CASE STUDY

Creating real value for millions of members

THE CHALLENGE

Among AARP’s 38 million membership base, an increasing number of members forgot about their membership and felt frustrated by the disjointed omni-channel experience. Consequently, members were less engaged and weren’t renewing their membership with AARP, which composes AAPP’s primary revenue engine.

THE OUTCOME

AARP engaged the PX Venture Studio to research, build, and launch a new experience to engage members at the start of their membership. 


The Approach

Over the following year, we ran 3 sprints of market experimentation with 150+ end users, which were AARP members:

  • MVP: low cost, low risk approach to test value proposition on-brand but off-platform in order to gather consumer feedback: We set up ‘lemonade stands,’ or tables in public areas, to mimic the experience of individuals signing up for AARP while minimizing resources. Peer Insight then delivered the new MVP “One Box” to new members to get “do” data, which gave us much more confidence and direction than previously collected “say” data.
  • Alpha test: high fidelity, tangible experience to observe behavior: optimized materials and used AARP’s existing member acquisition channels and distribution system.
  • Beta test: high fidelity, tangible experience to observe behavior: optimized overall messaging and experience and used actual AARP’s vendors.

The Impact

AARP exited the PX venture studio with a new membership onboarding experience that had:

  • Traction: More than 70,000 members showed us through their behavior that this new experience had the impact AARP desired in terms of engagement.
  • Organizational impact: Our work together effected an organization-wide, customer-centric strategy: AARP is now evaluating its other departments and functions to discover ways to embrace innovation (approx. 70%).
  • Marketing strategy: We enabled AARP to have a deeper understanding of its members and reshape its branding and messaging to better identify with and influence its members.
  • Operational impact: Our iterative, test and learn approach allowed us to transform AARP’s existing supply chain while still minimizing risk and cost to produce this experience.
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