Here’s a scenario that plays out in boardrooms more often than it should:
A CMO walks into a budget meeting feeling good. Engagement is up. Members are active. Redemptions are climbing. NPS scores are strong. By every measure they’ve been tracking, the loyalty program is working.
The CFO looks at the same program and sees a growing liability, rising redemption costs, and no clear line connecting loyalty spend to revenue.
Both are right, and that’s exactly the challenge.
After 14 years in the loyalty space, I’ve seen this disconnect more times than I can count — and it rarely gets named directly. It should. Because when marketing and finance are measuring the same program through completely different lenses, the misalignment can evolve from a communication issue to a structural one.
The Tension: Breakage vs. Engagement
Here’s the tension that sits at the heart of most CMO/CFO friction in loyalty:
CMOs want members redeeming because redemption proves the program is valued. CFOs, quietly, are counting on breakage (unredeemed points) to make the economics work. So, when a program genuinely succeeds at driving engagement, it can actually look worse on paper to finance than to marketing.
Add to that the time horizon gap. CMOs are playing a long game — modeling 3–5 year financial implications, building relationships that compound over time. CFOs are measured in quarters. When an initial investment is required upfront for a program that pays off in year two, it’s a hard sell in a world where quarterly performance matters.
Then there’s the language barrier. When a CMO says the program is “driving lifetime value,” a CFO hears noise. When a CFO talks EBITDA contribution, a CMO may not instinctively connect loyalty to that number. Neither side is wrong — they just haven’t been granted a shared language to work in.
Build the Financial Model First, Not Last
The fix starts before a single benefit is designed. Too many programs get built around what feels compelling to members, and then finance is handed a finalized construct to account for. Flip that order.
Start with conservative financial assumptions — what the business can afford per member, per redemption, per tier. Build the member experience within those guardrails. You can still create something genuinely compelling. You just build it with discipline.
One thing we do intentionally at Kobie when building a financial case is leave out the softer loyalty levers that are real but hard to model conservatively upfront — things like customers choosing full price because they love the brand, or naturally expanding across categories over time. Those benefits are likely. But rather than bake them into the base case, we leave them out on purpose.
When you walk into a CFO conversation and say “we’ve actually left some upside out of this model,” it changes the dynamic completely. CFOs are accustomed to marketing walking in with optimistic projections. Conservative modeling signals that you’re being straight with them — and if the upside does show up, the program beats projections. That’s a much better place to be than the alternative.
Find the Metrics That Mean Something to Both Sides
The practical answer to the misalignment is a shared scorecard — not two separate dashboards where marketing is celebrating engagement while finance is flagging cost.
The metrics that resonate with CFOs connect member behavior to dollars. Incremental revenue from members vs. non-members (true program lift, not selection bias). Redemption liability vs. breakage rate. LTV curves at 12, 24, 36 months. The revenue saved by retaining a member who would have otherwise churned — with a dollar figure attached.
CMO metrics aren’t wrong. They just need translation. NPS should connect to retention probability, which connects to revenue. Engagement rate should connect to purchase frequency, which connects to revenue per active member. If you can make that translation fluently, you stop having two separate conversations and start having one.
What Not Investing Actually Costs
The budget conversation that only accounts for the cost of building a program — and never quantifies the cost of inaction — is an incomplete case.
The churn you don’t stop. The share of wallet you don’t capture. The competitive ground you give up. Put numbers on all of it. When you do, the conversation shifts from “can we afford this?” to “can we afford not to?”
That’s when loyalty starts becoming a strategy.
Written By: Kelli Graf, Director of Strategic Consulting, Kobie
