Membership only works when customers feel they're getting more than a transaction. That can come from access, belonging, service, experiences, or ongoing value that's easy to use and hard to replace. This threenote looks at what makes community and membership models stick, and how brands build relationships that last beyond the first cycle.

Belonging by Design: When People Pay Because They Choose To
The strongest membership models aren't built on paywalls or exclusive access - they're built on purpose, identity and belonging. Hear about The Guardian's supporter model where readers pay despite free access Learn how purpose-driven positioning, clear audience focus and consistent value delivery create recurring revenue that's resilient precisely because it's chosen, not forced.

National Trust - Relevant for another 130+ years?
Retention is changing. It is being driven by belonging, identity, and shared experience. The most effective membership models are moving beyond passive benefits and into something closer to fandom; where people choose to engage, contribute, and come back because they feel part of something. Tom explores how the National Trust are looking beyond their successful repeat visit model, earning loyalty through relevance, reinforced through participation, and sustaining it by creating moments people want to return to.

Radical Customer-Centricity: Building Loyalty Through Everyday Value
How Nutracheck keeps customers engaged over time by making the product feel useful, personal and easy to stick with, turning 'daily habit' into a membership proposition with long-term loyalty and retention.

Most businesses treat subscriptions as recurring transactions. The ones that win treat them as ongoing relationships. This session explores the mindset shift required to build true membership models: designing for retention from day one, creating ongoing value that compounds over time, and building systems where members feel invested in staying, not just paying.

Subscription models have long optimised a single relationship: brand to human. That’s changing. AI agents are starting to browse, evaluate, purchase and manage subscriptions on users’ behalf. What happens when the “customer” is a machine? From authentication to pricing and paywalls, the rules are being rewritten.

The session would focus on how brands can move beyond awareness-led social strategies and use creators to drive not just membership acquisition, but also retention and long-term value. I’d bring in a more performance-led perspective looking at how creator content can be structured across the full funnel, from conversion through to loyalty.

Asking email to fix your churn problem is like mopping the floor to fix a leaking roof. Email is a communication layer, not a problem solver, so when the engine underneath is broken, even the best sequences are just noise. This session identifies where your churn actually lives and what to do about it. Find out which part of your roof needs fixing.

The sharpest DTC brands aren't just selling on repeat — they're building propositions that give customers a reason to stay beyond the product. This session examines how access-based value and genuine community compound lifetime value, reduce churn, and create advocates. What does it take to make that shift?

How bundling across your own products and through external partnerships can unlock new audiences whilst protecting value, pricing integrity and recurring revenue performance.

Sports brands don't sell products - they sell identity. Fans don't just buy, they belong. Chris Duncan explores what brands can learn from how sports properties build loyalty: creating tribes around shared passion, turning emotional connection into recurring revenue, and designing membership models where customers define themselves by what they subscribe to, not just what they consume.

Every subscription business is sitting on something AI wants — not least its content. Right now lots of that content is finding its way into AI systems whether you like it or not. It’s an inflection point for the media, and one which represents a real opportunity at the same time as being a profound threat. Using a real example from media — a coalition of brands including the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian, FT, Mediahuis and The Telegraph — this session looks at how all businesses producing content in the subscription economy can respond before the terms are set by someone else.

The gaming industry has evolved far beyond the traditional model of selling a single product at retail. Today, many games function as ongoing platforms, combining recurring revenue models, live content, digital economies, and highly engaged user communities. In this fireside chat, Tiago discusses how that transformation happened and why it has become one of the most important shifts in modern consumer entertainment.

Churn is a symptom, not the disease. When subscribers leave, it's rarely about price. It's about not feeling part of something worth staying for.Naked Wines built its model on that insight — turning customers into advocates, and advocates into the engine of the business. This session explores how they did it: what community actually means in a subscription context, why belonging drives retention more reliably than perks, and what other subscription brands can take from their playbook.

Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others) is seeing astonishing growth as it captures a growing share of brands' digital marketing budgets. With its new advertising system rewarding those that feed it the right creative at volume, how can you keep pace? Luke Jonas, one of the country's leading ecommerce experts and co-founder of Nest Commerce, will explain why Meta's Andromeda update has changed paid advertising for good. He'll show how leading subscription and retail brands are connecting brand, loyalty, creative and performance at the scale the platforms now demand. A practical look at what it takes to outperform on growth and loyalty when the algorithm, not the media plan, decides who wins. 

Points balances and spend thresholds keep customers returning. But do they keep them caring? Transactional loyalty programmes drive repeat purchase without building genuine attachment, leaving brands exposed the moment a competitor offers a better deal. This session examines what shifts customers from calculated loyalty to emotional commitment, and where transactional mechanics still have a place in the mix.

Loyalty isn't built on rewards programmes or engagement tactics - it's built on customers actually understanding why they should stay. Kunle Campbell shows how complexity quietly erodes retention: unclear value propositions make customers question renewals, confusing benefits reduce utilisation, and friction creates reasons to leave. Learn why the clearest propositions generate the strongest loyalty and highest lifetime value.

The media industry has been stress-testing subscription models longer than most. This keynote draws on original research from global publishers to surface ideas with cross-sector relevance: why cultivating super users and fans drives disproportionate value in any subscription business; how to rethink reach when fragmented funnels have broken the old acquisition logic; and why lapsed customers represent an underused growth lever across retail, media and beyond.

Some subscription brands serve an art form. Some serve a postcode. Some serve a single, specific passion or purpose. None of them are trying to be everything to everyone — and that's precisely why their subscribers stay. This panel looks at what focused subscription brands get right about loyalty that broad-reach publishers and platforms consistently get wrong. The argument is simple: clarity of identity isn't a constraint. It's a retention strategy.

Why delivery performance and returns experience shape retention and loyalty, and how 'back-office' operations can become loyalty features customers feel.

The excitement of acquiring a new subscriber can sometimes distract organisations from a more important challenge: delivering long-term value. Sustainable subscription growth depends on multiple teams working together towards a shared destination, yet many businesses still operate with competing priorities, disconnected metrics and fragmented customer experiences.In this session we explore how organisations can better align marketing, product, technology and operations around customer and commercial outcomes. This session will examine the structures, incentives and behaviours that help teams move beyond departmental goals and contribute to a common mission: sustainable growth and customer loyalty.