketing props. They’re built into the brands essence, it’s a lifestyle.

Dua Lipa: From Pop Star to Publisher

Then there’s Dua Lipa, who’s built Service95 into something resembling a global editorial startup. It started as a newsletter, but quickly expanded into a full ecosystem: essays, interviews, a book club, playlists, and a podcast. Each month, a new book is selected—not based on trend, but on voice. Titles like Widow Basquiat, Crying in H Mart, and There There all reflect the platform’s editorial POV: global, intersectional, and emotionally intelligent.

It’s not trying to sell you anything. Instead, it’s inviting you into a world. And that quiet community of culture is part of what makes it work.

Dior Book Tote: Fashion as Narrative

Jonathan Anderson’s debut for Dior Men’s Summer 2026 collection in July 2025 took cultural integration to the next level with the reimagined Dior Book Tote. This time, the iconic bag wasn’t just a fashion accessory—it was literally a book. The embroidered covers of books like In Cold Blood and Dracula made it clear: this bag wasn’t just a nod to literature—it was a part of it. It’s a clever wink to the performative nature of “reading as branding,” and a way for the brand to put intellect and culture front and center.

Saint Laurent and Loewe: The Cultivation of Quiet Taste

Saint Laurent has also embraced this cultural shift. Today, you’ll find the Rue Saint-Honorè flagship window merchandising featuring art not clothes, as you enter the store (much like Acne Studio’s down the road) you’re met with in-store lifestyle displays, like large-scale coffee tables featuring books, magazines, candles, stationery, and branded coffee cups and lighters—small but deliberate artefacts that create a quieter, more thoughtful retail experience.

The brand now feels more like a concept store than just a stuffy luxury fashion boutique. Even the stylist team vibes feel more relaxed and intentional than they used to. Loewe is following suit, using poetry salons, artist workshops, and literary collaborations to build a space where culture thrives alongside craftsmanship. These are no longer just fashion brands, they’re shaping environments that invite you into a world - a lifestyle.

Cultural Capital is the Strategy

These brands aren’t just looking for buzz—they’re building belonging which in turn, generates the buzz.

Fashion has always been about identity, but now the most powerful brands are going beyond aesthetics. They’re asking: What do you read? What do you believe? What kind of world do you want to live in?

This is the conversation, and more importantly, this is where loyalty is built - not in your app or checkout process, but in the ideas that surround the brand and the sense of self a customer creates by engaging with it.

This is the New Form of Loyalty

The future of loyalty isn’t in discounts or even rewards programs. It’s in culture and community.

It’s in the slow-building connection that comes from being part of something bigger than a transaction.

Whether it’s Miu Miu handing you Simone de Beauvoir in a Paris garden, Dua Lipa curating a global book club, or Alex Cooper speaking to 10 million people a week, the impact is the same - they’re not just building audiences, they’re creating belonging.

And when people feel a sense of belonging, loyalty becomes inevitable.

Written by Emily Shum - A CX Strategist based between Paris and Sydney - specialised in loyalty, CRM, content, experience design and business growth. Emily has worked on brands like Lululemon, OMEGA, Coca Cola, IKEA and Michelin agency-side with Ogilvy. Client-side with Hilton and Virgin, and currently she’s with Richemont working on brands like Cartier, Chloe, Piaget and Dunhill.