A lot of Thought Leadership on LinkedIn about the final days of Stranger Things on Netflix over the past few days.
LinkedIn Thought Leadership Thesis (#LTLT):
- Stranger Things is a Success.
- Netflix Marketers are Brilliant.
- Making The Customer Wait Three Years For Season Five Creates Excitement, Interest.
- Spreading The Final Season Out Across Five Weeks Is Smart.
- FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, Creates Shared Experiences.
- Build Anticipation, Then Have A Massive Payoff.
- Retention Marketing (Catering To Your Best Customers) Is Much More Profitable Than Acquisition Marketing. Stranger Things Proves This Fact To Be True.
- The Reason Your Brand Struggles Is Because You Don’t Focus On Retention Marketing And Your Marketing Team Isn’t As Smart As The Team At Netflix Is.
- Do What Netflix Does.
I don’t have enough hours in the day to respond to this drivel.
First of all, Netflix is selling Stranger Things Season 5. You are selling Widgets. Who has a harder job? You do! It’s not even close.
Stranger Things Season 5 is not proof of anything, much less the myriad brilliance of Retention Marketing. Well, let me take that back. If anything, Stranger Things Season 5 is proof of the importance of acquiring customers to the Stranger Things franchise in 2016. Yeah, think about it. How many people watched Stranger Things in 2015? None, it didn’t exist. The franchise had to acquire viewers in 2016, those viewers spread the word organically, and the marketers at Netflix did a ton of very challenging viewer acquisition work in 2016 that pays off today. If the franchise stunk (i.e. bad merchandise), it would not exist today. The product had to be compelling, viewers had to try it out, viewers had to tell friends how wonderful the series was, and from there viewer acquisition led to a success story. It was viewer acquisition from nine years ago that #LTLT should be talking about, because without the hard work done by creative/marketing people nine years ago, retention tactics are meaningless today.
Every customer you love marketing to today had to be acquired yesterday.
By the way, do you have $400,000,000 to $480,000,000 of petty cash lying around to spend on Season 5 of a decade-long franchise? Retention Marketing is easier when you have the GDP of Tunisia at your disposal. You don’t have those resources at your disposal, do you?
Another fundamental difference between Stranger Things and your Widgets business?
- Stranger Things Ends on Wednesday.
- Your Business Is a Going Concern … You Sell Every Day Forever As Long As Profit Allows You To Sell.
It is easy to prime the pump for something that fifty million or a hundred million people have watched, something that will end in a few days.
It is amazingly, terrifyingly hard to show up for work every day and somehow convince people that they should buy a widget and then they should pick you over every other widget provider for said widget. Honestly, Stranger Things marketers are working in Hawkings, the widget marketer is working in the Upside Down, trying to stave off Vecna. Every day.
It is easy to talk about Retention Marketing, which is why so many people put us on blast mode about it.
- It is not hard to convince a Starbucks customer to purchase five drinks a week instead of four drinks a week.
It is hard to Acquire customers. Very hard.
- It is VERY hard to convince a coffee drinker who has said “no” to buying from Starbucks for two decades to try Starbucks for the first time.
Content-based Retention Marketing rules do not apply to your business. Your job is so much more difficult. Which is why some people talk about retention marketing on LinkedIn while you work so darn hard to keep the wheels on the widget bus.
