Sometime around 2015, the business press decided that subscriptions were the future of everything. Software went subscription. Razors went subscription. Meal kits, gym gear, coffee, underwear, dog treats, paint colours — subscription. The argument was elegant: recurring revenue is predictable revenue, customer lifetime value compounds, and the relationship between brand and customer deepens over time. There was just one problem with this argument. It assumed customers would stay. Most of them didn’t. And the marketing built to retain them was, almost universally, terrible.
The Subscription Dream and What It Actually Required
The subscription model is not, in itself, a bad idea. When the product is genuinely valuable and continuously improving, when the relationship between brand and customer is built on something real, subscriptions make sense for everyone. The customer gets convenient access; the brand gets predictable revenue and the data to improve. The model works when it’s built on a value proposition that holds up over time.
What the subscription boom of the last decade produced instead was a category of businesses that mistook the billing mechanism for the business model. The idea was: acquire customers, put them on a recurring payment, and the relationship takes care of itself. The acquisition marketing was excellent — smart targeting, compelling offers, clear value propositions. The retention marketing was an afterthought, which is interesting because retention is literally the only thing that makes the model work. You cannot build a subscription business if people keep cancelling. The economics don’t function. But somehow, the marketing budgets didn’t reflect this reality for years.
The result was churn. Spectacular, industry-defining churn. DTC brands with beautiful Instagram feeds and customer bases that dissolved after the first order. Streaming services in a permanent arms race because nobody had worked out how to make people want to stay once the free trial ended.
What Retention Marketing Actually Produced
When subscription businesses eventually noticed the churn problem — usually when the acquisition costs became unsustainable — they hired retention marketers. These were, in theory, the people who would build the systems and communications that kept customers engaged and loyal. In practice, they built email sequences.
The retention email is one of the great unexamined creative failures of digital marketing. It is, in most cases, a notification with delusions of relationship-building. “We miss you.” “Your subscription is paused — here’s what you’re missing.” “Come back and get 20% off.” These messages are not the product of deep understanding of why a customer left or what they valued. They are the product of a workflow that fires when churn risk indicators are triggered, filled with copy that was approved in ten minutes by someone who needed to ship the automation before the end of the sprint.
The attention economy has made this worse. The bar for customer communication has risen while the quality of most brand communication has stayed flat. People are better than ever at identifying when a message was sent to them specifically versus sent to a segment of 400,000 people who all share the same behavioural trigger. The “personal” touch that brands put on retention emails — the first-name merge field, the reference to “your account” — fools nobody. Customers know when they’re being processed. Processing does not build loyalty.
The Loyalty Programme That Wasn’t
The subscription economy’s answer to retention, when email sequences weren’t enough, was the loyalty programme. Points. Tiers. Exclusive access. Member pricing. The theory was that customers would stay not just because the product was good but because they had invested in a status they didn’t want to lose. Gamification of the customer relationship.
The execution was, in most cases, a vanity metrics machine dressed as customer engagement. Brands tracked enrolment numbers, point redemption rates, tier progression statistics — and used these as proxies for loyalty that had no relationship to actual customer lifetime value. You can have a technically impressive loyalty programme and still haemorrhage customers, because loyalty to a programme is not the same as loyalty to a brand. Customers will collect the points and leave when something better arrives. The points are not the relationship. The relationship is the relationship.
What genuine subscription retention requires — and what most brands have proven unwilling to build — is a continuous improvement of the core value proposition. If the product gets better over time, customers stay because leaving means losing access to something genuinely useful. This sounds obvious. It is apparently very difficult to operationalise in environments where the product roadmap is driven by acquisition-focused metrics and the marketing team is optimised for new customer growth rather than existing customer deepening.
The Cancellation Experience as Brand Statement
Nothing reveals a brand’s actual relationship with its customers more clearly than the cancellation experience. The companies that have built genuine customer loyalty tend to have cancellation flows that are respectful, clear, and easy. They know that a customer who cancels easily but has a good experience is a customer who comes back.
The companies that built their subscription model on the assumption that friction equals retention have cancellation experiences that are among the most hostile interactions in consumer technology. Multiple confirmation screens. Persuasion flows with counter-offers. “Are you sure?” repeated until it becomes a philosophy. The “pause” option that defaults to a three-month extension. These flows are designed by people who looked at churn data and decided the solution was to make leaving harder rather than staying more valuable. They are also, increasingly, subject to regulatory scrutiny in multiple jurisdictions, because regulators have noticed what customers already knew: making it difficult to cancel is not a retention strategy. It’s a hostage situation with a monthly payment.
The authenticity that brands claim in their acquisition marketing evaporates entirely at the cancellation screen. The brand that told you it was “on your side” and “built for people like you” — that brand, when you try to leave, becomes a slot machine designed to keep the coins inside. Customers notice the contradiction. They do not forget it.
What the Subscription Economy Actually Needed From Marketing
The subscription model, at its best, is a commitment to ongoing value creation. The marketing brief for a subscription business is not “acquire customers and minimise churn.” It is “build something people want to be part of for as long as possible.” These sound similar. They produce radically different organisations and creative outputs.
Marketing that serves the first brief optimises for the moment of acquisition and then deploys increasingly desperate retention tactics when customers start leaving. Marketing that serves the second brief thinks deeply about what keeps people engaged — what they’re learning, what they’re getting, what they’d miss — and builds communication that reflects that understanding. The content is different. The tone is different. The metrics are different. The customer experience is different.
The brands that will survive the current subscription shakeout are not the ones with the cleverest acquisition funnels. They’re the ones that treated the subscription as a promise rather than a payment mechanism — and built everything, including the marketing, to keep that promise over time. The rest are experiencing what happens when you build a business on the assumption that customers won’t notice. Customers always notice. They’re just occasionally slow to act on what they know.
If the subscription model has trapped your brand in an endless acquisition treadmill where new customers barely cover the cost of churned ones, the problem isn’t the marketing execution. It’s the brief. And if you’re ready to write a better one — or burn the current one entirely — the NoBriefs toolkit is waiting. Start with Fuck The Brief at nobriefsclub.com and see what happens when you stop optimising for the wrong things.
