Roughly 30% of US companies use non-cash incentive rewards to improve performance, creating a $25 Billion dollar industry. Over 80% of incentives are tied to sales objectives but 65% use incentives to reward non-sales performance concurrently. The success of incentive programs that achieve their objectives averages 86% consistently. And the average amount of increase achieved through incentives commonly tops 15%.
(Source: Incentive Marketing Association)

Though cash rewards still have wide appeal, sponsors of non-cash incentives exploit the important psychological distinction between compensation and "motivation" by playing to those highly personal aspects of incentive recognition.

One survey of 1,000 employees in a cash-based incentive program found that:

  •   18% didn't remember receiving it
  •   15% don't remember how they used it
       (Source: Wirthlin Worldwide)

And research from the American Productivity & Quality Center found that sponsors of cash programs actually require 3-5 times the amount of cash value to achieve the same results as with non-cash incentives.