The Problem Statement 

In the past few years, we have seen the rise of the subscription model thanks to Netflix, Apple Pay, Amazon Prime and the likes. The subscription business model is a type of revenue model in which customers pay a recurring fee in exchange for a product or service. The easiest way to think about it is your Netflix subscription plan. Whether it’s a family or individual plan you are on, you pay a certain amount on a monthly basis. In fact, this type of business model has become so popular that 70% of business leaders say that subscription models are the way to go for the years to come according to Global Banking and Finance Review.

In view of these facts, a well established company in the business of instant cameras approached us with the goal to incorporate a subscription model to their current line of products. Previously, they were offering only the hardware which was the instant camera. However, now they want to start a subscription based cloud storage service so customers could store and edit photos online. But they would need crucial B2C market research insights for this product line expansion. They had a division of customers into high loyal and low loyal customers and they wanted to know how this ratio would shift post the subscription service was launched. Thus, they would need qualitative data survey insights to derive quantitative results. With this in mind, we launched right into the project to start our fieldwork.

Our Approach

The B2C market research spanned several areas such as customer sentiment on cloud storage, willingness to pay for a basic and premium subscription, current pain points of having an instant camera (eg. unable store and add filters to photos in physical form). We recruited and surveyed 700 existing customers and we then converted the B2C market research data into a report on consumer sentiments, highlighting the company's strengths and growth avenues across low loyal and high loyal segments.

The Results

Based on the B2C market research that we conducted, our client was able to:

• identify opportunities to educate low and high loyal customers about the value addition of the cloud storage service
• modify brand messaging, based on the user needs in each segment: high and low loyal clients
• revamp the product portfolio to complement their instant cameras with a cloud storage subscription service.