BRANDED<
the No 1 internet company for customer satisfaction according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index and for 10 out of the 11 Fore See Results surveys which come out twice a year it has been No 1 in terms of customer satisfaction.” Regarding the focus of Netflix’s advertising, Swasey says it deals very directly with the customer benefits – that of the ability to watch instantly and have unlimited movie enjoyment. A number of TV ads feature ‘The Wrightnow Family’ – for example, in one ad a man comes selling popcorn and the dad of the family invites him in to watch a movie ‘right now’.
PR has also been an important part of Netflix’s marketing strat-
egy. However, not all of it has been positive. The company launched in Canada in September with a splashy event on a Toronto street that attracted dozens of onlookers. But many of those in the crowd were actors who were paid to be there. They were then interviewed by journalists who didn’t realise they weren’t real consumers who were genuinely interested in the product. Swasey says Netflix apologised for the misunderstanding and
doesn’t believe the incident had any ill effect on the brand. In fact, within hours of the event, Swasey addressed the matter on the company blog in a post entitled ‘We blew it’. “Simply put: we blew it,” he wrote. “We didn't intend to mislead the media or the public, and we can understand why some have raised questions. We're sorry that our misfire has given Canadians any reasons to doubt our authenticity or our sincerity.”
Web power The internet has been an extremely powerful tool for Netflix from a marketing perspective. “The internet enables us to be much more predictive and more accurate about what people will want than a
video store. There are three billion ratings in our database from customers,” says Swasey. “For example, if you gave It’s Complicated five stars, Bridget
Jones’s Diary five stars and Avalon three stars, we can compare you with all the other people who gave the same ratings to the same films, see what they chose and rated highly otherwise and can predict what you will want to watch. The predictive algorithms are extremely innovative and highly accurate, but also very impor- tant. With 20,000 titles available, how do you choose what to watch otherwise?”
When someone joins Netflix as a subscriber they are asked to fill out a quick survey, outlining how often they watch romantic comedies, children’s movies and so on, and this forms the basis of the service provided. People can have a free two-week trial in the US and a month free in Canada. After this they pay US$8.99 a month to subscribe, no matter how many films they decide to rent or receive via streaming.
The attractive price and mass-market appeal means that
Netflix’s customer profile is quite broad. “Netflix’s customer base looks like America. There are single parents, college kids, grand- parents. The common thread is they all have a credit card and an internet connection. There are 90 million homes in the US that fall into this category and we have 15.9 million as customers.” Recently there has been much speculation that Netflix might be considering entering markets other than Canada. The company recently posted a job advertisement for a director of product man- agement to ‘drive the Netflix team to clearly understand what work must be done, and in what order, to achieve international scale most quickly’. According to Swasey, however, there will be no imminent announcements about international plans.
Volume 4 Issue 4 2010 Marketing Age 39
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