What: Retail experts say non-transactional apps and features, such as Dick's Sporting Goods' youth-sports app GameChanger, now drive deeper customer engagement than traditional loyalty programs.

Why it is important: The approach shows that loyalty doesn't have to be built from scratch: brands succeed by plugging into communities customers already belong to, rather than manufacturing new ones, a lesson equally relevant to David Jones' shift toward lifestyle-integrated rewards.

The loyalty program space has become crowded, with features like points and tiers now standard, and consumers say they are more interested in rewards than they are willing to use them. The average consumer belongs to eight loyalty programs and is active in five, according to Deloitte research.

Rather than compete within that saturated field, some brands are building engagement through services unrelated to direct selling. Dick's Sporting Goods' GameChanger app, acquired in 2016, connects parents to youth sports through livestreams, stat tracking and team messaging tools, keeping the brand present in customers' routines without selling anything directly.

Katherine Black of Kearney says the future of loyalty depends on understanding consumers beyond purchase behavior. Katie Thomas, also of Kearney, notes that early loyalty programs functioned mainly as data collection tools rather than genuine relationship-builders. Non-transactional programs, while unlikely to drive the sales volume of a promotion, generate data on attitudes and behavior that transactional programs cannot capture, according to Gartner's Halle Stern.

Crucially, these programs succeed by connecting to communities customers already belong to — as with GameChanger and youth sports, or Nike Run Club and running — rather than attempting to create new ones from scratch.

IADS Notes:  Department stores have been testing several versions of this shift from transactional to relational loyalty. At the World Retail Congress, executives from Selfridges, Lane Crawford and Nykaa described building loyalty around community and experience rather than spend alone, from Selfridges' engagement-based status tiers to Nykaa's large-scale beauty festivals (Fashion Network, May 2025). David Jones took a similar path by pairing its rewards programme with Qantas, trading a points-only structure for flexible, cross-brand redemption tied to personalisation and lifestyle integration (Inside Retail, September 2025). The Mall Group has pushed furthest into the data dimension, building a loyalty ecosystem of more than seven million members around CRM and AI to capture behavioral signals well beyond transaction data, including gamified rewards and personalised recommendations (Retail News Asia, May 2026).

Why communities, not transactions, are the future of loyalty