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As product managers we all dream of the day that we could muster up the courage to actually raise the price of our product. Just imagine – we wouldn’t have to do any additional work, and we’d be able to bring in even more money! Apparently the product managers over at Netflix had the same idea because they decided to dramatically raise their prices. That’s when things got confusing…
So just exactly what did Netflix’s product managers do that generated such a fuss? Well, once upon a time Netflix had a very popular product that they were selling: for $9.99 / month, customers could subscribe to a service that provided them with the option to rent one DVD via postal mail at a time and stream an unlimited amount of online videos. Needless to say, people loved this service and signed up for it in droves.
So what was the result of this little pricing action by the Netflix product managers? How about the loss of 1 million customers and the company stock dropping by 19%. Ouch – that’s not going to look good any anyone’s product manager resume!
So where are these million lost customers going to go? There are a number of possibilities: Amazon, Apple, and Hulu. However, none of these services have either the scope of Netflix’s offering nor Netflix’s “all you can eat” approach to online streaming.
Which leads us back to our original point: if there is no clear alternative to Netflix, then those one million customers must have been pretty angry at Netflix Account.in order to leave them. What did
The first mistake that the Netflix product managers made was that they surprised their customers. Nobody saw this 60% price increase coming. Secondly, Netflix forgot to offer their customers any additional value. I mean really, if you’re going to boost my price that much, then you’d better be throwing something into the mix that will help me understand why you’re doing it.
Finally, when everyone started to complain about the change, Netflix was strangely quiet – they didn’t really react to the feedback that they were getting from their customers. In baseball, after three strikes you’re out. Let’s hope that the Netflix product managers have learned their lesson.
So now that it’s clear that the product managers at Netflix have made a mistake in how they went about changing their product’s pricing, what should they have done? What’s missing here is strategic management of a product’s price. The key item to remember when you go tampering with your product’s pricing is that any changes that you make to a price must be done as though you were having a conversation with your customer.
In Netflix’s case, the product managers should have started the process by issuing a series of press releases talking about all of the additional content that they were adding to both their physical DVD service as well as their streaming service. In those press releases they should have also brought up the fact that their costs were going to be going up, but that they thought that it would be worth it for the additional content.
Once the price has hit the new higher level, reward your customers by telling them that you’ve heard their complaints (because there will always be complaints) and announce that you’re going to separate the services and offer each at a price that is lower than the original service was offered at Discord Nitro.
In the end you’ll get to the same price point. However, it’s how you got there that makes all of the difference. You will have had a dialog with your customers along the way and although they may not fully agree with you, they’ll understand why it all happened. If the Netflix product managers had gone about changing their prices in this way, then they’d still have the million customers that they lost doing it their way.