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Tracee Hsiang
With the launch of new content and new deals for content, Netflix continues to amaze and continues to grow in size and power. This week, I finished writing a case study on Netflix for one of my Business Acumen programs and my participants will read it before they have the chance to run their own simulated business and apply various framework of strategy.
Soon after their epic victory over Blockbuster, they created a plan based on 9 leadership practices that they feel is their primary differentiator and enables them to drive to continued disruptive success. These leadership practices include:
You make wise decisions (people, technical, business, and creative) despite ambiguity. You identify root causes and get beyond treating symptoms. You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do. You smartly separate what must be done well now, and what can be improved later.
You listen well, instead of reacting fast, so you can better understand. You are concise and articulate in speech and writing. You treat people with respect independent of their status or disagreement with you. You maintain calm poise in stressful situations.
You accomplish amazing amounts of important work. You demonstrate consistently strong performance, so colleagues can rely upon you. You focus on great results rather than on process. You exhibit bias-to-action, and avoid analysis-paralysis.
You learn rapidly and eagerly. You seek to understand our strategy, market, customers, and Suppliers. You are broadly knowledgeable about business, technology and Entertainment. You contribute effectively
You re-conceptualize issues to discover practical solutions to hard problems. You challenge prevailing assumptions when warranted, and suggest better approaches. You create new ideas that prove useful. You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify.
You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than best for yourself or your group. You are ego-less when searching for the best ideas. You make time to help colleagues. You share information openly and proactively.
But very few retail investors knew that, in 2021, Netflix is in trouble again. And coincidentally, this trouble situation is very similar to that of 2007. And how it reacts to the situation will actually go on to determine, whether Netflix stock shoot up or crashes down.
This is a story that dates back to 1997 when the very popular Blockbuster failure saga actually started. Back then, Blockbuster was a movie rental service that had physical stores of DVDs all across the United States. And the general American tradition back then was, renting a movie on Friday and giving it back on Monday. In 1997, Blockbuster was a billion-dollar company with more than 6000 stores in the US alone and had a revenue of 3.91 billion dollars. But the problem was 60% of that revenue came from late fees, which was annoying millions of customers. That is when one of the customers were fined an exorbitant amount of 40$ in the late fees.
Over here, the X factor turned out to be the mindset of the company. While on one hand, Blockbuster was extremely adamant upon keeping their late fees and made millions of dollars out of the pain of its own customers, while on the other hand, Netflix leveraged the same undesirable attribute to build a million-dollar business. And by 2004, it had a revenue of 500 million dollars. This is when there came the first twist in the tale.
In 2004, Blockbuster understood the DVD in-mail service is a big market and they made a grand announcement and launched their own DVD in-mail service as a direct competition to Netflix. And they started growing as fast as Netflix, adding 2.1 million subscribers in the very first year itself. Now, on paper, Blockbuster was all set to crush Netflix. Because on paper, they had such a vast network of stores that 90% of the American population were at an accessible distance to a blockbuster store. And this meant, when Netflix DVDs will take 2-3 days to come from a warehouse that is hundreds of kilometers away from the warehouse, Blockbuster could have delivered the same movie within just 2 hours because those movies will come from the nearest Blockbuster store of the customer which was hardly a few kilometers away.
In that year itself, Netflix lost 55,000 subscribers as Blockbuster kept growing steadily. This is a context-based on which J P Morgan put out the statement saying that Netflix is facing tougher competition from Blockbuster than originally expected.
And this is where Netflix did something amazing to surprise the world. They identified 2 major threats to their business. First one was obviously Blockbuster entering the DVD in mail service because considering their huge network of stores, they could have delivered a much better service than Netflix with very less efforts, using their existing supply chain itself. Secondly, they realised that they had a hidden competitor who was strangely eating into the profits of both Netflix and Blockbuster. And this mysterious entity was none other than Walmart.
Well, as it turns out, Walmart was also eating into the profits of both Blockbuster and Netflix because it was using a pricing model called the loss leader pricing model. It is a type of pricing model wherein one sells a low cost, low margin product just so that, customers can be exposed into buying a high cost, high margin product. In this case, Walmart was giving away DVDs on rent at a dearth price just so that it could entice its customers to come to the Walmart store. Eventually exposing them to shop other products, which gave them more profits. Walmart did not care about making profits through DVDs which was the core business of Netflix and Blockbuster.
And this is where Netflix ventured into online streaming and pivoted to another segment. And they invested heavily into data analytics to build a formidable personal recommendation algorithm and used the Internet to distribute the content instantly and cost-effectively. This is how, Netflix, the streaming service that we know today was born. Meanwhile, Blockbuster being too late to the streaming party actually crippled with the debt, eventually, filed for bankruptcy and the rest is history.
Just like in 2007, Blockbuster already had a profitable network of stores and all it needed to do was to go online and merely by delivering DVDs, it could have beaten Netflix very easily. Just like that in 2021, Disney and HBO, both already have an extremely profitable network. Disney makes a billion dollars through theatre releases itself. And before the movies come to the OTT platforms, they have already made the company a ton of money. And HBO does the same through the television network. And all they need to do is start pulling out content licenses from Netflix and Prime and launch them all in their own OTT, which by the way, is happening very quickly. something, Netflix identified way back in 2011 itself.
Therefore, just like Walmart in 2007, Amazon is using the core offering of Netflix as a loss leader which makes it impossible to match its pricing. Meanwhile, since Disney makes a lot of money through theatre releases and TV distributions even Disney can afford to give away their content for free, just so that it can entice its viewers to pay for exclusive series like Loki and Wanda vision. Eventually, it can turn its free viewers into paid subscribers. So, to put that straight, Netflix has lost its unique selling proposition and most of its best content are disappearing, forcing it to keep producing a mammoth amount of content. But at the same time, while competitors have multiple streams of income, Netflix is solely dependent on subscriptions which makes it very difficult to maintain its profitability.
History always repeats itself, so always remember whatever is happening to a particular company today has either happened to the same company before or has already happened to some other company in some other domain. In this case, the equation between Netflix and Blockbuster in 2007 is very similar to the equation of Netflix and Disney in 2021. And these kinds of analogies will give you a lot of clarity about the future possibilities of a company.
Even companies as big as Netflix will have their own vulnerabilities popping up from time to time. And if you keep a close eye on how they react to it, you can project the growth or the downfall of the company, way before it happens.
The business ecosystem of the 21st century is getting more and more complex wherein e-commerce companies are now competing with entertainment companies and strategic partnerships are being formed between potential opponents. But the nature of these strategic partnerships will give rise to new strengths and new vulnerabilities and because all of this information is freely accessible through the internet, it gives us the superpower to look into the intricacies of the market which very few people can understand.
To help you with your Product Manager interview preparations, we have compiled a complete list of the most asked Product Management Interview Questions and Answers at companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, etc. answered by PMs at FAANG.
In 2007, J P Morgan\u2019s analyst Barton Crock put out a statement, wherein he said that Netflix is facing tougher competition from blockbusters than originally expected because Netflix in 2007 was facing a very peculiar situation. And after this news came out, the stock prices of Netflix went down by 5%. The market, in general, became skeptical about Netflix's progress. But Netflix was so strategically able to navigate through the situation that, in the next 10 years, Netflix went on to become one of the best-performing stocks in the world which gave out a return of more than 10,000% from 2007 to 2018.
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