This is a guest post by Chris Winterhoff, who is an expert in Growth. Currently Chris is a fractional Growth leader and growth advisor at Perceptycs.
Previously he headed Growth at Onto, a UK platform for all-inclusive electric car subscriptions. And was also Head of Marketing at Mashroom, which covers the UK housing industry.
Guest Author: Chris Winterhoff
The single biggest thing that drove Netflix to become a 250+ million subscriber business?
Create brilliant shows? ❌
Raise a lot of money? ❌
Run highly visible marketing campaigns? ❌
All of the above helped, but the most important thing they did was…
They found a pool of perfect customers no one was paying attention to. ✅
Netflix uniquely understands the market they are in, who their competitors are and how to position themselves against them:
Netflix is NOT in the Cable TV market.
Netflix is in the entertainment market and competes against the likes of YouTube, Fortnite (and other games) as well as Cable TV.
This is why Netflix picked up so many subscribers in the early 2010s without massively impacting Cable TV subscriber numbers.
They expanded the paid-for content market by winning customers who had never paid for content before. These early customers were playing games online and watching YouTube.
Netflix shaped their streaming product to suit their customers:
Creating binge-able content that was available on their preferred devices (i.e. laptops). Only later did Netflix launch their TV app.
In essence, they did the exact OPPOSITE of what Cable TV (Comcast, Sky etc) were doing. They served content:
👉 On-demand
👉 On devices that their audience were using
👉 With an affordable monthly subscription. Cable TV has higher monthly costs because it bundles lots of content together (e.g. sports, movies, shows) and usually has longer contract terms (i.e. 12 months).
They did this because they understood the power of research interviews. Interviewing customers and non-customers alike to uncover gaps and opportunities in the market.
🔎 If you think there might be underserved customers in your market, or you want to strategically expand your market like Netflix did, ping me a DM.
I do research interviews with your customers and non-customers to extract insights for future growth for your business.
