There is a version of this story that most CMOs are already telling themselves: loyalty is about emotional connection, brand affinity, and a compelling points program. The Q2 2026 Brand Loyalty Tracker from Ad Age and Affinity Solutions tells a different story, and the difference matters for how you allocate budget, measure retention, and assess your own competitive position.
The brands at the top of the repeat-purchase rankings for April through June 2026 are Amazon, McDonald’s, and Costco. None of them won by running a more generous rewards program. Each of them built something structural that makes switching genuinely costly for the customer. That distinction should reframe how you think about loyalty entirely.
What this data source actually measures
Before drawing strategic conclusions, it is worth understanding why this tracker is different from the brand preference surveys most of us have been reading for years.
Affinity Solutions does not ask consumers what they prefer. Their system observes what people actually paid for, repeatedly, across more than 150 million credit and debit cards and more than 86 billion transactions annually, representing approximately $4 trillion in annual consumer spend. Each purchase attribution is deterministic, meaning it reflects a specific card transaction at a specific merchant. There is no modeling or probabilistic inference involved.
The tracker also separates three behavioral dimensions that can move independently of each other: visit frequency, spend per trip, and customer lifetime value. That granularity is what makes it actionable. Two brands can have identical revenue per customer and wildly different retention trajectories depending on which of those dimensions is driving the number.
For a CMO trying to build a credible measurement story, this is the kind of data that should be benchmarking your own retention metrics. Survey-reported loyalty and revealed-preference loyalty diverge sharply, and only the latter predicts future revenue. Not every dollar of revenue is equal, either: a blended revenue total treats a dollar from your best customer and a dollar from your worst customer as identical, when the retention economics behind them can differ by multiples.
The structural lesson from the top three
Amazon leads because Prime is not a loyalty program. It is an architecture where every additional benefit a member uses increases the cost of cancellation. A customer using Prime Video, two-day shipping, and Prime Music is making multiple renewal decisions simultaneously, not one. Amazon has extended this model to younger consumers with a half-price membership at $7.49 per month for ages 18 to 24, explicitly building switching costs earlier in the customer lifecycle.
McDonald’s is more interesting from a data strategy perspective. The company’s CEO described it on the Q2 2026 earnings call as “the industry’s largest customer platform with nearly 220 million active loyalty users.” Those 90-day active users grew 13% year over year, and trailing twelve-month systemwide sales to loyalty members reached $40 billion, a more than 20% increase. The strategic value is not the points. It is the first-party data that 220 million enrolled customers generate: order history, visit timing, promotion response rates, and price sensitivity across dayparts and geographies. A competitor who wants comparable intelligence has to build that base from scratch.
Worth noting: McDonald’s Q2 US comparable sales rose only 0.8%, below expectations, and US foot traffic declined 4.5% per Placer.ai. High loyalty-platform enrollment and short-term execution problems can coexist. The platform provides a floor; it does not guarantee results.
Costco has no points program and no promotional sequencing app. Its retention mechanism is the annual membership fee, and its US and Canada renewal rate at the close of Q3 fiscal 2026 stood at 92.2%. In the first 24 weeks of fiscal 2026, Costco’s membership fees exceeded merchandise operating income. That inversion means every pricing decision Costco makes is structurally oriented toward justifying the renewal, because the renewal is the business.
What this means for your decisions
The Q2 data shows spending consolidating toward brands where there is a structural reason to return beyond habit or promotion. That has a specific implication for how CMOs should be evaluating their own retention programs.
First: are you measuring revealed preference or reported preference? If your loyalty metrics are built primarily on survey data, you have a gap between what you know and what is actually happening in your customers’ bank accounts.
Second: what is the switching cost your brand creates? Not the promotional incentive to stay, but the structural friction to leave. Amazon’s answer is bundle depth. Costco’s is a sunk annual fee. McDonald’s is an enrolled data relationship that generates personalized offers. If your answer is “our rewards points,” that is a significantly weaker mechanism than any of the three above.
Third: the gap between brands with structural customer-capture mechanisms and those relying on promotional traffic is widening, according to the tracker. Q1 2026 restaurant data showed chains broadly losing ground on repeat purchases year over year. McDonald’s outperformed that category trend specifically because of enrolled-member retention. If your retention strategy depends on paid media to drive repeat visits, you are competing against brands that do not.
None of this means your points program is worthless. It means that points are a retention tactic, not a retention architecture. The brands at the top of this tracker have both.
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Original source: Brand Loyalty Tracker Q2 2026, Ad Age via TechTimes
