Generative Loyalty

Generative Loyalty

Elevating your business with loyalty-driven growth strategies.

Today, customers and brands are both addicted to discounts. To build lasting brand preference, it’s crucial to refocus promotional incentives where they have real impact and explore new ways to engage customers beyond price cuts. That’s why nine in ten brands want to reinvent their strategy for loyalty. 

 
At Empathy Lab, we combine our deep understanding of customer motivations with growth economics, and make it real with AI technologies and creative execution. We work with you the whole way as your new strategy is built, launched, and optimized.  
 
With ever-enriching customer connections, smarter promotional spend, growing audiences, and new data-rich customer propositions, brands with generative loyalty strategies gain a competitive advantage. 

We design loyalty programs powered by AI to make every benefit truly personal. 

 

It’s about moving beyond the transactional and creating emotional connections that make customers choose your brand, time and again.

 

Today, many brand–customer relationships still fail to break free from mass or simple segment approaches. We help you change that by delivering dynamic experiences that evolve with every customer interaction. Creating meaningful moments, even beyond the purchase cycle, that keep your brand top of mind and the first choice.

 

We measure the economic impact of loyalty to ensure your program delivers real value. Our bold creative concepts flow seamlessly into program design, benefits, and mechanics. And these designs aren’t static. With generative AI, we create potentially thousands of variations of tailored experiences, all while making it work technically, and ensuring practical operation.

 

Brands come to us for loyalty reinvention to:

  • Improve retention and reduce the cost of acquiring new customers.
  • Deepen engagement and grow their share of wallet.
  • Build better data for insights that drive optimization.

We marry customer psychology with machine learning and real-time decisioning.

 

Customers are becoming desensitized to discounts, and ramping up more of the same isn’t sustainable. It’s a delicate balance – protecting brand perception and protecting trading performance. So how do you generate demand with fewer, smarter offers?

 

We focus on optimizing promotion performance. By creating purposeful, personalized offers that reinforce your brand’s value, we design strategies to nudge customer behavior and maintain their willingness to pay.

 

Our approach pinpoints the most effective triggers and tipping points along your customers’ journey, from consideration to conversion. 

 

We shift focus from mass promotions to personalized ones, through loyalty programs using enhanced decision models and platform capabilities. Then, we craft a comprehensive playbook – from communications that emphasize perceived value to business rules that protect P&L performance.

 

Brands come to us for smart demand strategies when they want to:

  • Stimulate sales.
  • Reduce discount costs.
  • Free up gross margin to reinvest in loyal customer growth. 

We help brands identify opportunities and build partnerships to expand their member base, using white-label, co-brand, or third-brand models.

 

In today’s crowded market, brands can focus too much on creating siloed environments. But what if you could extend your products and services to where customers already are – using partnerships to reach a wider audience?

 

We create unified memberships that bring together a curated selection of brands. This approach delivers a holistic end-to-end experience, where the collective effort meets the shared goals and needs of your customers.

 

With thoughtful data sharing strategies, we help you connect with target customers beyond your immediate ecosystem, unlocking new addressable moments.

 

Member benefits can be delivered through third parties, with open architectures and collaborative commercial models that maximize shared customer value.

 

Brands work with us on multi-membership strategies to:

  • Scale their customer base.
  • Drive organic volume growth.
  • Achieve greater scale for enhanced monetization opportunities.

We help you design new value exchanges and build the capabilities needed to become a truly data-driven business.

 

While the benefits of loyalty are clear, unlocking the ability to invest in disruptive offerings goes beyond just promising higher spend over time. So how do you tap into new sources of funding?

 

We help commercialize your loyalty base to boost value for both you and your customers. This could mean creating new consumption models, like adaptive subscriptions, launching premium tiers or buy-in clubs, or monetizing data.

 

We’ll work with you to identify which strategies are the best fit, then craft new propositions for the right customer segments. These are often high impact but lower penetration, and we use research-led methods to set benefits and pricing. After launching, we’ll prove the value to both customers and your business.

 

Brands turn to us for new value models when they want to:

  • Create new, higher margin revenue streams.
  • Free up investment capacity for differentiated offers.

Loyalty Economics

 

Empathy Lab’s toolkit connects customer appeal with quantified P&L impact. This integrated approach combines quantitative concept validation research with business case modeling. This helps build the best propositions and define the optimum rollout approach across brands, segments, and markets.

Global Customer Loyalty Report

 

Empathy Lab partnered with Antavo to deliver the loyalty industry’s largest report. Based on research with 10,000 global consumers, inputs from 2,600 loyalty business stakeholders, and analysis of 230 million loyalty program member actions, it includes financial performance benchmarks, feature trends, and AI use cases.

Rochelle Wang
Director, Experience & Innovation Consulting, Amsterdam

With 14 years of working on the world’s most loved brands, Rochelle loves to turn conventional thinking on its head.

Ward de Kruiff
Global Head of Web3 & Metaverse, Amsterdam

Ward spearheads Web3, Metaverse and digital commerce transformations at EPAM, focusing on cutting-edge consumer engagement.

Emma Kilczynski
Principal, Loyalty Business Consulting, Amsterdam

Emma has worked in loyalty, strategy, and experience consulting for over 10 years, helping brands worldwide build meaningful customer connections.

At Empathy Lab, she designs innovative loyalty program strategies that go beyond transactions – fostering emotional and lasting customer lifecycles. Emma is passionate about how AI and revolutionary program mechanics are transforming loyalty, making experiences more relevant and rewarding for the end-users.

Recently, Emma moved to Amsterdam from Dubai and is embracing life in a new (colder) city and enjoying getting lost in the maze of canals.

Freddie Leigh-Akompi
CIO Loyalty Technologies, London

Freddie is a seasoned technology consultant with over 20 years of experience. He serves as a trusted partner and advisor working in regulated industries and in complex, multi-national and start-up organizations helping clients to create the future together, addressing business needs from strategy and design to operational excellence. 

He has proven loyalty expertise in retail energy, grocery, fashion and automotive having historically worked on engagements ranging from short-term business case reviews to full-scale transformation programmes focusing on the enabling enterprise architecture and digital experience and loyalty technologies across EMEA and North America.

Whether seeking to launch, refresh or simply uplift a Loyalty program, he is sure to bring the energy and knowledge to help.

Jaap Beärda
Director, Experience Design, Amsterdam

Jaap Bearda is a strategic leader in Experience Design, blending strategy and innovation to craft engaging, generative loyalty-driven brand experiences.

Arthur Hoogeveen
Director, Digital Engagement, Amsterdam

Arthur Hoogeveen is a digital commerce strategist with 15+ years of experience, driving innovative solutions that transform brands and customer engagement.

Josi Swerts
Director, Digital Marketing Operations, Brussels

Josi Swerts leads the day-to-day operations of EPAM’s EMEA Digital Marketing team, driving performance across automation, data, media, and optimization.

Katie Robinson
Director, Digital Engagement, London

Katie is a seasoned client partner, helping clients navigate their most ambitious digital transformations.  

Andrew Doyle
Global Head of Loyalty & Promotions Practice, London

Andrew partners with brands to create and apply strategies that deliver growth by capturing share of wallet and share of market. He is the global head of Empathy Lab’s Generative Loyalty services. 

 

His team are trusted advisors to brands accelerating customer growth by reinventing loyalty, optimizing promotions, creating partnerships, and building monetization business models. He leads the continued development of domain expertise within our integrated capabilities – in consulting, design, and engineering – across industries.

 

Prior to EPAM, he was a director in growth strategy at a global consultancy and co-founded a social enterprise.

Next-Gen Marketing
Learn more
Intelligent Products
Learn more

Interested in exploring AI’s potential for empathy?

It all starts with a conversation.