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How a leading US value retailer defined digital as a competitive growth lever, designed a membership proposition, and built the platform, organization, and market intelligence to scale it.
The challenge
Digital had become a competitive imperative.
One of America's largest value retailers was moving aggressively to expand its online presence, develop new digital propositions, and protect its most valuable customers as competitors' membership ecosystems captured a growing share of their spend.
The ambition was clear: digital had to become more than another channel. It had to become a meaningful differentiator and a disproportionate source of future growth.
The retailer was pursuing several major initiatives at once. It had launched through third-party marketplaces, was building its own e-commerce proposition, and was weighing whether a paid membership program could defend share of wallet and accelerate digital adoption.
The real question ran deeper than whether to launch a membership program. It was whether the retailer had the proposition, economics, technology, operating model, and organizational capacity to make one succeed.
“A membership promise is only as strong as the business underneath it. Your platform, operating model, and organization all have to be ready to deliver what the customer is paying for.”
TOMORROW Engagement Manager
The work
We started by defining the role digital could play in the retailer's next chapter of growth.
Before designing a program or selecting technology, we worked with leadership to understand where digital could create a distinctive advantage: which customers were most at risk, how competitor programs were changing their behavior, which benefits could earn their loyalty, and what the retailer would need to deliver operationally for the proposition to hold.
We analyzed how many of the retailer's customers were already participating in competing programs, how their spending was shifting, and which customer groups represented the strongest opportunity to win and retain.
From there, we designed and tested a paid membership proposition from the ground up. Customer research and prototype testing identified the benefits most likely to drive adoption and incremental spend, the value customers placed on each benefit, and the subscription fee the proposition could support. We then modeled the economics to confirm the program could create value for both the customer and the retailer.
The 18-week strategy phase established a clear competitive and financial case for membership, including the role it could play in protecting market share, accelerating online growth, and lifting incremental revenue over time.
The work also surfaced a more fundamental truth: a membership promise is only as strong as the business underneath it.
The retailer's legacy platform could not support the scale, speed, and experience the broader digital agenda required. Instead of treating the platform as a separate technology decision, we positioned re-platforming as a critical step in enabling the growth strategy.
We designed and led a 12-week platform evaluation across four shortlisted vendors and 25 dimensions, including architecture, API maturity, latency, security, roadmap alignment, support model, and commercial structure. The process went past technical functionality to assess how each platform would perform against the retailer's operating model, integration landscape, customer proposition, and long-term growth ambitions. In parallel, we developed a negotiation playbook covering licensing structures, overage terms, service levels, and termination rights to protect long-term value.
Technology alone would not be enough. We also assessed the retailer's digital organization, benchmarking team size and functional ratios against assortment, e-commerce revenue, and the expanding portfolio of digital propositions. That work informed a multi-year talent plan built to give the retailer the capacity to execute across e-commerce, membership, and adjacent growth initiatives.
Following the strategy phase, we stayed embedded through six months of implementation, supporting requirements definition, configuration design, UAT planning, cross-functional alignment, and launch readiness. We also established an ongoing digital intelligence program, continuously identifying market developments that could affect the proposition and enabling the retailer to adapt as customer expectations and competitor offers evolved.
The result
The retailer moved from a collection of digital initiatives to a connected foundation for growth.
Leadership gained a clear view of where digital could create a differentiated advantage, which customers and behaviors mattered most, and how membership could support both defensive and offensive growth objectives. A customer-tested membership proposition was developed with a defined value exchange, pricing logic, and economic model.
The retailer selected the technology foundation capable of supporting its expanding assortment, loyalty ambitions, and future omnichannel requirements, and strengthened its commercial position through a disciplined evaluation and negotiation process. A multi-year organizational plan gave leadership a practical roadmap for building the team to manage the growing digital agenda.
We stayed alongside the business from strategic definition through implementation, helping the proposition, platform, organization, and operating model advance together.
The outcome went beyond a re-platform. It laid the foundation for digital to become a stronger competitive differentiator, a more scalable growth engine, and a greater share of the retailer's future.
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