Brand loyalty. It’s an important thing, make no mistake. It’s the kind of thing that keeps a user coming back even if an experience isn’t all it might have been, or if competitors are making alluring new offers to break customers out of established patterns.

MasterCard’s global products and platforms’ loyalty solutions division head Marti Beller recently revealed a few noteworthy points about getting—and keeping—loyalty in an age of loyalty programs.

Beller first noted that loyalty wasn’t just a program, but rather a complete way of life.

Loyalty is a principle that drives significant, and profitable, behavior change, which is a reasonable way to put it.

Things like points and miles and free stuff all contributes to one side of loyalty, but the other side of loyalty is people shopping and buying things and coming back for more later.

To get to that point, businesses—and MasterCard is no exception—must not only offer freebies, but also a service that answers the various “pain points” a customer endures.

While many businesses want badly to draw the affluent customer, MasterCard has an unusual way to draw that customer: offering time savings.

The affluent are commonly busy people, and by offering time savings, it’s a major pain point that can be addressed and a problem solved in the process.

Using data is also important to loyalty, as it helps businesses determine just what it is customers want and how to respond accordingly.

When a program knows that it’s in an airport, it can swoop in to offer customers a free glass of wine at a restaurant near a customer’s gate, for example.

That takes a lot of data being analyzed and acted upon to produce, however.

In the end, as the song says, it’s all about value. MasterCard believes, and not incorrectly, that it’s not necessarily a straight quid-pro-quo that generates results.

Rather, it’s a constant proposition of solving problems, fixing “pain points” where the customer has the most trouble, and delivering value continuously that keeps customers loyal.

Customers go where their business is most desired, and customers gauge a business’ value of a customer by what the business offers.

Loyalty is more than freebies, and MasterCard is demonstrating this clearly.

All the things that go into a great customer experience help determine loyalty, and it’s more than one program that will make this happen.