By Morten Suhr Hansen
Last week, I was in Stockholm, ending the day with a fika with some great colleagues after another long strategy day at one of Sweden’s largest media companies. It was one of those days where your head feels a bit tired, yet you’re energized by the big questions.
What’s interesting right now isn’t just that more companies are working with subscriptions. What’s interesting is that more are starting to focus on the bigger strategic story behind the subscription. In fact, I’m currently working on three different subscription strategy projects with three different clients alongside my talented colleagues at Subscrybe.
And honestly, it’s about time.
Subscription strategy is far too often treated purely tactically. Discussions revolve around pricing, packaging, campaigns, onboarding flows, and churn dashboards. And yes, all of that is important. But that’s not where strategy begins.
A strong subscription strategy starts elsewhere. It begins with a more fundamental question: Why would a customer even want to maintain a relationship with us over time? That question is what separates strong subscription businesses from those that have merely added automatic payments to an existing product.
Here are five things I believe you need to get right when building a subscription or membership strategy that can truly last.
1. Start with customer value. Always.
The first question isn’t: What can we charge per month? The first question is: What ongoing problem are we solving for the customer?
It sounds simple, but this is exactly where many go wrong. They start with the product. Or the price. Or what competitors are doing. A subscription only works when strong and recurring customer value is at its core.
That’s why the best subscription businesses rarely just sell access. They sell relief, convenience, security, inspiration, status, development, or continuity.
Take Aarstiderne, for example. It’s not just food in a box. It’s help in everyday life. Less decision fatigue. A feeling of being more organized as a family. And that difference is exactly what makes a subscription business stronger.
If ongoing customer value is unclear, everything else quickly becomes cosmetic.
2. Think relationship, not transaction.
Subscription is, in reality, a beautiful business model. It forces companies to think relationally.
You don’t truly win because the customer said yes once. You win when the customer keeps saying yes. That’s a crucial distinction.
Far too many companies still treat subscription as a one-time sale with automatic renewal. But that’s not how the customer experiences it. The customer experiences it as an ongoing evaluation: Is this still worth the money? Does it still matter in my life? Would I miss it if it disappeared?
That’s also why the relationship isn’t just a soft layer on top of the business. The relationship is the business. This applies to media, streaming, memberships, software, and all other subscription models. Look at the Nordic media houses succeeding digitally: it’s rarely the ones with the most content. It’s the ones that become a habit. A priority. Part of the user’s daily life.
Subscription isn’t just recurring revenue. It’s recurring relevance.
3. Design for retention from day one
One of the most important truths in the subscription world is that the best growth often comes from lower churn, not just higher sales. Yet retention is far too often treated as something to consider later – after the product is launched, the campaign is run, or the sales have started.
That’s a mistake.
Retention must be considered from the beginning. How do we onboard? When does the customer experience their first value? What behavior patterns are common among long-term customers? Where does friction appear? When does the customer lose momentum? What do we do before the customer leaves?
These are not minor operational questions – they’re strategic. If you build a model that’s good at attracting customers but poor at keeping them, you’ve really just built an expensive leak.
And yes, acquisition can still be exciting. But retention is often where profitability truly lives.
4. Build a model that can evolve
One of the unhealthiest things you can do is fall too in love with version one of your subscription model. The truth is, no one gets it perfect the first time.
A strong subscription strategy doesn’t just define a model. It defines a model that can learn, adjust, and evolve with the market, customer needs, and the company’s own insights.
Packaging changes. Pricing changes. Bundling becomes more important. New segments emerge. New value levers appear.
We already see this across Scandinavia. Media companies combine content with events, audio, newsletters, and community features. Streaming services experiment with multiple tiers and access models. Membership businesses increasingly work with differentiation instead of one standard package for all.
The best subscription strategy is not the most rigid – it’s the most adaptable.
5. Get the organization on board. Otherwise, it’s just PowerPoint
This last point might be the most important. A subscription strategy isn’t just a commercial strategy. It’s not something marketing can do alone. It’s not just a pricing exercise. And it’s not something you can delegate solely to a CRM team or dashboard.
It’s a company-wide strategy.
If subscription lives only in one department, it almost always fails in practice. The overall subscription experience is created across product, marketing, customer service, tech, data, finance, and leadership. Everyone must understand the type of relationship you’re trying to build and how their work impacts the customer’s willingness to stay.
This is also where the most exciting strategy projects emerge. When a company fully embraces subscription thinking, it often discovers that it needs to rethink more than just pricing. It needs to rethink value, customers, organization, and success.
A good subscription strategy isn’t primarily about selling something again next month.
It’s about building something the customer genuinely wants to remain connected to over time. It’s a much more demanding discipline – but also a far better business.
