One of the most ridiculous, and frequent, experiences you can have in the technology industry is listening to a bunch of marketers sitting around talking about how they “own the customer.” This customer is so loyal to us, they’ll never leave us. They love us. We own them. Every marketers’ dream, or so it would seem from the number of times I’ve heard it said.
I bet people at Tivo have that conversation — and really, of all the technology companies that might talk that way, Tivo may have one of the least absurd claims to a bonded relationship with its customers. But let’s be clear, Tivo, just in case you do think you own us: you don’t.
Nobody owns their customers. It’s the other way around — we own the products we’ve paid our money to buy. The customer is king, remember? And every time we think about buying something new, you’ll have to win us all over again.
Tivo has already lost me for my next DVR purchase. What they’ve made clear is that they want money from people buying ads; and in the long run that means my reason for buying their product is no longer the product’s purpose. How long will it be before the 30-second skip hack goes away for good? Since Tivo can install updates to my machine’s software over the wire, without my approval or consent, what could I do about it if they decided, today or tomorrow or next year, to take away the feature that led me to buy their product in the first place? Why should I take the risk of finding out?
Great companies find a way to increase satisfaction for all participants in a market excepting only their competitors. Google (to use the only permitted exemplar company) makes searchers’ lives better by giving them better matches and relevant ad matches, and makes vendors’ lives better by making it more cost-efficient to reach customers. Both sides of the search/sell transaction win, and Google profits handsomely. The same goes for eBay with its sellers and buyers, Amazon with its vendors and buyers, and so on.
What Tivo is doing, in contrast, is trading down its users’ happiness by reinserting ads into their media, in order to trade up the satisfaction of advertisers. Both sides will lose in the end, and when that happens, so will Tivo.
I haven’t thought this through, but I suspect that the problem here may be a backlash against Tivo’s original, mistaken business model. The company set out to improve the experience of television viewers, and definitely did that, but did so at the direct expense of the media networks whose existence was and is predicated on mass advertising reach. The mistake in the model was to give the networks no alternative form of revenue. The company swung out very far in the direction of benefitting users over ad-sellers, and now it’s swinging back, trying to win back the other side of the market, and swinging away from its users in the meantime.
How short-sighted. Tivo, you need to find a way to make both the networks and the viewers happier — not either one at the expense of the other. What would viewers pay to see episodes of their favorite shows earlier than they could otherwise, with all the commercials pre-skipped for them? If I get into Lost half-way through the season, could I buy the earlier episodes and have them download to my Tivo at night? Why can’t I vote for my American Idol favorite with my Thumbs-Up/Thumbs-Down buttons, and pay for the privilege as I already do for calling in to vote?
Or, of course, keep going the way you are. Pretend like you own your customer and you can abuse their interests without harm. What you may find, though, is that we own something more powerful than our Tivos; we own our money, and we’ll take it with us when we go.