If innovation isn’t people first, it isn’t real progress.

Technology has reshaped incentive and loyalty marketing – but its real power is in how it supports human insights. 

Innovation has become one of the most frequently used – and least interrogated – words in business. In practice, it has increasingly become shorthand for technology: artificial intelligence, automation, platforms, dashboards, data at scale.

To be clear, these developments are powerful. They’re reshaping how organisations operate, communicate and grow, often at remarkable speed.

But there is a quiet risk embedded in it. When innovation is treated as something that exists primarily in tools and systems, it becomes easy to mistake novelty for impact.

History suggests a more nuanced truth: the most meaningful innovation in incentive and loyalty marketing has never been driven by technology alone. It has always emerged at the intersection of human insight and enabling capability.

In fact, incentive and loyalty marketing itself began as an innovation – long before software platforms, APIs or AI entered the conversation.

Incentives and loyalty: an innovation before technology.

At their core, incentive and loyalty programs were built on a radical idea that emerged in the mid-20th century: that behaviour could be influenced by understanding what motivates people. Drawing on early work in organisational psychology and management thinking, organisations began to move beyond purely transactional models of reward towards more intentional approaches to motivation and recognition.

Early incentive schemes were often simple but powerful. Employees were recognised through long-service awards and public acknowledgement. Retailers experimented with loyalty stamps that rewarded repeat behaviour over time. These programs weren’t technologically sophisticated by modern standards, but they worked because they were rooted in an emerging understanding of reinforcement, status, and perceived value. The innovation lay not in the reward itself, but in the thinking behind it.

Over time, the discipline matured. Academic research deepened our understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Other work showed that motivation is not simply a function of reward size, and that poorly designed incentives can even undermine engagement. Behavioural economics challenged the assumption that people make purely rational decisions.

None of this progress was driven by technology in the first instance. Technology followed and amplified insight – not the other way around.

Where innovation wows and wobbles.

As digital tools entered the picture, innovation accelerated. Points-based systems transformed loyalty by introducing flexibility and choice. Digital platforms enabled scale, speed, consistency and always-on engagement. Data allowed programs to be measured, refined and iterated in ways that were previously impossible.

These advances have succeeded best when they’ve supported behavioural insight. Points work not simply because they’re convenient, but because they tap into powerful psychological dynamics like progress, autonomy, and deferred gratification. Digital engagement increases participation because it shortens feedback loops and makes recognition more immediate.

Each technological leap unlocked new possibilities, but at every stage, impact depended on how well those capabilities were aligned with human behaviour. When they aren’t, programs stall.

Across the industry, this is visible in loyalty programs with high enrolment but low active participation, incentive schemes that deliver short-term spikes followed by disengagement, or platforms rich in features but poor in sustained usage.

But in recent years, the innovation equation has subtly shifted. Increasingly, technology has become the starting point rather than the enabler. Organisations select platforms first and then attempt to fit programs into their constraints. Procurement processes are often led by system capability rather than behavioural intent. Features multiply, data volumes grow – but outcomes don’t always follow.

When programs are designed around what technology makes possible rather than what behaviour requires, even heavy investment risks being ineffective. Hyper-personalised communications can still feel irrelevant. Vast reward catalogues can overwhelm rather than motivate. Participation may exist, but engagement or emotional connection weakens.

Innovation that ignores human behaviour isn’t innovation. It’s just activity.

Reframing innovation: integration over invention.

This is not an argument against technology. On the contrary, modern incentive and loyalty programs depend on it and are enormously more powerful thanks to it. But technology alone cannot create relevance, motivation or meaning. Those still require design, judgement and an understanding of people.

True innovation is not simply about new tools. It must change behaviour positively. The most durable innovation in incentives and loyalty has always been a blend of human insight and enabling technology.

Innovation, therefore, is not just about novelty and invention. It’s about integration. It’s about asking better questions before deploying better systems. It’s about designing programs around people first, and then selecting technology that enables those designs to work at scale.

Innovation in this sense is quieter, but more powerful. It’s visible in thoughtful program architecture rather than feature density, and intelligent curation rather than endless choice. It requires organisations to balance art and science: behavioural understanding alongside data, creativity alongside rigour, judgement alongside technology.

In the articles that follow, we explore what this balance looks like in practice: how employee engagement has changed with our evolving consciousness of human motivation; how the real potential of technology in channel incentive programs is to increase partner loyalty; how customer loyalty innovation can deliver extraordinary value and also fall short; and how rewards illustrate both the power and the paradox of choice.

Innovation has always been about moving forward. The challenge, and the opportunity,  is to ensure we do it without losing sight of the people we’re trying to engage.

Are you getting the balance right?
If you think your program’s technology may be overshadowing human insight – or that your tech isn’t working hard enough – we’d welcome a conversation. Email andrews@awards.co.za.