Customer behaviour has moved on. Today, offers sit much closer to the centre of how people discover brands, evaluate purchases and decide where to spend.
The Offer Economy report from Reward Gateway | Edenred makes the scale of that shift clear. Among more than 10,000 UK consumers surveyed, 65% said looking for offers is now ‘absolutely standard practice’ and 62% said offers influence what they buy, not just where they buy it.
If you are in the business of attracting and retaining consumers then here are the other things you need to know from the research.
One of the most important findings in the research is that consumers no longer divide neatly into ‘deal seekers’ and ‘full-price buyers’.
Offers don’t simply help close a conversion at the final stage of the funnel. In many cases, they influence which brands customers consider, which partner channels they engage with, whether they convert at all and how much they ultimately spend.
Nearly half of consumers surveyed said offers allow them to buy something they otherwise couldn’t afford. 41% said offers encourage them to upgrade to a better option.
That’s not simply discount-driven behaviour. It’s evidence that reward creates incremental demand and influences customer decision-making much earlier than most brands account for.
Another clear theme running through the research is trust.
Customers actively seek offers, but they approach many open-web deal environments cautiously. Poor-quality voucher sites, misleading codes and inconsistent redemption experiences have made consumers far more selective about where they engage.
The research found that 80% of consumers trust employee discount platforms to provide legitimate, good-quality offers, compared to just 22% for offers found via search engines.
That trust gap creates a significant opportunity for affiliate and partner channels operating within controlled environments. The same offer often performs far more effectively in a trusted, curated space than in a crowded open-web environment where customers question quality or legitimacy.
For brands, channel quality increasingly matters as much as the offer itself.
Many brands still focus reward activity heavily around peak retail periods like Black Friday or Christmas.
Customer behaviour no longer works that way. More than half of consumers surveyed said they actively look for offers throughout the year, not just during seasonal peaks.
That creates a real opportunity for affiliate and referral programmes. Always-on reward strategies keep brands visible continuously across the customer journey rather than competing only during heavily discounted promotional windows. In competitive categories, that visibility influences switching behaviour, accelerates purchases and drives acquisition ahead of competitors.
The brands performing best in the offer economy treat reward as an ongoing acquisition lever, not a short-term promotional tactic.
Customer expectations around value have fundamentally shifted. People expect reward to feel immediate, relevant and easy to trust – because that’s how the best digital experiences already work.
But what the research also tells us is that offers influence not only conversion rates but customer confidence, purchase timing and brand consideration. That shift sits at the heart of the offer economy.
Brands that understand how reward shapes customer acquisition behaviour will compete far more effectively than those still treating offers as a purely tactical tool.
If you want to explore the full research and discover how changing consumer behaviour, affiliate performance, customer acquisition and reward strategy contact retailsupport@rewardgateway.com for your copy of the Offer Economy report.
