5 Things Your Company Could Learn From Netflix

Ask people which business owners they look up and familiar names usually come up: People like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk, for example. Ask them which brands they look up to, though, and the responses you’ll get are mixed ...

If you get anything OTHER than a weird look, that is.

There are some brands we all recognize – Coca-Cola, McDonalds – but that doesn’t always mean we love them. Brand relationships are fickle things, and the companies behind them get into so many shenanigans, it’s hard to truly declare undying loyalty.

We’d like to propose one familiar, yet strangely humble contender: Netflix.

Yes, Netflix. Even if you’ve never used it before, you know what it does and how. That alone is pretty impressive, but we’d like to submit that it gets better from there. The namesake of the now-ubiquitous “Netflix and chill” meme actually has a lot to teach the rest of us.

Let’s look at five big lessons you can take away right now.

1. Netflix Bounces Back – Even From Its Own Boneheaded Mistakes

It may be hard to remember these days, but there was a time when Netflix was one of the most hated brands in the United States – and its stock was worth less than those little red envelopes. In 2011, Netflix stock collapsed, losing 35% of its value, as 800,000 subscribers jumped ship.

What was the problem? Qwikster, the virtually suicidal move to split into two companies and jack up the price on streaming – which, even back in 2011, was the company’s core value prop. Netflix let the train hit it, but at least saw where it was headed, and backtracked hard.

Its current value is in the neighborhood of $150 per share.

And, of course, many of its lost subscribers ended up coming back (more on that in a minute.)

No matter what kind of business you have, strive to build that Netflixian resilience into your own work. Someday, you might make a decision – or even a comment on Twitter – that has everyone howling. If you persevere and move forward (like I just did, making four guesses at the right spelling of persevere) you might come back from it stronger than ever.

2) Netflix is First in Line When it Comes to Technology

You could (almost) forgive Netflix for misreading the moment so badly. When the company was founded back in 1997, the whole idea of streaming was, well, not exactly mainstream. The basic point of the brand was to send out DVDs, competing with Blockbuster (remember them?)

In 2004, Blockbuster was still going strong, even though Netflix had unlimited monthly rentals for a relatively low monthly fee. Netflix moved into streaming in 2007, as broadband Internet started to grow more common – positioning it to be the original streaming service.

Today, we have competitors like Hulu, Amazon, HBO Go, and many others. But even Amazon, the business that’s singlehandedly captured online retail, couldn’t beat Netflix to the punch on streaming. The decision to focus on the technology kept Netflix from going the way of MySpace.

In the online world today, there‘s someone out there who was the first to take advantage of Google. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then live video streaming ... and the list goes on. We might not know WHO they are, but we can bet they made a tidy profit.

Always be looking for the next big thing and how you can get in position to use it.

3) Netflix’s Distinctive Visual Branding is Second to None

Netflix is red. Sure, there are other things out there that are red, such as Coca-Cola, KFC, Heinz, Kraft, and Nintendo. Maybe it’s just us, though, but nothing out there is quite as red as a Netflix envelope. In a time when traditional postal mail is boring, it still stands out.

(Come on: What other piece of mail are you actually excited to get?)

There’s no need to rehash the marketing psychology of the color red: It’s bold, passionate, strong, and loves attention. In Netflix’s case, however, it makes even more sense. Netflix is for getting your hands on the hottest movies, and hot always means red.

There‘s a way to make your brand stand out visually, no matter what it is. Find it.

4) Netflix Never Gives Up on You, Even When You Give Up on It

via GIPHY

If you’ve ever had a subscription to Netflix, odds are good you’ve gotten mail from them lately.

Maybe this is evidence of the lessons learned back in the bad old days, when so many people left Netflix drifting alone at sea. Someone out there in Netflix land might just have decided that the brand will never get abandoned again – and they’ve built tenacity into their operations.

Weeks might pass, or months, or even years ... but sooner or later, you’ll get an email letting you know Netflix misses you. It still thinks about you.

Won’t you please take it back – at a special price?

There may be other brands that know their way around an email auto-responder, but none capable of the same low-grade persistence continuously offered by Netflix. By sticking to you like glue – but not chafing enough to get you to unsubscribe – it’s probably netted money from millions of lapsed subscribers over its lifetime. And that’s pretty amazing.

Any business that does any online operations can learn this lesson. Cultivating an email list and adding value to it every day is one of the most important things you can do to strengthen your business. That‘s true not just for customer retention, but for building trust and launching offers, too.

5) Netflix Uses Your Laziness to Its Advantage

What’s the main reason giant video rental stores no longer roam the Earth? Some people might point to changing technology, but there’s an even deeper reason. Video rental stores were fun and exciting to explore, but they were always working against their customers’ nature.

If you didn’t watch your movie right away, you’d get punished in the form of late fees.

And where would you put the blame? On the rental store, of course.

With Netflix, it doesn’t matter how distracted you get. You can leave your DVD in the mail for a week, or watch half a movie and pick it up at that exact instant months later. Netflix doesn’t judge you. Why? Because Netflix gets paid either way.

And that means it never has to risk your resentment.

There‘s a huge lesson in here for any company that wants to raise its website conversion rate, the value of its sales, and the lifetime value of its customers: Make things easy and obvious. Don‘t punish people for honest mistakes – even better, look for ways to passively benefit from the things your users will do anyway. That way, they‘ll never have a reason to shake their fingers at you.

Not all of us can be Netflixes (Netflixii?) but one thing is for sure: We can all learn from it.

After all, can you think of any other brand you’d rather chill with?

If the answer is “your own,” go out there and put Netflix charm into practice!