Netflix is the new McDonald’s
What Tech start-ups can learn from the debacle of the Fast Food industry
In 2004, Morgan spurlock, an independent filmmaker, decided to eat McDonald’s food for 30 days, all three meals of the day. His story, an award winning documentary, showed what everyone was scared to admit till then — just how much bad “fast food” can do to our health. The documentary created such a big furore that in six weeks time McDonald’s phased out their Super size options from their menu.
McDonald’s and rest of the industry have ever since struggled to shed the “junk food” image. Today, even with far more healthier options in their menu, brands like McDonald’s are still perceived to be unhealthy.
Facebook is the latest bad boy in a string of businesses that failed to live up to our ethical standards. But, even before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company had started losing its’ core users. Like fast food, everyone knows that Facebook is bad for them, just not “how bad” exactly.
In a recent interview, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings raised quite a few hairs with his comment about Netflix’s main competitor.
“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” — Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix
The bigger problem, other than privacy issues, societal concerns and behavior hacking, is the metric companies like Netflix, Facebook etc. use to measure product impact — how much time a user spends on the platform.
Let’s take an example.
You are back from work, it is pretty late, you are too tired to sleep. You open your Facebook to know what’s going on in your world. You see an interesting video on your feed and you click on it. And before you realize, you have spent hours just watching videos, one after another.
Yes, you have just consumed the digital equivalent of “junk” food.
From McDonald’s to Facebook to Netflix, this obsession towards metric maximization — whether it is the customer’s dollar or time, is what makes them build addictive products.
Entertainment is supposed to make us feel better. That’s the underlying value proposition of any entertainment service. People go to Facebook for connecting with people, talking and sharing. People use Netflix to “entertain themselves” in way better than ever before.
But these companies trying to maximize their “golden eggs”, end up giving people anxiety, stress and even depression. Exactly how McDonald’s and its supersize meals made people overeat, “feel bad” about their choices and ultimately made them unhealthy.
What can be done?
For one, since we are eating digital equivalent of “fast food”, we will need digital equivalent of “calorie count”.
Digital products and platforms should start providing the amount of megabytes we are consuming and what exactly is consumed — like McDonald’s does and in some cases, like other restaurants are forced to do. Consumer product companies should open up the “usage metrics” data to their customers.
Beyond Digital Calorie Counts, product owners can also tackle the “perception” of time waste by providing “positive” value to users.
For example, instead of movies alone, why can’t Netflix put more MasterClass type videos, videos that people can use to learn something and be better at something? Why Netflix can’t go beyond just “waste of time”? Yes, it is absolutely possible that customers ignore such videos. Even if they do, they still know it is their choice and not Netflix’s. And that will make all the difference.
Take any product that is considered as contributing “positive” value like Duolingo, Medium.com etc. These products use similar behavior hacking techniques like everybody else. But they are not often targeted for hacking our behavior because we consider them to be helpful to our betterment.
For example, let’s say you spend one hour each, in Facebook and LinkedIn. In both you are watching videos and reading blogs and commenting on others’ posts. I bet my money that you will feel far better about time spent on LinkedIn than on Facebook. Why?
Goal alignment.
LinkedIn is not awesome, either. But at least, it’s inline with what many of us desire for — better job, better opportunities, career growth etc. So the time you spend on LinkedIn is not entertainment, unlike Facebook or Netflix. LinkedIn is “personal growth” time for many. There is no data to prove if LinkedIn contributes positively to our growth, but it definitely makes us feel that way. And like everything else in the world, perception is reality.
And that is the question for every product owner out there — How can you help your customers’ desires to improve and be better? How can you make customers successful at something?
Metrics should not be just a way to understand how a company performs. It should also be a way to understand how the customer performs. Is the user becoming better at something as a result of using a product? What’s the value users are deriving out of the interaction? What are customers becoming as a result of using a product — overweight and distracted or fit and focused?
Metrics are ways to measure the impact of a brand.
By maximizing for metrics that don’t care for users, we tend to break the brand value than build it. By putting the customer back at the center of the product, a brand can maximize life long value not only for the customer but for the business as well.
Harish is a product story-teller obsessed with human behaviour, technology, and future. Connects products to the minds of people @ www.productstory.io
