By Lia Grimberg – CLMP, MBA, and Chief Engagement and Growth Officer, NALA™ and The BIG Handshake Loyalty™ Toronto and Chicago
I’ve been to a lot of loyalty conferences. Here’s what most of them have in common.
You fly in. You sit in a darkened room. Someone’s deck has 47 slides. The keynote speaker is engaging, but you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do with what they said. One was a total sales pitch, beginning to end. You walk through a dozen booths that all want to sell something to you. You eat a sad lunch. You fly home.
And somewhere on the flight back (completely drained), you think: I should have just read the recap.
I’m not being cynical. I genuinely love this industry and the people in it. But a lot of loyalty events are built for optics, not for practitioners. They’re designed to look impressive on a website, not to actually move you forward in your work.
That’s exactly why Hadie Perkas, Costas Perkas and I built The BIG Handshake Loyalty™ North America differently.
What The BIG Handshake (TBH) Loyalty Chicago is, and what it isn’t
What there won’t be:
❌ There’s no stage at TBH Loyalty Chicago
❌ No booths
❌ No keynote where someone reads their slides to you while you check your email under the table.
What there is:
✅A room full of senior loyalty practitioners
✅Mostly brand-side (80%)
✅Actually talking to each other about the real stuff.
The stuff that doesn’t make it into polished conference presentations because it’s too honest, too messy, or too specific.
Things like:
🤔What do you do when your CFO doesn’t believe your loyalty metrics?
📈How do you make the case for emotional loyalty when your board only speaks P&L?
📌What does “personalization at scale” actually look like when your data infrastructure is held together with duct tape and hope?
🤐 And the question nobody wants to answer out loud: is chasing membership volume actually hurting the quality of your program?
If any of those hit close to home, you’ll want to be in the room.
Those are the conversations that happen at TBH Loyalty. Not because we force them, but because when you put the right people in the room and get out of the way, that’s what loyalty professionals actually want to talk about.
👉 Join us in Chicago — registration is free: https://www.tbhchicago.com/#/tickets?lang=en
📆November 10
📍Omni Chicago Hotel
Who’s in the room
About 80% of attendees at TBH are brand-side. That’s intentional and we protect it. We do not sell tickets to the event.
At TBH Loyalty Chicago on November 10 at the Omni Chicago Hotel, you’ll be in conversation with loyalty leaders from brands like Giant Food, KFC, bp, RaceTrac, Great Wolf Lodge, and Omni Hotels and Resorts, among others.
Speakers include Ryan Draude, Lanna O’Connor, Mario Mijares, Alyssa Callahan, Dave Van Saun, and Lindsay Eichten.
These aren’t people reading from a script. They’re people doing the work, and they show up to TBH Loyalty because this is one of the few rooms where they can speak candidly.
The format earns the conversation
We shake hands (literally). We run debates. We run roundtables.
We create deliberate space for disagreement, because that’s where learning actually happens. Nobody’s trying to sell you anything. Nobody’s scanning your badge to follow up with a pitch deck.
But here’s the thing people always mention after: they had a genuinely good time. There’s something that happens when you take the sales pressure out of a room full of smart people who care about the same things you do. The conversation gets better. The laughs get louder.
We take the work seriously. We don’t take ourselves seriously. TBH Loyalty is the rare event where you can geek out over loyalty mechanics at breakfast and still be laughing about it over drinks at the end of the day.
Just loyalty people, talking about loyalty. Honestly, and with a lot of energy. From the first handshake to the last.
And it’s free to attend
No ticket price. No catch. Just a commitment to showing up ready to contribute to the conversation, not just consume it.
If you’re a loyalty leader who’s tired of coming home from conferences with a tote bag and not much else, this one is for you.
👉 Register here (it’s free): https://www.tbhchicago.com/#/tickets?lang=en
I’d also love to connect before November if you want to talk through whether it’s the right fit for you and your team. Just send me a note.
See you in Chicago.
NALA is the North American Loyalty Association. TBH Loyalty Chicago takes place on November 10 at the Omni Chicago Hotel.
