[7]. brand confusion: Netflix

Netflix, it used to be so simple. Sign up, add a DVD to your queue, receive it in about a day via mail, enjoy it, return, repeat. January 2008 rolls around and Netflix introduces unlimited instant streaming alongside DVD rental to adapt to the changing ways of media consumption. It revolutionized the film distribution industry for good. No complaint there. Then July 12, 2011 happened.

The hundreds of thousands of Netflix faithfuls receive notification that the company will be splitting the DVD rental and Instant Streaming feature into separate packages with separate prices. What? You mean to tell me that that I now have to choose between two platforms that are actually complimentary to each other? For the thousands of films or television shows that I cannot view instantly, I need to get them by DVD. That is what Netflix is all about right, allowing me to get them quickly and efficiently all under one price. Netflix got a very quick reminder that they are in the midst of the consumer control era. The general people did not sit idol. They blew up Facebook with negative comments and even got "Dear Netflix" to trend on Twitter followed by nasty remarks about the decision to split the services.

If that didn't piss everyone off enough, CEO Reed Hastings had to take it one step further on September 18, 2011 by announcing that DVD rental would now no longer be a part of Netflix, but an entirely new service known as Qwikster. The announcement came by way of a blog post distributed via e-mail from Hastings himself but sounded more like a sob story Hastings pounded into text after a few too many glasses of wine. 23 short days later, Hastings renounced the Qwikster move and retained the DVD rental service to Netflix.



Congratulations Hastings, in less than 4 months you managed to confuse your brand not once but twice. You upset a huge amount of faithful subscribers and to top it all off you retreated your actions, further demonstrating the soft backbone that attempts to keep Netflix standing upright. The impressions have been made and with consumers having more and more influence than ever before, you really picked a bad time to do this.