Not Just Anniversaries: We Must Rethink Our Definition Of Milestones

"That's policy, ma'am." Those three words, delivered with a polite, bureaucratic finality, are the reason I almost walked out of a luxury store. My firm recently completed three successful years, and I wanted to mark the occasion. But when I asked about offers, the sales associate pulled out the standard laminated script: offers apply only to birthdays and wedding anniversaries.

"I don't have an anniversary," I told her. "But this business milestone means a lot..." She blinked. 

This is a fundamental branding blind spot. We are living in an era where life scripts have been rewritten, yet corporate loyalty programs are still stuck in the 1970s. People are delaying marriage, opting out of it entirely, or restarting their lives in their 40s and 50s. I am sure you keep seeing new acronyms like DINK (Double Income, No Kids), SINK (single income, no kids), every other week.

What Is A Milestone, Really?

Brands are obsessively collecting data on us, yet they fail to recognise their demographics. Yeah, AI can solve this by the way (if you want to!) If you look at the landscape of my friends, you see the absurdity of this rigid anniversary standard. I have friends who are my age, wildly successful, some of them are single, and some are divorced. With significant spending power.

The Anniversary Discount excludes them just as it excludes me, the single person who never married. While everyone has a birthday, not everyone gets married nowadays. But everyone fights battles. Everyone achieves things. Everyone has moments where they look in the mirror and say, "I did that."

Why are brands leaving money on the table by refusing to celebrate these moments? We need to operationalise the variable milestone. 

It is a simple concept: give your customer the autonomy to define what matters to them. When I sign up for your loyalty program, ask me for my birthday, sure. But then give me a blank field: "your personal milestone." Let me fill it in. Maybe it's the day someone bought their first apartment. Maybe it's the day someone got thier PhD. Maybe it's the day someone overcame mental health issues.

If I tell you that January 25  is my "Business Anniversary," and you send me a personalised offer saying, "Happy 3 years of being a bosslady," you have secured a customer for life because you validated my life choices.

The jewellery industry, which is historically the worst offender for perpetuating the "ring-by-spring" narrative, is finally waking up to this. Thankfully, some jewellery giants are finally smelling the coffee. They realised that the 'happily ever after' sales pitch was leaving half the world’s bank accounts untapped. They’ve stopped waiting for a groom to walk through the door and started looking at the woman who walked in alone. Women are buying their own rocks as hard, glittering evidence of the mountains they've climbed themselves.

Retail Therapy is often the only way we can tangibly ritualise our private victories in a world that forgets to throw us a party. But most other sectors are lagging. Few brands have done well by creating value-based communities that reward engagement rather than just life events, but even they miss the emotional punch of acknowledging a specific, non-traditional personal victory.

When you’re single, you become the person who celebrates everyone else. You buy the wedding gifts. You show up for anniversaries. You clap loudly at baby showers. You send thoughtful texts on their days. And because you don’t have that socially sanctioned milestone, you often don’t receive gifts in return. Because society hasn’t built a ritual around your wins. So yes, it gets painful. Just… invisible-painful. 

Recognition still follows a narrow script. Book launches and business wins don’t get treated as “occasion-worthy” in the way weddings do. I am owed a lot of gifts that way! Take a cue.

Modern lives deserve modern loyalty design

Imagine the loyalty you would build if you allowed a divorced person to swap her wedding anniversary date for some other date. It sounds radical, but culture is already there. People throw divorce parties, no?

Brands are the ones lagging, and they have immense power to drive cultural change. Anniversaries need to be celebrated, yes. But I also want the discount. And more than that, I want the recognition: that my three-year company milestone is as real as someone’s three-year wedding milestone.

So, to the ones reading this: tearing down societal barriers is the mechanics of how you treat customers at the till. Stop forcing them to fit into a box that doesn't exist for them. Redefine the policies. Let them choose their discount day. Milestones are not one-size-fits-all. And yes, life doesn't fit in policies.

Shalaka Kulkarni (@shalakulkarni), founder of Write Click, is a Bengaluru-based author writing at the intersection of culture and technology. Views expressed by the author are their own.