Gousto

As competition in the meal kit category intensified, Gousto faced a challenge familiar to many subscription businesses.

Value-led acquisition strategies were delivering sign-ups, but they weren't always delivering the customers Gousto wanted most. While promotional offers and broad targeting could drive volume, they didn't necessarily attract subscribers who would stay, order frequently and generate long-term value.

In an increasingly competitive market, sustainable growth would only come from attracting households that were more likely to remain engaged over time.

The challenge wasn't simply acquiring more customers. It was identifying and acquiring better customers.

Gousto needed to shift its focus from optimising towards short-term sign-up volume and instead prioritise consumers with the highest long-term potential.

The Brief

Traditional audience targeting wasn't enough.

Gousto wanted to identify the households most likely to become high-value customers and build an acquisition strategy around them.

To do this, we needed to move beyond broad demographic targeting and create a bespoke audience solution that could identify consumers with the right combination of behaviours, lifestyle characteristics and purchasing power.

The objective was clear: find and reach people who weren't just likely to subscribe, but likely to become loyal, profitable customers.

Success wouldn't be measured solely by sign-ups. It would be measured by the quality of those sign-ups and the commercial value they delivered after acquisition.

What We Did

To understand what drives long-term customer value, we started with Gousto's existing customer base.

Using Gravity Connect, the7stars' proprietary data platform, we analysed Gousto's highest-value customers and combined that insight with a range of additional data sources, including TGI audience insight, O2 mobile behavioural data and household income indicators derived from Open Banking data.

This allowed us to build a privacy-centric geo-behavioural model designed to identify consumers that closely resembled Gousto's most valuable customers.

The result was a bespoke audience segment called Confident Adventurers+.

Unlike standard off-the-shelf audience solutions available to competitors, Confident Adventurers+ was built specifically for Gousto. Rather than focusing on reaching the largest possible audience, the model prioritised households that demonstrated the strongest potential for long-term value.

Using postcode-level modelling as a common identifier, the audience could be activated consistently across multiple media channels, creating a unified acquisition strategy.

Meta, YouTube and Pinterest were selected as the core activation platforms due to their targeting capabilities, optimisation tools and proven effectiveness for driving subscription growth.

The same audience was deployed consistently across all channels, ensuring potential customers were exposed to a coordinated message wherever they encountered the brand.

Importantly, we wanted to measure more than platform-reported performance.

To understand the true impact of the strategy, we conducted a four-cell geo-based incrementality test. Carefully matched regions were selected using historical sales correlations, allowing us to isolate the effect of the audience strategy and accurately measure its contribution to business performance.

This ensured we could assess not just whether the campaign generated more sign-ups, but whether it generated more valuable customers.