Brands Belong Here: How Better Brand Access Can Transform the Rewards Experience
A new industry initiative aims to help incentive, reward, recognition, and loyalty companies deliver more meaningful, retail-quality rewards experiences through broader brand access, real-time product information, current pricing, and modern fulfillment technology.Closing the Reward Redemption Experience Gap With Retail
Why the Rewards Experience Matters
Expanding Opportunities for Brands and Fulfillment Partners
Components of the Initiative
Building a More Meaningful Rewards Marketplace
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The primary beneficiaries of Brands Belong Here are the organizations investing in engagement programs and the people they seek to motivate, recognize, and reward. By making it easier for participants to find the specific brands and products they truly want on reward, recognition, and loyalty catalogs, the initiative seeks to increase satisfaction, perceived value, redemption, and overall program effectiveness.
Sponsored by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance’s Brand Media Coalition, the initiative brings together brands, fulfillment partners, and solution providers to help modernize the merchandise rewards experience. Its founding sponsor is Power Sales, one of the world’s largest master fulfillment companies serving the incentive, rewards, recognition, and loyalty marketplace.
The effort includes an ongoing educational effort to inform brands on the benefits of participating in the incentive, rewards, and recognition business. Many of them backed away from the market during the Great Recession.
Closing the Reward Redemption Experience Gap With Retail
Organizations invest billions of dollars annually in employee recognition, sales incentives, customer loyalty, and channel engagement programs. Yet while retail shopping has evolved through real-time inventory, current pricing, personalization, rich product information, and seamless fulfillment, many merchandise reward programs still lack access to these capabilities.
The result can be limited product selection, unavailable merchandise, outdated information, higher costs, and participants settling for second-choice rewards.
Modern API-driven technology can help organizations provide broader brand access, more accurate product information, real-time availability, and pricing that better reflects current market conditions. Participants gain an experience that more closely resembles the shopping experiences they encounter every day.
Greater choice also enables more meaningful personalization. Rather than receiving a generic reward or selecting from a limited catalog, participants are more likely to find products aligned with their individual interests, lifestyles, and preferences.
Why the Rewards Experience Matters
The perceived value of a reward can be as important as its monetary value. A product someone genuinely wants can create a much stronger emotional connection than a less relevant item of equal cost.
A more compelling merchandise experience may also encourage greater redemption. While unredeemed points can reduce short-term program costs, they may also indicate limited engagement or insufficient perceived value. Making desirable brands and products easier to find can strengthen participation, satisfaction, and the overall impact of the program.
This does not diminish the important role of gift cards. The opportunity is to complement gift cards with merchandise experiences offering comparable convenience, choice, personalization, and value.
Expanding Opportunities for Brands and Fulfillment Partners
Brands Belong Here is based on the belief that branded merchandise remains one of the most powerful ways to create aspiration, emotional connection, and lasting memories. However, many brands have found it difficult to participate efficiently in a fragmented marketplace served by numerous technology platforms and fulfillment providers. At the same time, fulfillment companies offer valuable customer relationships, merchandising expertise, and category knowledge but face growing demands for API connectivity, real-time content, and scalable infrastructure.
The initiative supports a more collaborative model in which infrastructure providers such as Power Sales can simplify market participation for brands while supporting fulfillment companies and solution providers with technology, product content, and operational capabilities.
Components of the Initiative
Brands Belong Here combines industry education, brand outreach, merchandising support, media visibility, and business development. Key activities include:
- Educational outreach explaining the opportunities available in the incentive, recognition, rewards, and loyalty marketplace.
- Ongoing Rewards Recognition Network coverage of participating brands and merchandising trends.
- A Brand University content series focused on brands, products, categories, and merchandising essentials.
- Outreach to fulfillment companies and solution providers seeking enhanced API and fulfillment capabilities.
- Increased visibility through newsletters, interviews, digital media, and educational programming.
Building a More Meaningful Rewards Marketplace
At its core, Brands Belong Here is not simply about offering more products. It is about helping organizations provide rewards that are more relevant, personal, convenient, and satisfying.
By expanding brand access and bringing retail-quality technology and fulfillment capabilities to the rewards marketplace, the initiative seeks to help organizations create experiences that participants genuinely value—and rewards programs that produce stronger engagement and more meaningful results.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
