How to write a loyalty brief that gets great work from your agency

The brief sets the ceiling on the work

At Livewall we receive dozens of loyalty briefs every year. Most are too long, and most are missing the one thing that matters: what do you want customers to do differently?

A brief that opens with features, budgets, and timelines sends an agency in the wrong direction. The team starts designing mechanics before the core strategic question is answered. That produces tidy deliverables but rarely great work.

The brief that produces great work starts with behaviour. What behaviour do you see now? What behaviour do you want? What stands between those two things? Once those three questions are answered, an agency has enough to build something that actually works.

What strong loyalty briefs have in common

After years of working with retailers, FMCG brands, and telecoms, we've seen what makes a brief work. The best ones share a few qualities.

They start with the customer problem, not the brand problem. "Our customers purchase once a quarter on average, but our most valuable segment buys twice" is a strong starting point. "We want to increase engagement" is not.

They define success in behaviour, not sentiment. Brand scores and satisfaction metrics are not loyalty outcomes. "Twenty percent of members actively earning points after six months" is.

They give the agency room to design the mechanic. Don't pre-specify which gamification layer you want, or how the points structure should work. Describe the behaviour problem. Let the agency propose the solution.

They include honest context about constraints. What hasn't worked before? What's off-limits for legal or compliance reasons? What is the CRM integration status? Agencies work better with constraints they know upfront than with surprises mid-project.

Structure of an effective loyalty brief

A brief doesn't need to be long. One page with the right components is enough. Here's a structure that works.

1. Behaviour objective Describe the specific behaviour you want to change or reinforce. Be concrete. "Higher engagement" is not an objective. "Members who interact with the programme at least twice a month" is.

2. Target audience Not all customers are the same. Who are you primarily trying to activate? New members? Lapsed ones? Your most valuable buyers? The mechanic differs per segment.

3. Context and constraints What do you already know about this behaviour? Has something similar worked or failed before? What are the technical, legal, or operational limits?

4. Commercial parameters What is the business case? What does an activated member generate in incremental value? This helps an agency design a mechanic that is proportional to the return.

5. How you will measure success What are you measuring? Over what period? Using which data sources? This prevents disputes after launch about what "good" looks like.

The most common mistake: feature thinking

The most frequent error in loyalty briefs is feature thinking. The brief describes what the programme should do rather than what it should achieve.

"We want a stamp card, daily check-ins, a leaderboard, and a badge system" gives an agency no strategic direction. It's a feature list. And feature lists produce feature deliverables, not behaviour change.

We see this pattern regularly in loyalty program design: clients who arrive with a fully-specified feature concept tend to see weaker outcomes than clients who arrive with a sharp behaviour problem. The agency becomes a builder in the first case. A partner in the second.

Decathlon is a good example of the alternative. The Decathlon Move Finder brief was grounded in member data and behavioural insight. That gave the team the freedom to design a mechanic that genuinely matched how the target audience moves and shops.

What an agency needs to do its best work

A good loyalty marketing agency, like Livewall, brings the mechanics expertise. Gamification, points and rewards programmes, gamified loyalty, seasonal campaigns: that's what we do. But no agency can design a mechanic that changes behaviour if it doesn't understand which behaviour needs to change, and why.

Beyond a sharp brief, there are three things only the client can provide.

Access to data. Programme behaviour, purchase history, segmentation. The more context, the better the mechanic.

A decision-maker in the briefing. Not someone who later reports back to a committee. Someone who knows what the brand is trying to achieve and can make decisions.

Honesty about what hasn't worked. The most valuable information in a brief is often what a brand has already tried. It stops the agency from walking the same dead-end path.

From that foundation, an agency can build something worth building. Projects like Proximus+ World and JET Winter Winners came together because the brief was precise about behaviour and context. The mechanic was the output, not the starting point.

What a good brief gives you

A sharp brief is not a guarantee of success. But it is a precondition for it.

It eliminates scope disputes mid-project. It gives the creative team a clear frame to work within. And it makes post-launch evaluation fair, because success was defined before anything was built.

At Livewall we ask the same questions at the start of every new project. What do you want the customer to do differently? Why aren't they doing it now? What is the smallest intervention that could change that behaviour? Only once we have those answers do we start on the mechanic.

That is how a loyalty marketing agency that wants to produce great work operates: as a strategic partner, not a feature factory.