Stop Chasing Loyalty. Start Creating Devotion.

During the 16 years I’ve worked in loyalty marketing, I’ve found myself surrounded by people with an insatiable curiosity about what drives brand loyalty and how to reach customers in the right moment with the right message.

This curiosity has led The Lacek Group to create and oversee some of the world’s most admired loyalty programs over the past three decades. From the day we opened our doors, we’ve been committed to finding new and innovative ways for brands to connect with their customers, building reliance, relationships, and retention.

Now, in collaboration with our partners at Ogilvy, we’re excited to introduce a new paradigm—a new way of thinking about brands and their relationships with their best customers. Welcome to Brand Devotion.

Are we just bribing customers to be loyal?

We live in a world where trust is collapsing and skepticism reigns. Consumers, bombarded by noise and reduced to data points, feel like targets instead of humans.

In this swipe-right, skip-ad, unfollow-without-blinking world, most brand relationships are transactional—built on convenience, discounts, and fleeting promotions. Even loyalty programs, designed to secure long-term customers, are overwhelmingly transaction driven.

But here’s the rub: Almost all purchase decisions are made subconsciously or emotionally, rather than based on objective factors, such as cost.* You may think you're in a mutually beneficial, committed relationship, but your customers are already looking for their next fling, driven by deep-seated emotional needs. Renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it this way: “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.”

So maybe loyalty isn’t really love after all. Maybe it’s just convenience.

It’s time to think bigger. Your real goal shouldn’t be retention through convenience or discounts; it should be devotion. What’s the difference?

Devotion is an emotional connection so strong that customers choose your brand not out of habit, but because it feels like an extension of them—of their perspectives, their values, their approach to living.

Think of the athletic shoes that fill your closet; the hotels you choose without considering others; the team you swear by, win or lose. You may love them for all sorts of reasons, but the core connection may simply be that you’re wired to do so.

Blame your brain. In those three pounds of gray matter between your ears, emotion outranks logic nearly every time. The limbic system—the nonverbal, emotional center of your brain—helps you feel connected to a brand, recall powerful memories, crave rewards, and identify with others who do the same.

We need to earn customer love.

Brands today are drowning in information but starving for insights. A rich and deep array of data points doesn’t guarantee a lasting customer connection. Brand relationships that endure need to be built on mutual trust, culture, and community.

We call that Brand Devotion, a new model for loyalty growth.

Brand Devotion marks a shift from points to pride, from feeling locked in to choosing to stay. It recognizes that customers aren’t just wallets, they're humans seeking meaning and belonging. And brands that reflect their deepest values.

How do we build this profound connection? By fostering devotion across four critical dimensions:

Data combined with creativity can win the day.

To ignite this kind of devotion, we need to create emotional moments that delight; build communities where customers connect and feel seen; use data to personalize experiences and show customers we truly understand them; and align with values that matter. That's how we'll transform buyers into advocates.

Here at The Lacek Group, we call this approach the Art & Algorithms of Brand Devotion because it involves capitalizing on the customer data that brands are drowning in to identify the right places, times, and ways to engage—and then using creativity to trigger an emotional response that builds on established memories and connections.

Devoted customers move from passive buyers to active promoters, with word-of-mouth messaging outperforming traditional paid media. Attention turns into attachment, and attachment into revenue. Price becomes less relevant when a brand aligns with a customer’s principles and fits into their culture.

Brand Devotion is where the real opportunity is.

True loyalty is an emotional outcome, a bond forged through empathy, shared values, and identity-shaping experiences.

So stop chasing loyalty. Stop renting customers with fleeting discounts and transactional perks. Start earning devotion and lasting relationships by creating spaces where customers feel seen, heard, and connected.

The brands that win tomorrow will create relationships that people want to maintain, building a future where customers aren’t just buyers, they’re brand believers.

*Studies quoted in Gerald Zaltman's landmark analysis of consumer behavior, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Markets (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), indicate that up to 95% of purchase decisions are made based on emotional factors.

John Jarvis is The Lacek Group’s chief creative officer. For more than 30 years, The Lacek Group has been perfecting the art and algorithms of brand devotion. We help world-class brands identify their highest-potential customers, engage them across channels throughout their lifecycles, personalize each relationship for optimal long-term results, and measure the true effectiveness of those efforts. The Lacek Group is an Ogilvy One company.