According to Loyalty360, InComm is bringing wellness rewards into the healthcare space, while Caribou Coffee is rolling out new loyalty perks for its customers. On the surface, these are two different stories — payments technology meeting a coffee chain's daily ritual. Read them together, though, and you start to see a pattern: brands are quietly expanding what a "reward" can mean.
The shift beyond points and discounts
For years, loyalty lived in a pretty narrow lane. Spend, earn, redeem, repeat. What we're watching now is a broader definition of value, and it lines up neatly with how this publication has been thinking about utility all along. Wellness rewards in healthcare speak to something the audience here already understands — that real, felt value is what turns a transactional program into an actual relationship. If you're a brand manager mapping out your next move, the question isn't only "what do we give back?" It's "what does our customer genuinely need that we can credibly provide?"
What to keep on your radar
A few things worth tracking as these programs mature. First, how InComm's wellness piece is structured — is it access, is it perks, is it something closer to health-adjacent experiences? Second, whether Caribou's offering leans into community building or stays strictly transactional. And third, how both programs handle the value exchange. Customers are increasingly willing to share data, but only when the return feels fair. We've all seen what happens when that balance tips the wrong way, and the brands getting it right tend to be the ones that design for the customer journey first, the balance sheet second.
There's also a larger financial framing worth considering. Loyalty rewards, even modest ones, sit inside a broader picture of personal investing and wealth building — and it's a reminder that the small perks we chase at the register are one thread in a much larger financial fabric. That intersection of daily rewards and long-term thinking is a useful lens for any brand trying to make its program feel like more than a punch card.
Here's the practical bit, the part we'd put on a sticky note for any team: if you're benchmarking against these announcements, don't copy the mechanics — copy the thinking. Ask your team where your customer experience is friction-free, and where it still asks too much. Then design backward from that answer. That's where the real loyalty lives.