Bundling isn’t discounting. It’s how you grow.

Most companies treat bundling as a pricing concession, but the ones growing revenue fastest are treating it as portfolio strategy.

Done well, bundling captures value that individual pricing leaves on the table, driving revenue per customer, accelerating adoption of higher-margin features, and raising the perceived cost of switching in the best possible way.

In this article, Juan Piqué and Juli Pham, break down what separates the bundles that build long-term revenue from the ones that quietly erode it.

Key takeaways:

• The bundles that perform are built around how customers actually use a product or service, not around what makes internal sense on a spreadsheet
  
  
• Every tier in a portfolio needs a defined commercial job. Without that, you’re building a feature list with a price tag
  
  
• Driver features support the decision; passenger features dilute it. Knowing the difference is what makes bundle design work

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What do we know about the commercial impact of getting bundling right?

Juli: The numbers make the case. Verizon reported* that customers who bundled fixed wireless and mobility products were 40% less likely to churn than stand-alone mobility customers.

Orange Group’s** CEO confirmed that convergence accounted for 80% of annual retail revenue growth in France in 2024, driven by upsell, cross-sell, and price increases within the bundle. Orange explicitly reported that convergent customer churn is materially better than non-convergent customers.

Well-designed bundles lift ARPU, accelerate adoption of higher-margin features, and improve retention because customers feel they’re getting increasing value over time. The commercial case is strong, but the execution is where most companies fall short.

*Verizon earnings call, 2026
**A major telecommunications company, formerly France Télécom

So why is bundling so often underestimated as a growth lever?

Juan: Bundling has an image problem. The moment you mention it, most people assume margin erosion. That instinct is understandable, but almost always wrong. Instead, bundles can capture value that individual pricing leaves on the table.

Companies that get bundling right aren’t discounting. They’re designing their portfolio around how customers actually use their product or service. The occasions they buy for, the features they reach for together, or the combinations that create genuine added value.

For example, in 2020, Apple One bundled services like music, fitness, cloud storage, games, and TV because many customers were already using several of them. By packaging that behavior into a single subscription, Apple increased service attachment and encouraged broader, more consistent usage across its services.

This is where service businesses are particularly well positioned. They have recurring touchpoints with users, can observe real behavior, and can iterate. That’s a structural advantage most product-led businesses struggle to replicate.

What are the most common bundling mistakes?

Juli: There are three common failures we see. First, bundles designed as a one-size-fits-all offer. When you try to serve every customer type with the same package, you end up relevant to none of them.

Second, entry-level tiers loaded with too many features, which leaves no room to upgrade. And finally, too many options overall, which overwhelms customers and kills conversion.

For example, we worked with a telecom operator that had more than twenty overlapping plan combinations. It was too much for customers to decode the differences, so they either defaulted to the most familiar option, or they abandoned the process entirely.

How do you build a strong bundle portfolio?

Juan: Every offer needs a defined job. Is it there to drive acquisition? To serve your core customer? To capture premium willingness-to-pay? To retain customers at risk of churning? Until those roles are clear, you’re building a feature list with a price tag.

Once roles are defined, content decisions follow logically. You’re no longer asking “should we include this feature?” You’re asking “does this feature help this bundle do its job?”

Strong segmentation is the foundation, and it has to come early, not as an afterthought once the bundles are drawn up.

How do you separate the features that drive decisions from the ones that don’t?

Juan: The distinction we find most useful is between ‘drivers’ and ‘passengers’. Drivers genuinely influence which product a customer selects. Passengers are features customers appreciate once they have them, but that don’t move willingness-to-pay.

Most feature roadmaps are full of passengers. When you bundle them in, you don’t make the product more appealing; you dilute it.

Knowing when a feature migrates from driver to passenger is also part of managing a bundle portfolio well. In telecoms, ten years ago, unlimited calls used to be a driver but today it’s table stakes.

How do you measure that in practice?

Juli: The instinct is to ask customers directly what they want, but rating features in isolation doesn’t reflect how people actually make decisions. The more accurate insight comes from what they actually choose when they can’t have everything. That’s the basis of most of our work, using methods like conjoint.

We present customers with complete bundle configurations and ask them to choose between them, simulating a real purchase decision. That exercise surfaces how customers genuinely weigh competing features, in a way that direct questioning can’t.

The output from this type of research tells us which features genuinely shift the tier a customer selects, by how much, and at what price.

What that evidence also does is change the internal conversation. Bundle design can be contentious because product teams, pricing teams, and sales all have different views on what matters. When you bring a single source of truth into the room, the debate moves from opinion to action. That’s often where the real value of the work we do sits.

How do you price the bundle?

Juan: The research Juli describes gives you the inputs you need. You can see which features move decisions, how sensitive customers are to price at the bundle level, and where the boundaries between tiers should sit. That’s very different to adding a margin to your costs.

In a bundle, the perceived value of the whole is almost never the sum of its parts. The combination changes how the purchase feels, and your pricing has to reflect that.

Good-better-best is the most common structure, and often the right one. But the gaps between tiers matter as much as the tiers themselves. Getting the balance right requires understanding what customers are weighing up. Prices have to feel logical and fair, not just make sense on a spreadsheet.

When does cross-category bundling work, and when does it backfire?

Juan: It works when categories genuinely reinforce each other in the customer’s life. For example, connectivity and content work together because customers consume them simultaneously. This is why Deutsche Telekom’s pan-European partnership with Disney+ holds.

But it backfires when the combination is driven by commercial logic rather than customer logic. eBay’s $2.6 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005 is the clearest example. The rationale was coherent internally – connect buyers and sellers via voice and video to make transactions richer – but buyers and sellers didn’t want to video call a stranger.

What does this mean in practice for revenue leaders?

Juli: Start with what your customers actually value and build your portfolio around that. The best bundles reduce friction, clarify value, and create the conditions for a long-term relationship.

Juan: Get it right and you grow revenue, loyalty, and perceived value at the same time. That’s not discounting. That’s portfolio strategy.

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