- Team project
- Customer research
- Market analysis
People don't cancel subscriptions because of price
- Role
- MBA Consultant, team of five
- Company
- Amazon UK
- When
- Mar to Apr 2025
- Tools
- Mintel, Statista, our own survey
- recommendations
- 5
- people surveyed
- 100+
- customer personas
- 4
Before
- A brief to understand "everything" about UK subscriptions
- No internal data to work from
- The assumption that price drives cancellations
After
- One focused question, agreed with Amazon in writing
- Our own survey, backed by market research
- Evidence that people cancel what they stop using
01The problem
Amazon's Alexa team for the UK and Ireland asked our Cambridge MBA team how the cost-of-living crisis was changing the way people subscribe. The brief was very broad, essentially "everything that affects subscriptions", and Amazon couldn't share any of its own data.
We had four weeks to build the evidence from scratch and turn it into recommendations.
02What I did
- Narrowed the question. In our first meetings, we agreed with Amazon what to focus on and wrote it into a signed project plan, so the work didn't become a search for a needle in a haystack.
- Dug into the market data. I led a large share of the market research, using Mintel reports to track how spending and habits had shifted since the crisis.
- Built the customer personas. I combined our survey with the market research into four typical subscribers, from Mia, a student who signs up and cancels often, to Graham, a semi-retired teacher who keeps only the essentials. The team tested every idea against them.
- Ran our own survey. Over 100 people answered and 69 met our criteria. We flagged its bias ourselves, since most were young and connected to Cambridge.
- Learned from winners and losers. We compared companies that keep subscribers, like Duolingo and Netflix, with ones that didn't, like MoviePass.
03What changed
- The data overturned the starting assumption: the top reason people cancelled was that they'd stopped using the service. Cost of living came third.
- Five recommendations on keeping subscribers, presented to Amazon's Alexa team on 14 April 2025.
My part
The four customer personas and a large share of the Mintel market research. I was also one of the team's two main contacts with Amazon.
“The final presentation was outstanding, delivering a well-structured narrative supported by robust data analysis and meaningful customer anecdotes… One of the most comprehensive analyses we've seen on this topic.”
Everyone expected price to be the problem. The data said people cancel what they stop using.