4 key takeaways from INCENTIVIZE NYC

Our mission was simple: we wanted to inspire new connections across our community, and share insider insights ahead of the flagship INCENTIVIZE Summit conference in November.

We were joined on stage by senior leaders from our network including Catherine Ok from Estée Lauder, Courtney Adair from SiteOne, loyalty strategist Heather Dettmann, and James Riess and Jen Gray from Merkle. 

The room was alive: here are the 4 ideas that kept coming up when the INCENTIVIZE Roadshow landed in NYC.

Some businesses compete on price, but emotional value leads to long-term success. To this point, Jen Gray, SVP, GM Promotions & Gamification at Merkle, shared the story of two hotels in Hollywood: A global chain with a reputation for great service and comfort, and a boutique hotel that costs nearly twice as much.

Jen pointed out that at first glance, the chain hotel is a reliable booking, but if you take a look at the boutique hotel’s reviews, you’ll see why customers are willing to pay the difference. It comes down to how the hotel makes guests feel. The reviews call out unique amenities – in-room magicians, linens wrapped in lavender, the midnight soft-serve bar, and the popsicle-delivery hotline – but they focus on how each one made their stay fun, exciting, and magical.

This is what Jen Gray calls a popsicle moment: an opportunity to delight customers with an experience that makes them feel something. “These moments don’t have to be expensive, but they’re differentiated by emotional value,” she said. That’s the beauty of a popsicle moment: your competitors can match your price, but they can’t sell the same story.

There’s a time and place for discounts, but discount dependency leads to long-term costs. Price sensitivity is very real, but constant, broad-sweeping discounts train customers to expect price reductions before making a purchase.

Brands need to ask themselves if they are buying behavior, or driving incrementality. Without discipline, discounts move from a tactic to a habit. They might solve a problem for today, but they can create a bigger one for tomorrow.

One point that kept coming up was how outdated tech stacks hold brands back from creating actual behavior change with their incentives strategy. Legacy infrastructure can be the start and end of innovation, and fragmented systems make scaling across brands and geographies nearly impossible.

Winning loyalty programs and promotions offer consistency across channels, and use the same logic to guarantee the same experience regardless of where and when a reward reaches a customer. 

Successful brands build growth engines on omnichannel architecture like this. It allows them to test, learn, and scale successful promotions at speed. Some promotions play catch up with customer expectations - the most effective promotions evolve alongside them. If this sounds familiar, check out our Creative Currencies report. It covers a framework creative promotions, and the technical architecture they require.

AI is moving fast: as Luke Effenberger, Talon.One’s Director of AI Solutions, noted, large language models have made a fundamental shift “from answers to actions” in the last 3 years alone.

Today’s agents can handle discovery, evaluation, and even transactions. There’s no need to panic: For many consumers, the shopping journey hasn’t changed just yet. But brands can already prepare for a shift to agentic shopping by building a strong foundation. Read our guide to agentic commerce to find out more.