Sam’s Club

Arm Candy helped Sam’s Club connect brand storytelling and performance media around one goal: making membership more valuable and easier to join. Using audience intelligence, measurement, and a streamlined acquisition journey, the work drove record new-member growth while increasing lead volume 124% and reducing cost per lead 16%.

The Result

Arm Candy built media around the full membership lifecycle: make the membership experience more valuable, make that value visible to prospects, and remove friction from the path to joining. 

For Scan & Go, the You vs. Usain work transformed a functional product benefit into a distinctive expression of membership value. The work delivered 200M+ completed video views and nearly 2.7M landing-page visits, while Kantar found prospects were most receptive to You vs. Usain and the Scan & Go creative outperformed many retail norms. 

On acquisition, the new model created a faster, more efficient path from interest to membership. Most importantly, Sam’s Club achieved the highest new-member acquisition growth for a single quarter in company history. 

The Execution

Make the Member Benefit Famous

Scan & Go had a simple, valuable promise: less time in line and more control over the shopping experience. The opportunity was to make that promise impossible to miss.

Olympic gold medalists Usain Bolt and Allyson Felix made speed the storytelling device. In You vs. Usain, two of the world’s fastest athletes raced through Sam’s Club to complete a three-minute shopping trip, turning a product demonstration into entertainment and making the benefit immediately understandable.

Arm Candy designed the media around the job the idea needed to do, not around a predetermined channel mix. Broad-reach video created scale; social and online video extended discovery and repetition; and audience strategy distinguished members who could adopt the feature from prospects for whom Scan & Go could become another reason to join.

Use Measurement to Shape the Experience

Independent measurement was built into the work so the team could understand more than delivery. Kantar’s cross-media analysis identified where the idea was resonating, how prospects and members responded differently, and where media weight could be reallocated to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

One of the clearest findings was frequency. Prospects reached diminishing returns sooner, while members remained more responsive to repeated exposure. That gave Arm Candy a more precise way to reduce waste, expand reach and use audience behavior to inform the next investment decision.

The business value behind the story made that precision matter. Scan & Go was not simply a convenience message; adoption was associated with dramatically higher store visitation, making the media objective bigger than awareness alone.

Audience Intelligence Across the Membership Journey 

The same data architecture supported the wider relationship. Arm Candy and Sam’s Club developed audience cohorts using membership status, purchase behavior, shopping recency, site activity, app behavior, competitive affinity and prior media exposure. 

Rather than treating those audiences as static targeting lists, the team used them to understand where people were in the membership journey and what media needed to accomplish next. That made it possible to shift from awareness to engagement to conversion without rebuilding the strategy each time the business objective changed. 

Remove Friction From the Path to Join

Membership acquisition required a different expression of the same principle: understand where value was being lost in the customer journey, then use media to remove the friction.

The initial approach intentionally tested across paid search, social, programmatic, video and multiple audience strategies to establish performance benchmarks and learn where quality demand was emerging. But the most important learning was not a channel learning. It was a business-process learning.

Historically, many prospects were sent to a lead-capture experience and then nurtured through email before being asked to join. Arm Candy tested that route against a more direct path that sent high-intent consumers straight to Sam’s Club’s Join Now experience.

The direct path outperformed the longer nurture journey.
That changed the investment model. High-intent search and social dollars could be optimized against membership behavior rather than intermediary lead capture alone, shortening the distance between media exposure and the business outcome.

The result was a rare combination of scale and efficiency: lead volume increased 124% versus the previous agency while cost per lead declined 16%. More importantly, Sam’s Club achieved the highest new-member acquisition growth for a single quarter in company history.

Compared to previous agency: 

A Media System That Could Flex With the Business 

Scan & Go and membership acquisition were the clearest expressions of the strategy, but the relationship extended across a much wider set of business priorities. Over multiple years, Arm Candy managed more than two dozen distinct media initiatives spanning product launches, online sales, seasonal retail priorities, recruitment, employee appreciation and other needs across the organization.

That breadth required more than a collection of media plans. At an annual scale of roughly $20 million in media investment, Sam’s Club needed an operating model that could shift quickly from brand storytelling to commerce, acquisition or engagement without losing the audience, measurement and business logic underneath the work. 

Because the same audience, investment and measurement architecture sat underneath the relationship, objectives could change without rebuilding the media model from scratch. Each initiative could be engineered around a different business need while remaining connected to the same customer and membership journey. 

ShoRelationship Scale

The Membership Journey was the Media Strategy 

The most important connection between Scan & Go and acquisition was not that both performed well. It was that both started with the same question: what makes membership more valuable, and what gets more people to act on that value? 

For current members, the answer was a differentiated experience that gave people another reason to shop more often. For prospects, it was a clearer path to understanding the value of membership and joining. Arm Candy’s role was to use audience intelligence, media, measurement and continual optimization to connect those experiences across the journey. 

The work demonstrated that brand and performance do not have to compete for priority in a membership business. When media is built around the customer and the business outcome, brand can create demand while performance converts it – and both can compound the value of membership.