- Tension: We crave recognition from brands we frequent, yet most loyalty programs treat us as interchangeable transaction logs.
- Noise: The industry obsesses over points multipliers and tier structures while ignoring what makes someone feel genuinely valued.
- Direct Message: True loyalty emerges when companies remember who you are, not what you spent.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
You walk into a hotel you’ve visited a dozen times. The front desk agent smiles politely, asks for your ID, and begins typing. No acknowledgment that you stayed here last month. No mention of your room preference. No sense that your history with this property carries any weight whatsoever. The loyalty program promised recognition. What you received was a database entry and a plastic keycard.
This scenario plays out millions of times daily across hotels, airlines, restaurants, and retail stores. Consumers carry wallets stuffed with loyalty cards, accumulate points across half a dozen apps, and yet rarely feel like anything more than a number in a spreadsheet. The promise of these programs has always been mutual benefit: brands gain repeat business, customers gain value and recognition. But somewhere along the way, the recognition piece disappeared.
During my time working with tech companies in the Bay Area, I watched countless loyalty initiatives launch with ambitious rhetoric about customer relationships, only to devolve into mechanical point-tracking systems within months. The technology existed to do more. The will, apparently, did not. Then I encountered the work of Adam Bravo at MGM Resorts International, and I started to see what happens when someone decides that a loyalty program should actually remember people.
The Gap Between Membership and Meaning
The hospitality industry presents a unique laboratory for studying loyalty. Unlike retail, where transactions might last seconds, hotels host guests for hours, days, sometimes weeks. Every interaction generates data: room service orders, spa appointments, restaurant reservations, entertainment preferences. The raw material for genuine personalization sits there, waiting to be transformed into something meaningful.
Yet most programs squander this opportunity. Zsuzsa Kecsmar, Chief Strategy Officer at Antavo AI Loyalty Cloud, captured the industry’s central contradiction when she observed, “Loyalty programs are everywhere, but loyalty isn’t.” The distinction matters. Membership is easy. Emotional connection is hard. And the distance between those two states explains why so many programs fail to deliver on their implicit promise.
Adam Bravo, now Vice President of Direct Marketing Strategy at MGM Resorts International, has spent his career closing that gap. His trajectory through the organization tells a story: from Director of Campaign Operations to Executive Director of Loyalty Marketing to his current role overseeing direct marketing strategy. Each position deepened his understanding of what customers actually want from a loyalty relationship. His recognition in the 2015 DMNews 40 Under 40 awards signaled that the industry was taking notice of his approach.
What makes Bravo’s philosophy distinct is his emphasis on data-driven decision-making that serves emotional outcomes. The data exists to understand people, not merely to segment them into marketing buckets. When a returning guest prefers a corner room on a high floor away from the elevator, that information should shape their experience automatically. When someone consistently orders room service breakfast, anticipating that preference demonstrates care. These details seem small until you consider what their absence communicates: you are a stranger here, regardless of how many nights you’ve booked.
I learned the hard way during my consulting years that data without empathy creates products nobody wants. We could generate remarkably sophisticated customer profiles, predict purchasing behavior with impressive accuracy, and still build experiences that felt cold and transactional. The intelligence was there. The humanity was missing.
Cutting Through the Points Obsession
Open any industry publication and you’ll find endless analysis of loyalty program mechanics. Earning rates. Redemption thresholds. Elite qualification requirements. Status match offers. The conversation circles around points as if they were the entire point. This obsession obscures something important: points are a means, never an end.
Chris Trick, Chief Marketing and Performance Officer at Sonesta, articulated the limitation clearly: “Loyalty has to extend beyond the transactional value of ‘you stay, you get points,’ because then it’s just a currency play.” When loyalty becomes purely transactional, it invites purely transactional behavior. Customers chase the best deal, hop between programs, and feel no particular attachment to any brand. The program designed to create loyalty instead creates mercenaries.
Research supports this intuition. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Retailing examined what actually drives retailer loyalty across five decades of data. The finding that resonates most: affective drivers, meaning emotional engagement and personalized experiences, have the most significant impact on retailer loyalty, especially in online retail contexts. Cognitive factors matter. Social factors matter. But emotional connection matters most.
The noise in the loyalty industry comes from treating programs as financial engineering projects. Consultants optimize earning curves. Analysts model redemption liability. Finance teams view outstanding points as balance sheet concerns. All of this matters operationally. None of it captures what makes someone think, “This is my hotel” rather than “This is where I have points.”
What I’ve found analyzing consumer behavior data over the years is that the companies winning at loyalty rarely have the most generous point structures. They have the most memorable interactions. They remember that a guest celebrated an anniversary at their property. They notice when a frequent visitor arrives after a long absence. They treat returning customers like returning friends. The economics still have to work, but the economics follow the relationship, not the reverse.
The Recognition Principle
Bravo’s work at MGM Resorts represents a broader shift in how sophisticated loyalty operators think about their programs. Las Vegas provides an intense testing ground for these ideas. Guests arrive seeking entertainment, escape, indulgence. Their emotional states run high. They remember how they felt, sometimes more vividly than what they spent. A loyalty program in this environment cannot rely on points alone.
Adam Rossbach, President at TFL, noted a revealing trend: “We see more and more brands incorporating live events into their loyalty programs. Why? Because modern consumers are collecting experiences. Live events build emotional connections and add uniqueness to modern loyalty programs.” Experiences create stories. Stories create memories. Memories create loyalty that survives competitive pressure.
The most powerful loyalty programs function as memory systems. They remember who you are, what you value, and how to make you feel recognized. When a brand recalls your history together, it transforms a transaction into a relationship.
Building Systems That Actually See People
Living in Oakland, I watch tech companies pitch personalization while delivering something closer to surveillance with benefits. The distinction matters enormously. Personalization in service of the customer feels like recognition. Personalization in service of extraction feels like manipulation. Consumers can tell the difference, even when they cannot articulate it.
Bravo’s data-driven approach at MGM works because it points toward customer benefit. Knowing a guest’s preferences enables better service. Understanding behavioral patterns allows for relevant offers rather than spam. Tracking history creates continuity across visits. The data serves the relationship rather than merely documenting it.
A study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services found that personalized approaches significantly enhance customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases, with loyal customers exhibiting higher Customer Lifetime Value and more diverse purchasing patterns. The business case aligns with the human case: when people feel genuinely known and valued, they return. They spend more. They recommend. They forgive occasional missteps. The mathematics of loyalty favor authenticity.
What Bravo and marketers like him understand is that technology creates possibilities, but philosophy determines outcomes. The same database powering intrusive retargeting ads could power meaningful recognition. The same predictive model that feels creepy when misapplied feels thoughtful when aligned with customer interests. The infrastructure matters less than the intention behind it.
When my wife and I travel with our kids, we notice which hotels remember that we need connecting rooms, which restaurants recall our dietary restrictions, which rental car companies know we prefer SUVs. These details shape our decisions more than any points balance. We are loyal to the places that make us feel known.
The future of loyalty marketing belongs to practitioners who grasp this principle. Points will persist. Tiers will persist. Earning multipliers and promotional offers will persist. But the programs that thrive will be those that use these mechanics in service of something deeper: the human desire to be seen, remembered, and valued. Adam Bravo’s career demonstrates what becomes possible when that understanding drives strategy. The data creates the opportunity. The empathy determines whether that opportunity becomes meaningful.
Companies sitting on mountains of customer data face a choice. They can optimize for extraction, squeezing short-term value from every interaction. Or they can build for recognition, creating systems that genuinely remember the people who choose them. The first approach generates transactions. The second generates loyalty. The difference shows up in every returning guest who feels, finally, like someone knows their name.
