RSS
Twitter
Facebook
You know the handling of your product launch was mishandled when Marketwatch suggests the timing and the way it was managed was an intentional mishandling to kill off a segment of your market.
Was Netflix’s introduction of Qwikster so bad that it’s believable the company bungled it on purpose to turn customers off DVDs? I’d imagine if you wanted to promote one aspect of your business while downplaying another there might be better routes to doing so than pissing off a great number of customers– knowingly- to sunset a service. Incentivized pricing, perhaps. Or gradually diminished selection on the DVD side. But creating a lame company with a silly name to affect such changes?
One analyst that spoke to the market-centric site- William Lozito, chief branding officer of Strategic Name Development- had this to say about Qwikster:
“It is so bush league, so juvenile, so immature it feels intentional… It’s almost as if they were creating a video that is a spoof on how to change your company name. It should be something that ends up on YouTube that everyone gets a chuckle.”
Likelier is the theory that Netflix plans to sell off the DVD division and just happened to handle the transition a bit less gracefully than one might come to expect from a big, widely entrenched corporation. Still, I wonder if there are fridges with automatic ice-makers at Netflix for that burn.
