Peloton Market research

GMU

This project was completed as a part of my marketing research class where a team of other students and I learned about the marketing research process and designed our own questionnaire focused on answering marketing questions for a company of our choice. Final presentation can be found here.

Executive Summary

For this project, the team and I chose to research Peloton and possible solutions to increase customer growth and retention. We studied 3 main solutions to gauge what actions could help gain new customers and increase Peloton membership value to increase retention.

  • Modification to subscription services: payment options and cost

  • Expansion of in-person events to drive community: live classes, community workouts, and more

  • Brand partnerships and media services: partnership discounts

Findings

After the completion of the survey results, we used Tableau and Excel to analyze to value of the proposed growth solutions. We found that 52% of users would be more likely to recommend Peloton if there were more affordable payment options, with 50% of respondents saying that their preferred subscription was a discounted annual plan. 50% of respondents were indifferent to increased in-person events with Peloton, although it did make them more likely to recommend Peloton to non-users. Of the respondents interested in in-person events, most preferred live classes with instructors or community events such as group runs or yoga sessions. Analyzing brand partnerships, we found that most respondents were indifferent to Peloton increasing brand partnerships, with 65% of respondents saying it would not increase the value of their membership.

We concluded that price was the most important factor to users and non-users with regard to membership value and likelihood to recommend Peloton to new users. Through this finding, we suggest increased marketing in holiday deals or annual subscription discounts. We also suggested testing out in-person community events in cities with a high concentration of Peloton users, such as pop-up live classes with popular instructors and community events such as outdoor group workouts.

Final Thoughts

It was interesting to explore and apply product research methods with a real product from company research, hypothesis building, survey creation, and analysis. One of the reasons we chose Peloton was due to their decreased membership after covid and their struggle to retain and gain customers post pandemic. Due to their financial position, Peloton has decreased their spending in marketing to increase their profitability. Working through this project it seems that there are many loyal customers that are indifferent to changes in their subscription but potential markets of new users who would be interested in changes such as community events and brand partnerships are being untapped due to the decreased marketing efforts. I think this analysis shows the importance of marketing and adapting to change for Peloton and it’s need to shift strategy post pandemic.