AGENDA

Join Dominic and John for a look at modern communication and messaging channels - including RCS - and how to ensure that brands can balance their customers’ stated preferences and needs with your own revenue and engagement goals. We'll review some of the ways 7-Eleven makes ongoing communication a pleasurable and engagement-enhancing experience for its many customers, and explore what channels like RCS now mean for the future of retail ordering, loyalty and servicing.

This session explores how retailers can guide customers through meaningful brand journeys by tapping into emotional loyalty. Ann Taylor/Loft and Kobie will present high‑level learnings from consumer research, highlighting how emotional motivations shape customer behavior in ways traditional data cannot capture. As privacy expectations shift and cookies deprecate, emotional loyalty signals offer retailers a durable, future‑resilient way to personalize experiences across fragmented channels. Attendees will learn how emotional data transforms the “what” of customer actions into the more powerful “why,” enabling empathetic and adaptive personalization in real time. The session will show how emotional loyalty metrics complement behavioral data to reveal customer sentiment, intention, and unmet needs. Speakers will also share real‑world examples demonstrating how emotionally defined segments behave differently and how brands can act on this insight immediately. Finally, the session will outline practical ways retailers can scale emotionally driven experiences, ensuring relevance even as customer contexts and expectations continue to evolve.

Most loyalty programs behave like bad relationships: a warm welcome, a birthday message once a year, and long stretches of silence in between. At Home realized it had fallen into that same pattern — operating a CRM program disguised as loyalty and expecting customers to feel connected. To rebuild trust, the team took the unusual step of deeply listening to customers, not about taglines or what they like about us, but about their real experiences, needs, and frustrations. What followed was a foundational reset of how At Home thinks about loyalty, recognition, and communication. This session reveals how At Home rebuilt its loyalty vision by treating customers like real people, not data points — creating a relationship based on intention, recognition, and continuous dialogue. Beyond overhauling the value proposition and modernizing data through new partnerships, At Home also reimagined its community management approach, establishing active two-way conversations on social and digital channels to keep the conversation going long after its pilot. Through humor, candor, and real insights, attendees will learn how At Home turned customer conversations into fuel for program evolution, emotional loyalty, and ongoing engagement. Participants will walk away with frameworks, lessons learned, and a challenge: if your brand only “checks in” with customers on their birthday, it’s time for a reset — and we are happy to bring the matches.

Join Andy and Elissa to hear how the company built one of retail’s most beloved loyalty ecosystems — not through discounts, but through deeply human experiences. From condolence flowers to frictionless Autoship, Chewy has mastered the art of embedding empathy into product design. They will unpack how marketing and product collaborate to craft lifecycle journeys that feel personal, why mobile (and especially the app experience) plays a critical role in driving retention, and how Chewy continues to evolve from a transactional ecommerce site into a trusted pet companion. This presentation will inspire retail and ecommerce leaders to rethink loyalty as a living, breathing experience — not just a marketing program.

Building a guest engagement strategy that works across the entire customer lifecycle -- from the first touchpoint through win-back -- requires more than great technology. It requires the right partners, the right architecture, and hard-won experience navigating the real-world complexity of enterprise retail. In this session, you'll hear from two brands at very different stages of that journey. Chipotle has spent years refining a sophisticated engagement ecosystem, using strategic technology partnerships to drive personalization, loyalty, and measurable revenue at massive scale. Nothing Bundt Cakes is earlier in that evolution -- bringing a clear vision and the ambition to build something exceptional from the ground up. Together, Jason Scoggins and Jenn McMillen offer a rare dual perspective: what it looks like when the strategy is fully mature, and what it looks like when the most important decisions are still being made. Whether you're just getting started or looking to take your program to the next level, this conversation will give you a candid, practical look at what it actually takes to win.

Loyalty today means moving beyond points and perks to deliver flexible, emotionally resonant experiences that keep guests coming back. This session explores how Choice Privileges is evolving to offer more frequent recognition, simpler pathways to status, and rewards that feel “within reach” for the everyday traveler. With insights and learnings from the launch of the refreshed program at the start of 2026, as well as some “hot off the presses” early results, this session will highlight how experiential redemptions, expanded partnerships, and new flexibility features are designed to meet modern guests where they are and how they travel now.

With Subscription Loyalty programs on the rise, alongside the desire for exclusivity among shoppers in general, now may be the time for your brand to explore or update an existing program. Join Andrew, a passionate proponent of this growing area in loyalty, to learn more about Cinemark’s Movie Club, launched in 2017. Following a timeline of successes as well as lessons learned along the way, this session will share takeaways that you can apply to your own company. You will learn the key benefits (and trade-offs) of a subscription loyalty program; how to evaluate whether this type of program is a good fit for your organization; and if so, best practices for designing and launching. For those already exploring or with an existing subscription loyalty program, Andrew will share how Cinemark drives continued success through consistent improvements that address their customer base as well as attracting new customers.

For too long, CRM has been treated solely as a performance channel. Disney chose to treat it as a brand experience. In this session, Emma and James reveal how Disney has reimagined CRM – a channel often dominated by functional, performance-led thinking – into a powerful engine of fandom, engagement and long-term value. By fusing first-party data, deep customer insight and marketing technology with Disney’s storytelling heritage, the team transformed email into distinctive, entertaining and deeply engaging customer experiences – from immersive Marvel and Star Wars moments to unexpected interactions that reward curiosity on open. The result: measurable increases in retention, conversion and long-term customer value, proving experience-led CRM can outperform promotion-led approaches. Attendees will learn how creativity and interactivity can become a core strategic ingredient in building differentiated, high-performing CRM programmes that drive sustained commercial impact. Join this session to discover what happens when data science meets imagination – and why the future of CRM belongs to brands that choose wonder over noise.

Foot Locker set out to answer a simple question: can you drive incremental profit without relying on deeper discounts? Instead of increasing promotional pressure, the team rethought how and when value is delivered—moving away from broad offers and toward more precise, intent-based engagement tied to real customer behavior. That shift changed more than conversion. It improved margin, increased AOV, and drove stronger apparel attachment through more multi-item baskets—all while maintaining a seamless customer experience. In this session, Foot Locker will walk through how this shift was made, what it took to operationalize a more targeted approach within an existing digital ecosystem, and how the team is extending this work through demand shaping—aligning offers more closely to inventory and business priorities. Attendees will learn how to reduce reliance on discounting, improve order economics, and apply a more disciplined approach to driving incremental profit.

Milestone events create rare cultural moments—but their true business value is unlocked when emotion is translated into action. The centennial celebration of the Grand Ole Opry, Opry 100, was leveraged as a strategic growth engine to expand and deepen a customer database through intentional engagement and conversion design. The Opry 100 strategy reframed a point in time milestone into a year-long plus journey. High profile engagement moments were used to accelerate first-party data acquisition and strengthen customer relationships. Customer journeys were optimized to move audiences from engagement to conversion, delivering measurable lifts in downstream revenue. The approach demonstrates how milestone-driven storytelling, paired with performance measurement and customer-centric design, can turn iconic cultural moments into scalable, long-term growth opportunities.

Customer loyalty is not an accident—it’s the result of harnessing customer data to deliver personalized, seamless experiences across every touchpoint. In this case study, Hibbett will showcase how brands can leverage customer analytics to strengthen loyalty, improve retention, and drive long-term growth. The session will highlight how creating a single customer view and integrating engagement data across omnichannel touchpoints allows brands to better understand and anticipate customer needs. Using Hibbetts’ customer-first approach as a real-world example, we’ll explore how data-driven insights can inform strategy, deliver measurable ROI, and ultimately “drive customers to new horizons.” Key takeaways include How to use customer data to personalize experiences across acquisition, loyalty, and retention. Real case studies showing how Hibbett leverages insights to boost repeat purchases and engagement; A framework for connecting KPIs like CLV and redemption engagement to actionable strategies that enhance the customer journey; and practical methods for evaluating and forecasting campaign success to align loyalty goals with broader brand performance.

Join this session to learn from Ruth Crowley how brand purpose and a framework built around customer focus, digital strategies, and Brand Strategy are integral to the success of any brand and required to retain and acquire customers while keeping a brand relevant in the changing landscape of retail.  Ruth will share examples from companies like Harley- Davidson, Nickelodeon, Universal Studios, M&M Mars and Hudson Group, the largest travel retail Company in the world.

For Live Nation VIP, the challenge was maintaining a premium experience during the long gap between a ticket purchase and the night of the show. Traditional CRM methods were often too static and transactional to capture the high-energy pulse of live music. To foster deep emotional loyalty with a new generation of fans, Live Nation had to solve a complex puzzle. They needed to deliver high-touch, personalized communication at a global scale while keeping the experience human and exciting. This session provides a transparent look at Live Nation’s strategic pivot toward guiding fans through a tailored, data-driven narrative. We will explore the internal hurdles of bridging the gap between massive data sets and creative execution. Leaders from Live Nation and Blings will share how they implemented real-time rendering to transform static touchpoints into interactive journeys. Attendees will leave with relatable takeaways on how this shift to dynamic content redefined their retention strategy and drove significant wins in fan sentiment by meeting fans exactly where they are in the moment. Join this session to get a transparent look at how Live Nation addressed the challenges of implementing real-time rendering at scale, and how the strategic wins were achieved.

Hear how this global men’s grooming brand expanded its perspective beyond points and perks to build and launch its new integrated loyalty and subscription program, Members Only Rewards. Stephanie will share the journey of selecting and integrating a new SaaS partner, re-platforming more than half a million subscribers, and reimagining the brand’s UX/UI to bring MANSCAPED Members Only Rewards to life. She’ll offer a practical perspective on building a modern loyalty ecosystem across multiple vendors, aligning subscription and rewards under a unified vision, and isolating the right KPIs during a major program transformation. As a DTC-native brand evolving into a fully omnichannel business, and fresh off its Super Bowl debut, MANSCAPED is continuing its expansion as a total men’s grooming brand, with new product launches, offerings, and more on the horizon. Join this session to learn how the company is building more meaningful customer relationships in today’s retail landscape.

LaVella will show the audience how Patagonia designs lifecycle programs that prioritize customer experience through examples like Worn Wear trade‑in flows, post‑purchase education, and customer surprise‑and‑delight moments. She will also share strategies for building frameworks that map customer journeys and adapt to evolving customer needs.

Fuel and convenience loyalty faces a loyalty paradox, where extremely high visit frequency does not translate into meaningful brand preference or engagement. Petro-Canada is addressing this through digital product evolution focused on reducing friction and enabling real-time value across fuel and convenience missions.

This session highlights how Petro-Canada simplified loyalty interactions, modernized digital capabilities, and increased customer activity and value through intuitive, real-time engagement. Attendees will learn actionable approaches to improving loyalty experiences by removing friction rather than relying solely on traditional incentive mechanics.

‍

ThredUp has long embraced AI, but over the past year, the brand has made a decisive shift from incremental message optimization to an Agentic lifecycle marketing approach. In this session, Kristen will share how her team reimagined customer engagement to deliver more meaningful, hyper-personalized messages to each individual user. You’ll hear how she is preparing her organization to adopt and operationalize agentic AI—building the processes, education, and cross-functional alignment across marketing, lifecycle, product, and data to support long-term impact. Kristen will also discuss what they are learning along the way and how brands can begin driving repeat purchasing and retention through adaptive, intelligence-powered engagement.

For Torrid, a plus size fashion retailer, marketing needs to be as unique and original as their customers. That’s why optimizing their loyalty program, they turn to customer data. Their data-driven approach emboldens a tailored loyalty strategy that keeps customers engaged—and attracts new ones—in meaningful, personalized ways.

In this session, hear Nate and Shmaba as they discuss how loyalty data is critical to understanding customers more deeply and driving strategies designed to fit real people.