Touch can increase perceived ownership.
Peck and Shu's Journal of Consumer Research work finds that merely touching an object can increase perceived ownership. The research is not about loyalty cards specifically, but it gives marketers a useful mechanism: contact with a tangible object can make something feel more personally connected.
That matters because many loyalty programs are invisible. A customer may enroll, forget the app, miss the email, or never understand the offer. A card or chip gives the program a physical anchor at the moment the customer is already engaged.
Tangible service objects can connect customers to an abstract service.
The "touching services" research extends the idea from products to services. It examines how tangible service objects can create emotional connection to a service even before use. That is close to the Loyalty Chips use case: the physical object represents a future service moment, not just the object itself.
A restaurant chip, cafe card, or hotel VIP card is not valuable as plastic or paper. It is valuable as a reminder of access: a reward, a status tier, a welcome back offer, or a next visit.
Physical hardware also solves a salience problem.
Digital-only loyalty often asks the customer to remember a program they cannot see. Physical loyalty adds a cue into the customer journey. A chip in a takeout bag, a card in a wallet, or a stand at the register makes the program visible where behavior happens.
This is not nostalgia for punch cards. NFC and QR make the physical token measurable. The business gets the tap, scan, claim, and customer record. The customer gets a low-friction path to the reward.
Design rule
Make the object feel like access, not advertising. The best physical loyalty cue should say: this is yours, it works instantly, and it gets you something specific next time.
Sources
- Peck and Shu, "The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership," Journal of Consumer Research, 2009.
- "Touching services: tangible objects create an emotional connection to services even before their first use," Business Research, 2020.
- Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng, "The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected," Journal of Marketing Research, 2006.