Antony’s blog

As a follow-up to my earlier post, it turns out that Netflix has listened to the voluminous customer feedback and decided not to remove the beloved Profiles feature that lets you have separate queues. Here’s a picture from the email they sent us announcing the stay of execution:

I was happy to see them reverse this decision. However, I feel they definitely lost some customer goodwill, which it will take them a while to regain. For instance, I was strongly considering buying the new Roku device that connects to your TV and home network to let you access the “watch instantly” movies/shows from Netflix’s website on your TV instead of a computer. But since this episode, I am now far less enthusiastic. Also, I’ve started looking a little more closely at the Blockbuster online advertisements.

Netflix has worked hard to build their brand as a trusted enhancement of your movie watching experience, through features such as separate queues, ratings and recommendations, user reviews, social networking with friend lists/recommendations, etc. But the flip side of insinuating themselves more deeply into your life than being “just a movie rental service” means that customers feel a sense of betrayal when they propose to remove a beloved feature. Some commenters on various blogs and forums asked the reasonable question of “What’s the big deal? If you don’t like the service anymore, just cancel.” To which others replied “I’ve spent many hours rating movies and recommending them to my friends as encouraged to by Netflix. Now they’re going to just delete all that data, erasing in essence a small piece of my online identity.”

I guess the business lesson is that you can’t have it both ways; you don’t get to both have your customers be “emotionally invested” in your brand to keep them loyal in the face of price and feature competition, and expect them to react dispassionately when you make a seemingly reasonable decision to remove a feature that is expensive and complicated to maintain and only used by a small percentage of users. Note the way they sign off in the above email: “Your friends at Netflix”. Dear Netflix: if you want me to think of you like a friend, you need to act like one.