Perspectives
The Secret Sauce of Loyalty Benchmarking
Kienan McLellan
Every brand wants to know how its loyalty program measures up. Yet true benchmarking in loyalty is far more complex than comparing point balances or participation rates. It requires data that reflects both the transactional realities of the marketplace and the emotional truths that drive customer behavior.
At Bond, we believe benchmarking should be independent, representative, and multidimensional. That philosophy guides how we gather and synthesize insights across our WalletIQ, ProgramIQ, The Loyalty Report, and PromoIQ platforms, where benchmarking emerges as a byproduct of continuous measurement and analysis.
Why Independence Matters
Bond does not use data from the programs we manage to create our benchmarks. This independence ensures that insights remain objective and that client program performance is never used to shape the averages we compare it to. Instead, we rely on surveys, trusted third-party sources, and publicly available data that can be blended and normalized across markets.
By keeping the source data separate, we can evaluate loyalty ecosystems with integrity and avoid circular conclusions. Programs are measured against the market, not against themselves.
Multiple Lenses on Loyalty Performance
Loyalty benchmarking is not a single measure. It is a composite built from several perspectives that, together, describe how customers interact with value, emotion, and brand.
Transactional Benchmarking
Through WalletIQ, we analyze wallet share, spend behavior, and competitive card dynamics to understand how customers distribute value across brands. This creates a financial baseline for how loyalty translates into real economic outcomes.
Program and Participation Benchmarking
With ProgramIQ and The Loyalty Report, we benchmark engagement, participation, and satisfaction across industries. These studies provide a view of how deeply customers are enrolled, how often they engage, and what they believe they are getting in return.
Emotional Benchmarking
Emotional connection is increasingly the true differentiator of loyalty. We measure it through survey-based modeling, sentiment analysis, and social media monitoring. This allows us to see not only what members do, but how they feel about what they do.
Promotional Benchmarking
Using PromoIQ, we gather and classify promotional and advertising data through AI agents that continuously collect and analyze live campaigns. This reveals how brands communicate value in market, how often offers appear, and which emotional or tactical tones are dominant.
Together, these sources create a complete picture of loyalty performance that goes far beyond transactional metrics.
The Role of AI in Benchmarking
Much of our secret sauce lies in how these benchmarks are maintained and updated. Agentic systems within PromoIQ and WalletIQ continuously collect new market data, identify emerging offers, and detect changes in tone or positioning. Machine learning models normalize these inputs, allowing Bond to maintain an always-current view of the loyalty landscape.
Because these systems are built to operate independently from client data, we can compare programs with confidence, knowing that what we see represents the market as it truly behaves.
Why It Matters
Benchmarking defines context. It tells brands not only how they are performing, but whether that performance is strong enough to lead, retain, and grow. By combining independent data sources with emotional, promotional, and transactional intelligence, Bond’s benchmarking helps brands see their loyalty programs the way customers do: as a full relationship, not a single metric.
That, ultimately, is the secret sauce.