My friends, witness a great marketing blunder of epic proportions here:
Netflix Profiles feature going away
Netflix has lost its head. I realize it probably isn't really as big a deal as the NEW COKE fiasco but I have to believe this is going to be a costly blunder. I've been a member of Netflix since October of 1999 (wow it'll be ten years next year) and I've never seen them do anything so moronic. Even their removal of email support (they allow phone support only) wasn't this stupid.
If you use Netflix, you may have used their profile feature which allows you to setup sub-accounts under a main account with its own separate queue for movie delivery and, just as important, its own separate rating history. I lot of people use these to divide their movie shipments into an adult category and a kids category so that kids always have a movie to watch and so do the adults. There are a lot of other uses of course such as a husband and wife queue or queues for roommates, etc.
Netflix has decided, because it is good for the user experience (not sure how), to remove this feature. This would be bad enough but they are also not preserving ANY information that was contained in the sub-account either. There is no export feature and no ability to merge info into the main account. Some people have spent a very long time building up their queues and rating history.
Fortunately for me, I don't use this feature but judging from the reactions on the Netflix community blog and on other sites, Netflix is getting nothing but very bad press and a lot of irate users. It'll be interesting to see if they really do remove this feature on September 1st or if they have to back down.
Either way, this is a perfect example of a major marketing blunder. If you take something away, you have to explain why and/or give something return. If they are doing this just to get additional revenue from extra accounts or purge their growing database, they should have made darn sure they candy coated this service change somehow.
At a time when the movie rental business is poised to change so dramatically, Netflix really can't afford any bad press. Its almost as if they WANT to hand this business over to Apple and Amazon.
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3 comments:
Netflix is on the same endangered list as TiVo. Both are solving the problems of yesterday's TV viewer.
Tomorrow's TV viewer will use services like iTunes and download movies and television shows directly, on demand. There will be no video store, and no mail services like Netflix.
It would be like someone mailing you your copy of Law & Order each week. Silly. It's available on the box automatically.
So it's only a matter of time. A few years at a minimum, to be sure, but not long enough for a company to take things for granted and start monkeying around with customer satisfaction.
Seen in combination with its impending irrelevancy, moves like this could easily spark a mass exodus of customers away from a service like Netflix (or TiVo) and keep new customers away.
"If you take something away, you have to explain why and/or give something return."
You're exactly right and it calls to mind Apple's stance on the iPod. Apple has been criticized (not harshly of course, but consistently) about the lack of an FM tuner, voice recorder, removable battery, etc.
It can be debated whether or not these things should be on the iPod (I often get into it about the battery issue. I've never owned an electronic device with a removable battery where the latch, contacts, etc. were not one of the first things to crap out), but Apple's philosophy behind it: "We are very careful about putting things in because its very hard to ever take them back" seems like a good lesson for Netflix in this case.
It is a lesson that should absolutely be taught to every marketing student without fail.
Apple definitely likes to think of the ramifications of things they do and what will happen in 5 or 10 years instead of usual 6-12 months like other companies. The "everything but the kitchen sink" approach is not the best strategy any longer.
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