What BFCM 2025 Reveals About the Future of Retail Value

The End of Discount-Driven Commerce

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) have long represented retail’s most aggressive discounting cycle. But 2025 marks an inflection point. As macroeconomic pressures reshape both consumer behavior and retail economics, the traditional BFCM playbook, deep markdowns driving volume, is proving unsustainable.

Increasingly constrained consumer spending power combined with compressed retail margins has created what we’re calling the “dual squeeze” – a market condition where neither party can afford business as usual.

In this environment, a more sophisticated value exchange is emerging, one where loyalty currencies, points, miles, and cashback function as the connective link between aspiration and affordability.

Valuedynamx, a global commerce and loyalty solutions provider, reports that everyday spending through loyalty-linked channels continues to grow at double-digit rates.

“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how consumers perceive loyalty currencies,” says Ed Wogan, SVP, Chief Merchant Office at Valuedynamx. “Points and cashback are no longer just a nice-to-have bonus, they’ve become an essential part of household financial planning. During economic uncertainty, the ability to offset everyday expenses through accumulated rewards provides tangible relief that a one-time discount simply cannot match.”

More tellingly, while average transaction values have declined, engagement in reward programs has surged significantly year-over-year. This isn’t simply a shift in consumer tactics; it’s a fundamental shift of how value is perceived, earned, and realized.

The Loyalty Economy: From Peripheral Benefit to Primary Driver

What we’re witnessing is the rise of a “loyalty economy”, where points, miles, and cashback function as a form of currency that helps consumers offset their spending and stretch their budgets.

For consumers facing higher costs and smaller discounts, loyalty programs provide a way to earn value from purchases they’re already making. For retailers dealing with rising costs and tighter margins, loyalty programs offer a targeted alternative to across-the-board price cuts.

For both stakeholders, this could be the conduit that enables a holiday tradition of “trading up,” or “holiday splurging,” which could by all indications, be hobbled without this enablement tool.

Redemptions are rising across essential spend categories: groceries, fuel, and household goods, suggesting that loyalty currencies have transcended their original function as aspirational incentives and now serve as practical financial planning tools.

Loyalty is no longer ancillary to the transaction; in many cases, it has become the primary rationale for merchant selection.

Strategic Advantages: Why Loyalty Delivers Where Discounting Fails

The shift from discount-centric to loyalty-centric value creation offers several structural advantages that become particularly acute during high-pressure shopping events like BFCM.

Margin Preservation Through Behavioral Targeting

• Traditional discounting operates as a blunt instrument—reducing price across customer cohorts regardless of their inherent loyalty or lifetime value potential.
• Loyalty programs enable surgical precision, incentivizing desired behaviors while maintaining price integrity for customers who would have converted regardless.

Data-Driven Personalization at Scale

• Every loyalty interaction generates behavioral intelligence. As Valuedynamx’s experience across retail, travel, and financial services demonstrates, brands that leverage this data can deliver contextually to the concept that relevant offers achieve measurably higher engagement rates.
• During BFCM, when consumer attention is splintered across thousands of promotional messages, personalization becomes the critical differentiator. It’s a grounding mechanism of sort.

Extended Customer Lifecycle Value

• Discounting creates episodic engagement. Loyalty programs create ongoing relationships.
• By structuring value delivery across time, earning on today’s purchase, redeeming against tomorrow’s, brands transform transactional interactions into sustained engagement loops.

The Everyday Loyalty Paradigm: Beyond Event-Based Engagement

Perhaps the most significant transformation in loyalty behavior has been the shift from event-based to everyday-based engagement. The pandemic accelerated a trend that was already emerging: consumers now expect to earn and redeem value not just during tentpole shopping moments, but across the full spectrum of daily expenditure.

Valuedynamx network data confirms this behavioral shift, as everyday spend categories like groceries, fuel, and essential goods continue to see the strongest growth and engagement. This represents the emergence of what we term the “continuous loyalty cycle,” where routine purchases become integral to the reward accumulation strategy.

For retailers, this shift carries profound strategic implications:

• BFCM is no longer an isolated revenue event to be maximized through aggressive discounting.
• Instead, it represents a high-visibility opportunity to demonstrate loyalty program value, driving both immediate conversion and extended post-season engagement.

The brands that recognize this will structure their BFCM strategies not around short-term volume maximization, but around long-term relationship deepening—using enhanced earning rates, bonus point structures, and exclusive member access to create differentiated experiences that build loyalty equity beyond the weekend.

How Leading Retailers Are Reimagining BFCM Value Creation

The most sophisticated retail operators are moving away from the “race to zero” pricing dynamic that has historically defined BFCM. In its place, they’re deploying loyalty-led value architectures that deliver perceived customer benefit while protecting profitability.

Valuedynamx works with partners to integrate merchant-funded rewards, curated commerce offers, and card-linked incentives into existing program ecosystems. This approach allows retailers to engineer value perception without corresponding revenue erosion, a critical capability in an environment where margin pressure is acute.

Brands from the financial services sector are particularly instructive. as they demonstrate how loyalty can deliver consumer value in categories not traditionally associated with reward programs. These fintech players, operating in utilitarian financial management spaces, now view rewards as a key driver of consumer loyalty and differentiation.

By embedding cashback and points into mortgage payments, business banking transactions, and everyday financial activities, they’re proving that loyalty mechanics can create emotional engagement even in purely functional relationships.

This represents a watershed moment: if rewards can drive loyalty in mortgage management and B2B banking, they can work anywhere. Similarly, established issuers like Chase illustrate how mature loyalty ecosystems can sustain engagement through economic volatility by positioning rewards as reliable value delivery mechanisms.

The lesson for retailers is clear: if financial service providers in commoditized, low-emotion categories are betting on loyalty as their primary retention tool, then consumer-facing brands with embedded emotional loyalty have even more to gain. This model is being adopted by mainstream retailers who recognize that BFCM success increasingly depends on demonstrating year-round value rather than isolated weekend discounts.

As we approach BFCM 2025, the data suggests a decisive shift in retailer philosophy: from “value through volume” to “value through precision.” Loyalty-led strategies, anchored in behavioral data and personalized incentives, are increasingly recognized not as alternatives to discounting, but as superior substitutes.

Forecasting BFCM 2025: Three Key Shifts

Based on global program data and retailer trends, Valuedynamx anticipates three key developments shaping this year’s shopping season:

Loyalty Will Replace Discount Depth

• More brands will emphasize points and cashback accrual as substitutes for heavy markdowns. This shift allows retailers to deliver value while protecting margins.

Everyday Earn Categories Will Dominate

• Spending in groceries, fuel, and household sectors will continue to rise, driven by practical reward use. Consumers are increasingly routing essential purchases through loyalty programs to maximize earning potential.

Personalized Rewards Will Win Engagement

• Brands that integrate real-time, data-informed offers will outperform those relying on generic promotions. As consumer attention becomes more fragmented during BFCM, personalization becomes essential for cutting through the noise.

Valuedynamx anticipates that BFCM 2025 will mark a turning point in how retailers deploy promotional strategies. As margin pressure intensifies and blanket discounting becomes economically untenable, brands are expected to shift promotional spend toward loyalty-based incentives—enhanced earning multipliers, bonus point events, and member-exclusive access.

This approach allows retailers to maintain price integrity while still delivering meaningful value to customers, particularly those already engaged in their loyalty ecosystems.

Building the Loyalty-First BFCM Strategy

As retailers architect their 2025 BFCM approaches, one principle should guide strategic decision-making: consumers respond not simply to price, but to confidence in value realization.

Loyalty programs are uniquely positioned to deliver that confidence. By transparently demonstrating how today’s spending generates tomorrow’s purchasing power, programs transform anxiety-driven deal-seeking into strategically informed decision-making.

For brands who consistently embrace and execute this approach, they are more likely to own a relationship “from cradle to grave” versus those who continue to negative spend against antiquated engagement strategies that perpetuate the door busters “one and done” mindset.

For brands, the imperative is clear: loyalty cannot remain a tactical program operating at the periphery of commercial strategy. It must become central to value proposition, customer experience, and retention architecture.

The organizations that integrate loyalty deeply into their BFCM planning, structuring offers around enhanced earning, celebrating member-exclusive access, and communicating the compounding value of program participation, will not only navigate near-term economic challenges more effectively; they will emerge with strengthened customer relationships and enhanced competitive positioning.

The question for retailers is no longer whether to invest in loyalty during BFCM, but how aggressively to make it the centerpiece of their value proposition.

In an era of constrained margins and sophisticated consumers, loyalty may well be the only sustainable path to profitable growth.