I've spent forty years watching marketing budgets move from one giant intermediary to the next. From the print papers to the early web. From the early web to the social platforms. From the social platforms to the targeting engines that now sit underneath everything else. Each shift has had a familiar shape: a small number of new intermediaries take a larger share of the spend, the businesses funding it get less for their money, and the community downstream sees almost none of it.
The loyalty program as it currently exists is a defensive product
Most loyalty programs that exist today were designed for a very specific job: to slow down the rate at which existing customers leave. They were not designed to bring new customers in. They were not designed to redistribute value back into the community. And they were certainly not designed to do anything for the environment. They were defensive tools — points-stamps and gimmicks intended to make switching to a competitor feel slightly more annoying than it otherwise would.
That worked, for a while. But the underlying economics have shifted. Customer acquisition costs have risen sharply across nearly every consumer category. The platforms that used to be reliable sources of new customers have become more expensive and less effective at the same time. And a generation of consumers has started to ask questions about where their money actually goes — a question that no traditional loyalty program is equipped to answer in a way that feels meaningful.
What the next decade of loyalty looks like
The interesting design question isn't how to make a better stamp card. It's how to redesign the underlying relationship so that a business's marketing spend simultaneously rewards the customer, funds something the customer actually cares about, and produces measurable benefit outside the four walls of the business itself.
That's the design principle Earth Points is built on. Every transaction is a small redistribution event. The customer gets value. Their chosen community organisation gets value. An environmental foundation gets value. And the business gets the thing it actually wanted in the first place — a customer who comes back, and who tells other people about the experience.
Why this matters for small business owners specifically
Large companies can absorb the inefficiency of the current advertising market. They have the volume and the margins to keep funding platforms that take more and deliver less. Small businesses cannot. For a local cafe, a local trades business, a local retailer, the marketing budget is one of the most sensitive line items in the whole accounts ledger. Every dollar spent on a platform that doesn't convert is a dollar that came directly out of somebody's livelihood.
The pitch for Earth Points is therefore not really a pitch about loyalty. It's a pitch about reclaiming a category of spending that has been quietly leaking value out of small businesses for years. The 3% fee on a completed sale is the entire cost. There's no monthly subscription, no impression-based bidding, no opaque algorithmic delivery system, and no foreign corporate intermediary taking a margin on top.
A closing thought
Years ago, the property model I built worked because it forced the underlying numbers into the open. Once a buyer could see that a new property actually cost less per week than an older one, once depreciation and rent and maintenance were all laid out side by side, the decision became straightforward. Earth Points runs on the same principle. Show a business owner what they're actually paying for their current marketing — and what they could be getting instead — and the conversation usually finishes itself.
Chris Bilborough
Founder, Earth Artificial Intelligence Limited
