How promotion campaigns can change customer behavior

In this blog post, we'll look at how to design promotion campaigns around four requirements, including:

Chili's, Chipotle, Sephora, Starbucks, and Bilt each illustrate a different part of that model. Their reported sales, signups, and participation figures are useful evidence of campaign scale and momentum. Only a controlled comparison can show whether a promotion caused profitable incremental behavior, rather than simply riding a trend that was already underway.

A loyalty program provides identity and ongoing value. A promotion, by contrast, is a time-bounded behavior-change mechanism. Gamification and member-only access are tools that can connect the two, and this guide treats each term precisely rather than interchangeably.

According to Harvard Business Review and Talon.One, a March 2025 survey found real momentum toward personalization. 62% of companies increased sales through personalized promotions, and only 14% plan to increase mass discounting. Most respondents were executive or senior managers, so the findings reflect support from the leaders who set budgets.

Four attributes distinguish the campaigns in this guide:

The strength of evidence varies by example. A randomized holdout or company-reported incremental-sales test is the most direct evidence. Reported activations, signups, and participation figures are useful evidence of scale. Sales and traffic context, like Chili's comp growth, shows the business environment a campaign operated in, without isolating the campaign's own causal effect.

Chili's Triple Dipper had been part of the brand's value-oriented advertising since 2024, according to Restaurant Dive. When the dish went viral on TikTok, the marketing team leaned into that momentum rather than starting from nothing.

Brinker reported Chili's same-store sales up 23.7% in Q4 FY2025, driven by traffic growth of 16.3%. CEO Kevin Hochman described the result as "sales +24% driven by traffic of +16%." This quarter completed 17 consecutive quarters of positive comps for Chili's at the time, a streak that has since extended further. The Triple Dipper represented about 15% of Chili's sales in the quarter, not Brinker's total sales across all its brands.

These figures describe the business environment the campaign operated in. They don't isolate how much of the sales growth the viral moment itself caused, apart from the value positioning and marketing already in motion. Chili's could lean into the moment because a value-anchored offer and an established social presence were already part of its strategy.

Chili's shows how speed can amplify existing demand. Gamified promotions apply the same responsiveness to repeated customer behavior.

A gamified promotion uses streaks, challenges, progress tracking, and prizes to reward customer behavior over time. It encourages ongoing participation across multiple interactions rather than a single purchase.

Chipotle ran "Summer of Extras" in the summer of 2025 as a standalone rewards event, offering weekly drawings and bonus points. Chipotle has said the 2025 program drove 6.4 million activations and an estimated $12 million or more in incremental sales. This is a company-reported figure rather than an independently audited one.

Chipotle then relaunched its loyalty program as "Rewards on Repeat" in April 2026, alongside a redesigned in-app experience. The 2026 edition of Summer of Extras built on that platform, adding streak-based monthly challenges and local leaderboards. Nearly 90% of Chipotle app transactions are linked to Rewards, compared with roughly 20% of in-restaurant transactions. Chipotle has pointed to that gap as its biggest growth opportunity.

Starbucks runs a comparable play at holiday scale through its annual "Starbucks for Life" sweepstakes. This promotion uses purchase-linked prize plays, weekly challenges, and a no-purchase method of entry.

MAX Burgers used a gamification launch to turn occasional guests into regulars, connecting the mechanic to Braze and mParticle in its existing tech stack. This is a vendor-reported case study rather than an independently audited result.

Snipp research found gamification associated with a 47% rise in engagement. The exact methodology and sample behind that figure should be reviewed before citing it as a general benchmark, since "associated with" doesn't establish that gamification caused the lift in every context.

The endowed progress effect offers a mechanism for why a sense of progress matters. Nunes and Drèze first documented it in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In a car wash experiment, one group received a 10-stamp card with two stamps pre-filled and completed the card at a 34% rate. A second group received an unstamped 8-stamp card and completed at 19%, even though both groups needed eight purchases.

Perceived progress changes effort, and motivation tends to rise as the goal gets closer. A streak or challenge puts that sense of progress in front of a customer every week, but the mechanic still needs a defined business outcome. Visit streaks can increase frequency, category challenges can encourage product discovery, and spend thresholds can lift basket size.

Progress must also remain understandable. Customers should know what counts, how far they've advanced, and when the challenge ends. Hidden or inconsistent rules weaken participation and increase support demands.

Once a game creates repeat participation, member eligibility can extend the promotion into a longer customer relationship.

Some brands reserve their highest-value promotional offers for enrolled members. Placing promotional value behind a member wall lets the campaign build a customer relationship while keeping the public price intact.

Sephora's Beauty Insider program used gamified challenges that combined online and in-store actions. The challenges mixed transactional and non-transactional engagement, with rewards such as brand experiences and deluxe samples. The first two challenges tripled participation forecasts and added more than two million new Beauty Insider signups.

Running tiered access requires coordinated promotional execution. Tier logic, points multipliers, and staggered windows must resolve in the same cart for the same shopper. Configurable loyalty programs and real-time promotion rules can support those mechanics.

Member gating also gives teams more control over promotion economics. Teams can vary access, discount depth, or rewards according to customer value, and cap redemptions to prevent unintended stacking.

The design still involves tradeoffs. A narrow gate can protect margin but limit reach. A broad gate can increase enrollment while giving value to customers who needed no encouragement. The gate should be set around a defined objective.

Grocery and travel brands use variations of the same member-access promotion. Wyndham Rewards Insider uses a paid membership tier, and Virgin Atlantic has reserved campaign benefits for members instead of every customer booking a fare. Chick-fil-A One uses a four-tier structure to connect member status with access to rewards and benefits.

A similar playbook can work beyond retail. Bilt Rewards created a new reward category by turning rent into rewards. It then expanded its ecosystem to points earned and redeemed across rent, travel, shopping, and fitness. It grew to more than five million members, reached one in four U.S. apartment buildings, and built a network of more than 40,000 merchant partners.

For banks and fintechs, the story makes a specific point. A differentiated earning mechanic can be harder to replicate than one built solely around rates or fees. Its durability depends on partnerships, data, and a well-integrated member experience. The platform must still support compliance, governance, and accurate tracking.

Novel mechanics can attract attention and enrollment. Measurement must then show whether those mechanics changed behavior or merely rewarded existing activity.

Redemption counts and sales lift during the campaign window can mislead teams. The promotion may simply hand margin to customers who would have bought anyway.

The right measure is incremental contribution, not gross sales:

Incremental contribution = (incremental revenue × contribution margin) − reward cost − fulfillment and variable costs − campaign costs

A campaign can grow sales while still reducing contribution. This happens when the discount is too deep, customers pull forward purchases they would have made anyway, or high-margin sales get displaced by low-margin ones.

Uplift modeling addresses part of this problem by sorting customers into four groups:

Persuadables are the primary source of incremental conversion for that specific treatment and outcome. A campaign can still affect other segments' timing, basket mix, or retention. Response models can prioritize customers likely to convert, including customers who would convert without the offer. Uplift models instead estimate the difference the treatment itself causes.

A randomized holdout is the preferred starting point. Withhold the promotion from a portion of the eligible population selected at random, then compare outcomes. If randomization isn't practical, a carefully matched comparison group is a fallback, with its limitations stated alongside the result.

The control group may reduce short-term campaign revenue, and business teams often resist it for that reason. Without a control, though, teams can't separate behavior change from subsidy. Teams should also exclude or separately track customers exposed to comparable overlapping offers, since a second promotion in the same window can contaminate the comparison.

Before launch, define whether the campaign is expected to create new demand, shift purchase timing, shift channel, increase basket size, or improve retention. That choice determines which metric actually measures success.

For a restaurant campaign, the intended behavior might be one additional monthly visit. For travel, it may be direct booking. For a retailer, it may be a higher-margin basket. The incentive and measurement window should follow that objective.

Document five decisions before launch: The target behavior, the eligible audience, the control design, the evaluation window, and the success threshold. Define a stop condition for when costs exceed expectations.

Campaign reporting becomes more useful when it separates customer groups. New, active, high-value, and lapsed customers rarely respond the same way, and segment-level results can reveal where a successful average hides waste.

Marketing teams need to build, test, and launch offers without filing an engineering ticket for every change. When promotion logic is embedded in core commerce code, even modest rule changes may require development, QA, release scheduling, and regression testing. A configurable rules layer can shorten that cycle for pre-approved campaign changes.

A customer data platform supplies profile and event context. An engagement tool delivers the resulting message, and a commerce platform supplies cart context.

A promotion engine then evaluates eligibility and value against that combined data in real time. Braze, mParticle, and commercetools each cover one part of that chain rather than the whole decisioning layer.

A shared promotion framework can remain consistent worldwide while local teams create rewards that reflect regional preferences.

Governance remains necessary at higher campaign velocity. Sandbox testing and approval controls support testing and approvals. Campaign budgets and redemption caps control costs, while stacking rules protect margin and customer experience.

A practical campaign brief should answer several questions before configuration begins. What customer action should change, and which audience qualifies? What reward cost is acceptable, and which other offers may combine with it? How will the team measure incrementality?

The promotion system must evaluate those answers during the customer session, resolving hundreds of live campaigns and overlapping offers to select the correct benefit.

Every campaign should specify the behavior to change, the eligible audience, the reward cost ceiling, and the causal measure of success. Each objective, whether frequency, margin, or acquisition, requires different eligibility, timing, and measurement.

The customer experience also deserves inspection from discovery through redemption. The message, progress display, checkout result, and rejection reason must agree. A campaign loses credibility when customers qualify in one channel but fail in another.

Audit the last three campaigns for incremental lift, margin impact, and launch time. Those results will expose the most valuable gap to close.

Talon.One's unified incentives approach applies the same principle operationally. It connects promotions, loyalty, and gamification so teams can move faster and prove incremental value.