Some offerings are just a complete fail. I’ll give you an example from my real world. Supermarket chains around here give out a voucher for a petrol discount when you spend more than $30 in one go. That’s kinda smart, since petrol pricing is something people care about so it can drive changes in customer behaviour (to a point).
Then one of the big chains has introduced a kind of loyalty card last year, whereby the discount gets linked to the card rather than getting printed on the receipt. Saves hassle with paper, but the real objective (like any loyalty card) is to better track customer behaviour by allowing the supermarket to link your purchases over time.

The key fail is that you still only get the discount if you spend $30 in one go. Of course this is aimed to entice people to do fewer big shops rather than more smaller ones. But apart from the paper hassle, we’ve merely identified two benefits to the vendor, and nothing much for the customer. And it doesn’t even work for the supermarket, because now people won’t bother showing their card if they’re spending less than $30, and thus their behaviour doesn’t get tracked for those purchases. That’s the thing you’d want to specifically track, if you’d like to get people to change their purchasing behaviour. And the discounts aren’t sufficient to drive a change in behaviour, they still do ad-hoc shops. So it just doesn’t work.

What could help? Keeping the loyalty card concept, the supermarket could record points for every purchase, with a bonus number (or percentage) for bigger purchases. At a certain level of points, the customer gets their fuel discount. It’s all automated through the cash registers anyway, so all that is easy enough to implement.

But I haven’t told you about the other fail, on the customer side. With the cards, people now can’t easily tell whether there’s a discount on their card, unless they login to some website to check (and remember yet another login and password). They used to at least have their discount voucher, which you handed over when you pay for the petrol.

If you don’t show your card now you still get your voucher (although no special offers that only apply if you show the card but again are only valid if the purchase is greater than $30), and if that were scrapped I’m sure that people would still use the card when doing bigger purchases just to not lose out on the discounts. That doesn’t mean it’s a good system though. It sucks on all sides as it pretty much fails all its objectives.