How your mood changes your Netflix.

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Last week I tried to answer the dilemma of how Spotify knows what I want to listen to, especially when I don’t know it in the first place. If you want to refresh your memory on what I found out, it is just a click away. This matter stuck with me in the following days and got me into thinking: which other brands try to keep me engaging with their product or service based on my habits?  

For me, especially during lockdown times, most of my free time at home is probably divided in being undecisive on what to listen to or not knowing what to watch on tv. So, now you know why Netflix is the topic of this week’s Inspiring Customer Example.

Clearly, Netflix is a great example for being a highly customer centric company. At MadeFor, we deeply care about this matter and developed 8 Customer Way principles to help you achieve customer centricity. As mentioned in our previous article, in Principle 8 - “Measure and analyse, always” - we focus on how important it is for brands to constantly measure and analyse to better understand their customers and outside forces.

Without surprise, Netflix uses AI and machine learning extensively with the purpose of understanding its customers and offer a personalised service as much as possible. To do so, it has plenty of ways to measure and analyze data along with a quite complex recommendation system. One of the tools Netflix uses is named AVA (Aesthetic Visual Analysis), which analyses significant amounts of images from video frames of movies and series to put as a thumbnail. More interestingly, AVA suggests different thumbnails depending on the user’s tastes and habits. It considers many factors, such as preferred genres, last seen actors, recently watched and so on.  

If you have a Netflix subscription, I have a challenge for you: log into Netflix and look up Stranger Things. What thumbnail do you see? This is what came up to me:

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In other words, it is very likely that the same show Netflix recommends to me and somebody else are going to look different depending on our preferences: from a customer perspective, this is quite cool. In fact, the interesting reasoning behind personalised thumbnails is Netflix’s efforts to keep me interested in the shows it has to offer and keep using its service, and avoid me getting bored and not finding anything to watch.  

The next time you open your Netflix account try to pay attention to your queue list and the next time you access it, it is quite likely that the thumbnails of the list will have changed depending on what you watched the last time. This is one of the many ways Netflix understands how a personalised service based on my current needs has a great impact on me as a user. By adapting the title image of a movie through the use of AI, it assists me in the process of finding and watching something new without me even noticing. That’s a quite smart way to keep and capture users right?

Hence, my question for you today for you would be: How are you personalising your product/service to your users? Which methods do you prefer when it comes to measuring and analysing?

By Rosa.

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