Case: Postmortem for an Underperforming Credit Card × Gym Partnership

Context

Your team launched a credit card–gym partnership offering a benefit (e.g., statement credit, discount, or rewards multiplier) intended to drive partner sign-ups/enrollments and incremental card spend at gyms. The initiative underperformed targets on both sign-ups and spend.

Task

Run a structured postmortem. Your response should:

1. Establish a credible counterfactual to estimate incremental impact.
2. Diagnose root causes across:
   • Targeting
   • Positioning/creative and channel mix
   • Incentive design (offer value and mechanics)
   • Partner operations (in-store/on-site execution, integration)
   • Seasonality and macro confounders
3. Specify the data you would collect and the analyses you would run (e.g., funnel drop-off, churn cohorts, geographic difference-in-differences).
4. Recommend immediate mitigations versus longer-term pivots.
5. Outline how you would communicate the failure to executives and to the partner while preserving the relationship.

Assumptions (clarify or adjust if needed)

• "Sign-ups" refers to enrollments in the gym offer (or partner membership sign-ups attributed to the offer); "spend" refers to incremental gym-category card spend (MCC 7991/fitness) within 30/60/90 days post-enrollment.
• The program ran in a subset of geos/channels, enabling the use of untreated controls for comparison.