How Netflix builds a dedicated audience
“Whenever I see people lined up outside of a club on a Saturday night, I just think…Look at all these poor people who don’t know Netflix exists.”
“Don’t cry because its over, smile because Netflix recommends similar shows.”
A sizable amount of such quotes exist across the internet which are representative of the fact that “netflixing” has become a verb.
From being a video streaming service to becoming a culture, Netflix is a bug which has caught up with millenials and GenX equally.
In its pursuit to becoming the next Disney, Netflix has adopted some innovative promotional strategies which has helped them drive user engagement and build a loyal audience.
Here are things Netflix did which helped the entertainment company turn its casual fans into passionate followers -
Building an emotional connect through content
Netflix published a paid post in the New York Times — Women Inmates : Why The Male Model Doesn’t Work which talked about the increasing number of women serving time in prisons. This was directly associated with the plot of the upcoming season of the show – “Orange is the New Black”.
As a strategy they did not promote the platform or the TV series itself but built a story around the plot of the show by using interactive graphics, hence getting the user involved into knowing more about the plight of the women prisoners.
Here’s what Reed Hastings had to say about building an emotional connect with the audience
We want Netflix to be the emotional connection brand. While our competitors like Amazon work on a “meet all needs” strategy, we want to have a more focused strategy.
Tweaking content based on audience insight
There are 33 million different versions of Netflix
– Joris Evers, Director of Global Communications
When House of Cards season 5 was about to be released, Netflix created 10 different cuts for the trailer, each for a different audience segment.
The media company used Big Data to analyze the behaviour of its users and showed the next trailer based on the insights.
So if you have rated Kevin Spacey shows highly, it would show you the House of Cards trailer accordingly with more scenes featuring your favourite star in the trailer.
Their proprietary recommendation algorithm also aims to provide a personalized experience by suggesting a match based on the previous shows that you have watched.
Hastings talked about a “dream user experience” at the Recode Interview when asked about how Netflix adds context to content -
Entertainment taste is incredibly broad. The key in music or video is to apply machine learning to present to you the content that you would love. We want to incorporate personalization in a way that you just turn Netflix on and it just plays the right thing on its own or present to you three or four choices and you don’t have to browse elsewhere. Together, we are all learning better statistical techniques to produce better results.
Understanding How We Consume Content
Netflix also ventured into wearable technology as it built socks that read your body to understand when you fall asleep, and then automatically pause your Netflix show.
Here is a word on the idea that went into this innovative invention
Our strategy was to celebrate Netflix fan culture by introducing a solution. Informed by social listening and by user-submitted ideas, we created the perfect marathon-watching accessory for Netflix users who watch themselves to sleep: smart socks. Netflix socks became the second installment of our MakeIt campaign — a series of of DIY projects inspired by users’ watching rituals, designed to deliver the ultimate watching experience.
Netflix socks is now a case study and the winner of the shorty awards in the “Creative Use Of Technology” category.
What lies ahead?
Netflix strategy remains very clear which, if put in Netflix, Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos’ words, is -
Providing Great Content To Consumers With Their Own Terms
The media entertainment group which started off as a DVD rental business by Hastings, is now valued at more than $100 billion. It is expected to have $2 billion as its marketing budget and will be spending $8 billion on “Netflix Originals” content.
With the amount of money they aim to invest, it will be interesting to see the level of personalization and technology that Netflix is able to achieve that keeps us glued to this internet TV giant.
