Netflix Case Study

2650 Words11 Pages
In today’s society, consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements and marketing campaigns. Consumers have a million and one options of different brands, products and services to choose from. Marketers know this which is why, in order to gain customer value through sales and profit; they must offer value through their products and services. Was co-founder and chief executive officer of Netflix, Reed Hastings, aware of this when he publicly announced an increase in fees on July 12th, 2011? Netflix emailed its U.S. subscribers announcing that the monthly fee was increasing from $9.99 to $15.98 and that they would be separating the DVD rental and online streaming services into two separate entities. This action resulted in a loss of 805,000 subscribers. In this study, we will explore why both these decisions proved to be disastrous for the company. Let’s first take a look at Netflix’s journey up to this point. Netflix was established in 1997 by co-founders, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. The California based company provided online DVD rentals. Members could rent three DVD discs at a time, which were mailed to them along with a postage-paid return envelope, for a fee of twenty dollars per month. Members had a wide variety of movie selection and could keep the DVDs for as long as they wanted without any due dates or late fees. In 2004 Netflix’s biggest competitor, Blockbuster, decided to offer DVD mail-in services as well. However Netflix had an edge in the market, no late fees. Blockbuster’s unwillingness to eliminate late fees, along with other factors, forced them to file for bankruptcy protection in 2010 while Netflix’s membership had grown to 4 million. Netflix however took a hit in 2005 when consumers began illegally downloading movies. In response, Netflix launched a streaming service in 2007 that offered unlimited movie rentals for a monthly fee
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