𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

TLC Worldwide is a Business Reporter client

A loyalty agency has banned the word “loyalty”. Say it in a meeting and you owe the charity jar a fiver. It started as a laugh, then got uncomfortable, because the moment you can’t reach for the word, you have to say what you actually mean, and a room full of people who do this for a living hadn’t the faintest idea. Marketers use this constantly yet can’t define it. That should worry us more than it does.

So, what is loyalty, really? We use the word often, in business and in life, and almost never check whether it means the same thing twice.

There’s one version nobody argues with. A football fan stands on a freezing terrace watching a team that hasn’t won anything since the 80s, singing songs their grandad taught them. They’ll be back next week, whether the team wins, loses or falls apart in the final five minutes. No discount code. No app pinging a reminder. And if the team drops a division, the fan doesn’t switch to whoever just went up. That would be unthinkable, almost rude. This is loyalty with nothing transactional attached, which is exactly what makes it so rare.

Most of what we call loyalty looks nothing like that. You switch supermarkets when the points are better this month. You drop your broadband the second the introductory deal ends. You’re “loyal” to three coffee shops depending on which is nearest. None of it feels like betrayal, because none of it was ever loyalty. It was convenience all along, wearing loyalty’s coat to a meeting it was never invited to.

And yet there are exceptions most of us make without noticing. When a good hairdresser moves to a salon across town, for example, we follow them. Further to drive, nowhere to park, usually more expensive, and we go anyway, because the loyalty was never to the salon. It was to the person who remembers how you like your fringe and asks after your mum. We’ll cross a city for the right human and won’t cross the road for the right brand. That tells you something about where loyalty lives.

Which raises an uncomfortable thought for anyone running a rewards programme. Perhaps commercial loyalty isn’t loyalty at all. Perhaps the repeat visits, the swipes, the points balances, are just habit and convenience in a more flattering word. Retailers spend a fortune keeping customers close, customers pocket the rewards and then a better offer appears two doors down and off they trot without a flicker of guilt. Is that loyalty wavering, or was it never loyalty in the first place?

There’s a sharper version hiding in everyday life. Picture a couple with a noticeable age gap and an even bigger gap in the bank balance. The question whispered at dinner parties is always the same: is the partner with the lower income in it for love, or for the lifestyle? Unfair, more often than not. But worth sitting with, because it’s really asking what any of us are loyal to when we choose to stay. The person? The comfort? The history? The quiet dread of starting over? Most relationships, like most customers, are loyal to some blend of all of it, and few could honestly untangle the percentages.

Maybe that’s the real discovery. Loyalty isn’t one thing. It’s several, all borrowing the same word and hoping nobody checks. There’s the emotional kind, the football terrace kind handed down through generations. There’s habit, the same coffee orders every morning, more muscle memory than affection. There’s identity, where the club you support becomes part of how you describe yourself. There’s community, built on the people you share it with rather than the brand. And there’s the transactional kind, which behaves exactly like the real thing until a better deal turns up, then vanishes without a backwards glance. Pile all of those under one word, as most programmes do, and you’re not measuring loyalty. You’re measuring marketing efficacy.

So, what nudges something from convenience towards the real thing? Rarely the grand gesture. Usually the small, slightly unnecessary one. The landlord who has your pint poured before you reach the bar, and your partner’s spritzer beside it, soda not lemonade, because he remembered. The “this one’s on the house” on your birthday, for no reason other than he noticed. The dog that welcomes you just the same, whether your day has been a triumph or a disaster, expecting nothing, yet somehow making you feel like you matter more than anything else in the world. None of it fits a spreadsheet. But it’s the closest most of us come to feeling like we matter to someone rather than to their margins, and a long way from ten per cent off.

This is the territory TLC Worldwide operates in. A global engagement and rewards business, PE Backed and the one behind that no loyalty talk office rule. The job isn’t selling loyalty, because loyalty was never something you could sell. It’s building the moments that earn it. The surprise. The small kindness. The thing that lands at exactly the right time. Clever, with rewards. Not rewards that cross their fingers and hope the cleverness turns up later.

So maybe that’s the honest place to land. Real “loyalty” might be the thing that survives even when the deal stops making sense, the thing you’d still choose tomorrow even if a better offer turned up today. Most of what we call loyalty doesn’t pass that test. The question worth sitting with isn’t whether loyalty exists, but how much of what we call loyalty really is, and how much is just the story we tell ourselves about why we haven’t left.

We might be wrong, of course, and we’d quite enjoy being told so. If you fancy arguing it out over a coffee, we’re easy to find. Just don’t say the L-word when you get here, it’ll cost you a fiver. Quote TLCIND when you do, though, and we’ll add a prize to the value of £5,000 to your first programme. The same fiver back, with a few noughts on the end.

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