Resume
Customer-focused organizations, regardless of their type and size, use customer loyalty programs extremely intensively as a modern marketing and management tool. In the paper, I am looking for an answer to the question: Are customer loyalty programs so new and modern, or do their roots go deep into human business history? The comparison between the ideal-theoretical DNA elements of the customer loyalty program with the ideal-theoretical DNA elements of the cooperative, formulated when it was established in 1844. unequivocally shows that the DNA of the customer loyalty program is part of the DNA code of the cooperative. Therefore, customer loyalty programs have been deeply rooted and used by the cooperative for more than 150 years and for it they are neither a new phenomenon nor a modern phenomenon, much less a modern marketing and management tool.
Key words: Cooperative, Loyalty Program, Membership, Loyalty, Trust