What being recognized again means for how we build

In May 2026, Gartner® published its Market Guide for Loyalty Program Vendors, and NeoDay was included as a Representative Vendor for the second year in a row. We already shared that news. This post is not about the announcement. It is a short reflection on what the moment means to us, and on the loyalty market we see taking shape around it.

Gartner, Market Guide for Loyalty Program Vendors, Brad Jashinsky, Halle Stern, 27 May 2026.

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What this recognition means to us

The first time NeoDay appeared in the guide, in 2025, it was a genuinely proud moment for everyone here. For a company set on doing loyalty differently, being visible in a guide that maps the global vendor landscape meant our work was being noticed well beyond our own customer base. We celebrated it, and we meant it.

Appearing again a year later carries a different kind of pride. A place in the guide is never carried over. Each edition is compiled fresh, as the market gets reassessed and the vendor landscape redrawn. So being included for a second consecutive year tells us something the first year could not: the way we think about loyalty is not a moment. It holds up while the market matures around it.

NeoDay was founded on a simple conviction: a single marketer, without a dev team behind them, should be able to run a full loyalty program end to end. When we started, that idea went against how most of the industry worked. Loyalty meant long implementations, heavy IT projects, and agencies running campaigns on the brand's behalf. We believed the marketer should hold the keys instead.

"Appearing in the guide again confirms that the market is moving away from rigid, over-engineered systems. We built NeoDay to eliminate heavy IT setups so marketing teams can focus on what matters: scaling smart personalization and building real customer connections. This recognition shows that agility is exactly where the industry is heading."

Jurgen Swaans, Founder of NeoDay

The market we see

In our conversations with retailers and consumer brands, three shifts come up again and again.

Loyalty has to prove itself. Budgets are under scrutiny everywhere, and loyalty is no longer allowed to be a cost center. The programs that survive are the ones that show revenue impact: more visits, bigger baskets, retention you can measure.

Enrollment was never the hard part. Most consumers are members of far more programs than they actively use. A card in a drawer or an app opened twice is not loyalty. Engagement is where programs are won or lost.

Marketers want control back. Teams are done waiting on dev tickets and agency timelines. They want to launch a campaign, test a mechanic, and adjust it the same week, on their own.

These shifts are exactly why we are proud to be visible in this market. They describe the world NeoDay was built for.

What we are really building

It would be easy to end this post with a product pitch. The honest version is that NeoDay is less a set of features than a stance on who loyalty belongs to.

When we say brands can launch a fully operational loyalty program in as little as 10 weeks, as a standalone app, an SDK inside their existing app, or a web experience, what we really mean is that loyalty should meet a brand where it is, not force it to rebuild everything around a new system. When we talk about AI-driven personalization, gamification, and ready-to-use designs, what we mean is that the marketing team itself should be able to create the moments that bring members back (a personalized challenge, a round of Winslots, a well-timed reward) without writing code or waiting in a ticket queue.

And when we say the platform is API-centric and cloud-agnostic, we mean the part we care about most: your loyalty data and your program logic stay yours. They move with you, wherever your stack goes next.

Every one of those choices traces back to the conviction this post started with. Loyalty should be a profitable growth engine in the hands of the marketer, not a multi-year IT project. Recognition two years in a row is encouraging, and we are proud of it. But the proof we build for is quieter: a marketer launching a campaign on a Tuesday morning without asking anyone for help.