The average consumer today belongs to 16 loyalty programmes and actively uses fewer than half of these.
Brands have spent decades, and billions constructing walled gardens in the form of retailer-specific apps, siloed points systems, proprietary data vaults, and the consumer has responded with indifference.
The loyalty model is not broken at the edges. It is broken at the centre.
The timing could not be worse.
Privacy regulation is tightening globally, and the long-anticipated deprecation of third-party cookies has forced brands to confront a data strategy built on borrowed infrastructure.
In Q1 2025, 71% of publishers identified first-party data as a critical source of advertising performance, up from 64% the year prior.
The era of tracking consumers without their knowledge is ending.
What replaces it? Zero-party data, where consumers voluntarily exchange behavioural information for tangible value, which requires exactly the kind of direct, trust-based relationship that fragmented loyalty programmes have consistently failed to build.
The global loyalty management market is projected to reach $31 billion by 2033, yet the architecture underpinning it remains fundamentally retailer-centric.
It assumes loyalty belongs to the store. Consumers have long since moved on.
The structural advantage of having no legacy
Here is the paradox that global retail strategists are only beginning to absorb: the markets best positioned to solve this problem are not the ones with the most sophisticated infrastructure.
They are the ones who never had it.
South Africa is the clearest example.
Its retail economy is structurally plural.
Formal supermarket chains account for roughly 57% of FMCG sales by value.
At the same time, the informal sector (spaza shops, township traders, independent neighbourhood stores) commands the remainder of a market valued at R207 billion by end-2024.
In 2025, spaza shops outgrew supermarket chains in sales velocity; so no single retailer owns the consumer relationship. No walled garden is large enough to matter.
That structural reality has forced a different kind of innovation.
Rather than attempting to lock consumers into a single ecosystem, South African data platforms have had to design systems where the data follows the consumer – capturing purchasing behaviour across both formal and informal channels, regardless of where a transaction occurs.
A purchase at Checkers and a purchase at a neighbourhood spaza shop generate the same data signal.
In this model, the consumer, not the retailer, becomes the primary node in the network.
This is not a workaround. It is the architecture that global brands actually need.
From marketing efficiency to economic infrastructure
Consumer packaged goods companies have historically depended on retailers to mediate their relationship with the end customer.
The retailer owned the transaction data, the loyalty touchpoint, and the point-of-sale insight.
Brands invested heavily in marketing while remaining structurally blind to the full purchasing journey.
Retail-agnostic data platforms are now dissolving that dependency.
Partnerships between these platforms and major consumer goods manufacturers signal that large brands are already moving toward retail visibility that extends beyond traditional store networks.
What was once considered experimental is increasingly becoming a strategic shift in how companies understand consumer behaviour across fragmented retail environments.
The implications extend beyond marketing efficiency
South Africa’s internet penetration stands at 78.9%, with more than 50 million users, making it the most digitally connected nation in Africa.
This mobile-first population, combined with a fragmented retail landscape, creates a rare alignment of conditions: consumers who are digitally reachable, economically diverse, and accustomed to transacting across multiple retail environments.
When those consumers exchange behavioural data for immediate, tangible value, such as airtime, micro-rewards, or real-time discounts, the result is a permission-based data relationship that no cookie-dependent advertising model can replicate.
The same principle is beginning to extend beyond purchases.
Much of the digital economy is funded by advertising, yet the financial benefit is typically captured only by the largest platforms.
Fintech-enabled reward systems are now starting to redistribute a portion of that value back to users.
How? Simply put, consumers can earn small incentives for activities such as playing mobile games, completing surveys, engaging with brand promotions, or interacting with sponsored content.
In this model, consumers are no longer simply the audience for advertising.
They become participants in the value chain, sharing in the economic value created by the attention and engagement that already power this online ecosystem.
The direction of innovation has reversed
For decades, retail technology innovation flowed from developed markets outward. Emerging economies were expected to adopt and adapt systems designed elsewhere.
That assumption is no longer defensible.
Markets with fragmented retail systems, high mobile adoption, and complex informal sectors have been compelled to design more flexible, consumer-centric data architectures: systems that prioritise interoperability over control, and mobility over lock-in.
The constraints that once appeared to be disadvantages have produced infrastructure that is structurally better suited to the post-cookie, privacy-first, zero-party data era that every global brand now faces.
For CEOs and retail strategists, the lesson is clear: emerging markets are not destinations for growth initiatives; they are laboratories for the next generation of commercial infrastructure.
The blueprint for what replaces a closed ecosystem is already being written.
And it is being written in the data architecture of markets that had no choice but to get this right.
The death of the silo is not a future event. It is already underway.
The question is whether global brands will learn from the markets that solved it first.
*The author of this article is Jed da Silva, a technology entrepreneur focused on consumer apps combining entertainment, rewards, and data-driven engagement. The views expressed by Jed da Silva are not necessarily those of The Bulrushes
