There are few chores more rewarding than claiming points from a credit card, however humble the return might be. So you can imagine my delight over the weekend when I cashed out hundreds of dollars at the click of a button.

But not all rewards programs make it so simple to claim benefits. A lot of development goes on behind the scenes to balance customer perks and company costs. And when teams within the company don’t collaborate, a flawed program can cause damage rather than inspire loyalty.

This week, Kellogg’s Tim Calkins dives into United Airlines’ snafu with its PlusPoints program to explain why it’s so critical to build alignment between teams before launching initiatives.

Plus, what the dollar’s recent decline might signal about its global standing.

Aligned at takeoff

When United rolled out its PlusPoints program, it seemed like a clear win for its tried-and-true customers. The program awarded points to frequent fliers, who could use those points to upgrade their seat to a better cabin.

So by the time Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing, had accumulated 420 points in his United PlusPoints account, he was excited to put them to work. But after trying to do so for 23 flights, he was only able to secure a single upgrade. Not only was the process to use the points tedious, but there were also very few flights for which he was able to use the points in the first place.

“My experience isn’t unique,” Calkins wrote. “One flyer wrote on Reddit, ‘[the points are] like a pile of Chuck E. Cheese tickets, but all the prize shelves are empty.’”

The trouble, Calkins later discovered, was that the core teams behind the program’s development were out of sync. The marketing team initially designed PlusPoints to be an easy way to encourage customer loyalty. But the finance team in charge of the program’s logistics had a different goal in mind, to ensure that the fewest number of customers actually used their points.

“For United’s finance team,” Calkins wrote, “seeing all the PlusPoints expire unused was the perfect financial outcome.”

Though United has since revamped its PlusPoints program, Calkins sees the initial rollout as “a classic example of … what happens when marketing and finance aren’t aligned, and why thinking through programs and building alignment is so critical.”

Read more from Calkins on LinkedIn.

Dollar down

The U.S. dollar, one of the world’s most widely sought-after assets, saw its value decline by as much as 10 percent in the first half of 2025, inviting speculation about the end of its global dominance.

Why does the value of the U.S. dollar rise and fall over time?

“It’s an age-old question,” says Zhengyang Jiang, an associate professor of finance at Kellogg. Using a valuation model based on two decades’ worth of data from the International Monetary Fund, Jiang and his colleagues were able to break down the strength of the dollar into simple, quantifiable components—and show which of them had the most influence over time.

The researchers found that more than 90 percent of the dollar’s strength comes from just two components: global savings (the amount of currency being held by companies, central banks, and other major financial institutions) and investor demand (the market’s overall appetite for buying dollar-based assets, like U.S. Treasury bonds).

Amid the dollar’s ups and downs during the two-decade timespan the researchers studied for their model, demand for the dollar remained relatively constant. This specialness is what underpins the dollar’s long-held status as a stable reserve currency for the global economy, they say.

But the recent tariff announcements by the Trump administration were met with a “surprising” 6.5 percent depreciation in the dollar from April 1 to 21 and a sudden drop in the relative value of U.S. Treasury bonds, despite rising interest rates and market volatility.

In the face of market volatility, global investors usually seek out the dollar as a safe haven. “This time,” Jiang and his coauthors write, “is different.” Global confidence in Treasury bonds appears to be wavering.

Read more on Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Abraham Kim, senior research editor
Kellogg Insight