Consumer Reports

In early 2018 Consumer Reports launched a new digital subscription model in order to reach more customers and increase revenue. Shortly after launch they hired Clearhead to help optimize this new digital channel for a short Proof of Concept engagement. I was fortunate to be their project manager and lead the team to a successful renewal due primarily to solid execution for a rather complex pricing test to help find a balance of revenue among the many new membership options.

Let's Keep it Honest campaign

Released in May of 2018 the Let's Keep it Honest campaign aims to demonstrate a key value proposition and competitive advantage for Consumer Reports: Trust.

Consumer Reports is most known for their product reviews and ratings. They take a scientific approach to testing products and have for a long time, since 1936. For example, they played a large role in making seat belts standard.

Workshop and hypothesis

About 3 weeks before this campaign launched we held a workshop to discuss the company goals, problems and solutions, and to decide where we should experiment and optimize first. A lot comes from these workshops, and I learn a tremendous amount about companies, business and the current climate of e-commerce and other industries, but I'll share just 1 example solution I contributed.

Towards the end of the workshop I offered a hypothesis as follows:

I believe if there was a timeline view of all the big impacts Consumer Reports has made, like for seat belt safety and other legislation, then members and guests would have a simple way to know just how much Consumer Reports really does for society.

If I am right then people would have a better understanding of the value of Consumer Reports and we would see an increase in revenue through additional sign ups and renewals.

The client said this was very interesting. It wasn't something that had done before but it at least passed the sniff test and they took note to check internally later. We then moved on to voting and this idea wasn't at the top so we didn't pursue it much further.

Now you may be thinking that's quite a leap to make from seeing a timeline to increasing revenue. Also, there is the hairy issue of attribution. Did the timeline view really make a difference or was it something else along the journey that ultimately lead to the user's decision and action? Those are important issues to address, but it is something that can be inferred through testing and data analysis if given enough time, traffic and priority.

Results

When the campaign was released can you guess what it included? The timeline shown below! And look at that positioning just above the CTA.

I can't know for certain if I was the first person to think of this, or if my hypothesis in the workshop was the seed. However, based on the sequence of events and how the design is fairly MVP compared to the high standards of Consumer Reports, I'd give it about an 80% confidence (directional) that I gave them the idea or at least helped it find the right audience to make it happen.

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