Reduced Churn With Disney+’s First Loyalty Program

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventures Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, James Schultz.

When I was at Disney+, the streaming wars had exploded the number of Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) services. Investors demanded growth at all costs and a fast path to profitability, so subscriber acquisition dominated. Churn was tracked as a KPI but sat in the back seat. As growth slowed in high-penetration markets like the U.S. and after global expansion, macroeconomic pressure on consumer wallets, frequent price increases across multiple services, content troughs between big releases, and near-zero switching costs (sign up or cancel in seconds, no contracts or truck rolls) created a perfect storm. Unlike cable or satellite, where high rip-and-replace costs locked people in, SVOD made it effortless to churn and burn then re-subscribe later. Even with Disney’s generational brand affinity and “Disney adults,” we still saw meaningful voluntary churn—especially among casual fans who only cared about a few franchises (I’m mostly a Star Wars and Nat Geo guy myself).

We faced a classic leaky-bucket problem: pouring new subscribers into the top while holes at the bottom (churn) kept the bucket from filling. The core question became how to reduce subscriber churn and improve retention by harnessing loyalty and the broader Walt Disney Company synergies. Data showed price/value perception as the leading indicator of voluntary cancellation. We couldn’t cut the subscription price—Wall Street wouldn’t allow it—so we had to increase perceived value to justify what members were already paying. Even a small reduction in churn carried huge financial upside. We needed something that worked for both hardcore Disney loyalists (high engagement, low churn propensity) and casual fans (lower engagement, higher churn risk), without solving every retention problem overnight.

We started by clearly defining the problem—reduce voluntary churn—then mined the data for leading indicators and formed a hypothesis: introducing subscriber rewards would cut churn among redeemers and create a broader halo effect simply from members knowing the program existed. Next we ran broad quantitative and qualitative research with both Disney+ subscribers and non-subscribers to learn which rewards actually mattered: free or early access, freebies, sweepstakes, gamification (badge journeys for finishing shows like The Mandalorian), discounts across Disney parks, consumer products and the Disney Store, plus relevant third-party offers such as food-delivery credits. Those insights shaped the strategy so we built what customers wanted, not what we assumed they wanted.

We then tested a subset of offers with segmented audiences to validate the hypothesis before committing to a full program—critical because walking back a launched loyalty product is painful. Casual fans and loyal fans had different desires, so we tailored tests accordingly.

Every reward had to tie straight back to the Disney+ subscription (“unlock this as a member”) so the value felt attributed to the service rather than random.

One memorable test was a seven-day National Geographic Galápagos cruise sweepstakes; it drew massive entries and also lifted Nat Geo viewing on the platform, proving rewards could drive core engagement metrics that ultimately reduce churn.

A major fork in the road was build versus buy. Building internally would let us make it uniquely Disney and turn it into a one-time capital expense, but it would fight for scarce engineering resources, risk years of delay, create ongoing tech debt, and pull focus from the core streaming product. Buying a loyalty SaaS platform gave us speed to market (we wanted to be first in streaming), expert ongoing enhancements, far lower internal resourcing, and enough customization to still feel Disney—despite integration complexity and recurring cost.

I recommended buy; after contentious debate with leaders who preferred build, we aligned on buy. We ran a collaborative RFP across roughly fifty loyalty SaaS providers, assembling a tiger team of marketing, data analytics, product and engineering so the decision was shared rather than made in a vacuum. Product marketing owned the initiative (one of the few times something this large was marketing-led), with a core team of six product managers and product marketers.

We relied on internal data and advanced modeling to surface cancellation drivers and build loyalty audiences (high-engagement/low-churn Disney fans versus low-to-medium-engagement/high-churn casual fans). Customer research mixed surveys, focus groups, support feedback and quantitative analysis of both subscribers and non-subscribers. For the platform itself we ran a formal RFP process against approximately fifty loyalty SaaS vendors, evaluating out-of-box capabilities, customization, integration effort and speed. A cross-functional tiger team (marketing, analytics, product, engineering) sat through demos and scored partners together. Once live, we used the partner’s rewards engine plus Disney’s own parks, consumer products, Nat Geo and third-party relationships (DoorDash-style offers) to keep the catalog fresh and costs manageable. Post-launch we monitored redemption, content engagement lift and churn among treated versus control populations.

The hypothesis held: tested rewards validated reduced churn risk among redeemers and delivered measurable engagement lifts (the Nat Geo cruise sweepstakes both generated high entry volume and drove a clear increase in National Geographic viewing on Disney+). By choosing the buy route we achieved first-mover status—the first true customer loyalty program of its kind in the streaming/entertainment industry—while keeping engineering focused on the core Disney+ experience. Leveraging internal Disney business-unit synergies gave us a wide, continually refreshed reward assortment at relatively low incremental cost, avoiding the classic loyalty-program failure modes of sparse or stale offers. Even modest churn reductions translated into outsized financial benefit. The work also proved that product marketing could successfully lead a large, cross-functional, zero-to-one product initiative when grounded in rigorous customer insight and tight collaboration.