OK. Going to take a moment for Marketing 101. I finished up my education just before Universities started prioritizing woke DEI ESG ideology over actually teaching practical curriculum. I got my undergrad back when the purpose of higher education was to teach you how to think, learn, and reason.
I just dropped my ISP. Shit, there's so many rabbit holes I could go down on this. AT&T. Now the original AT&T went bankrupt decades ago by blowing a lot of money without any clear strategy. They bought into broadband. Then sold it off for pennies on the dollar. Then they bought into Voice Over IP...and realized having broadband service would be really useful if you're offering VOIP. That's just one example. Their last few years they did that constantly: spend a bunch to buy into a market, decide they didn't like that market and sell out for pennies on the dollar and move to another market--only to realize they needed the thing they just sold in order to make the new venture work. Just completely inept. So the thing that mystifies me is, when someone buys failing AT&T, they rebrand as AT&T. Cingular Wireless did it. So did whoever owns the brand now. Brand names can lose value. Just because AT&T was a monolith in the early 20th century doesn't mean it has any kind of reputation today.
Nonetheless, that's who I went with for Internet when I moved to Kentucky. Only because at the time the only other option was Spectrum Cable and I hate cable companies even more than I hate AT&T. That said, for years they provided adequate service. Then they bumped up the rate. Oh well. Such is life. Then they bumped it up again. 6 months later they bumped it up again and they recently announced they'd be bumping it up yet again. Yes, I get it, inflation is a thing. But today broadband Internet is basically a commodity. And cable is struggling. So Spectrum will significantly undercut what AT&T was charging even a year ago to try to win customers. There's also new competitors now. 5G makes wireless home Internet viable again (my first broadband was WiMax and I had no complaints with it but the company (I forget the name) went under). Even nostalgia kick Earthlink is back in the ISP business. So even if your costs have gone up, you cannot afford to raise your prices if your customers only use you because you suck slightly less than your competitors. Because eventually you make it worth the cost to switch--even if there isn't a significant savings, just because you've angered your customer.
So what happened is, they figured they could soak me for yet another $5-10 (I forget how much) on top of the past increases and I'd just go along with it. When I didn't, they freaked. And rightly so. Because instead of getting another $5 a month from an existing customer, they're losing 13x that every month because they've permanently lost a customer. And there's really nothing they can do to win me back. They can maybe get me back with discounted rates, but then they just wind up losing money (assuming they needed the rates they were charging to make their model work) and will lose me again the second they try to raise rates.
On a related note, I recently changed insurance providers. The company I'd had for literally almost a quarter century had taken a big dive in quality in recent years. The thing about insurance is, you don't realize this until you try to file a claim. I had 2 small claims within a week of each other and the headache and frustration of trying to get them resolved caused me to drop my provider. Even making that happen was a huge headache. But eventually I got it done. But here's the funny thing: These days my e-mailbox is full of service offers from my old insurer. Banking. Insurance. Investing. You name it. But it's just automated garbage. Except for the letters I get about updates to my credit card that I cancelled almost a year ago. I mean, those are probably automated too, but they're actually about a product I used to have. Which brings me to my point: It's a lot easier to keep a customer by keeping them happy than to get back a customer you've lost. I'd even say it's almost impossible to regain a customer--especially one you had for 23 years and managed to lose. And spam offers only make things worse. "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" If you really want to win back a long time customer you've managed to alienate, you've got to have an actual person get in touch with them. Someone that has some actual authority. And you've got to understand how you lost your long-time customer. Then you've got to acknowledge this, apologize for losing their trust, and clearly and convincingly explain what you're doing to fix things. And if you *can't* fix the problems that lost you this customer, you might as well just cut your losses and leave them alone, because otherwise you're only alienating him further.
Now I'm going to change the topic a bit and talk about Disney and Bud Light. Again, they've fumbled simple, basic, freshman level marketing principles. If you have a dominant, mainstream brand, you don't want to move it into a tiny niche market. You certainly don't want to alienate your existing customer base in an effort to court a statistically insignificant market. We'll do Bud Light first, because that's the simplest. What do you think of when you think Bud Light? To me it is basically aging bros. Spuds MacKenzie, I love you man, Real Men of Genius. Jokey, fun time, huntin' and fishin' tailgate party blue collar guys. Who do you NOT think of when you think Bud Light? Transgender "influencers." First off, just how big a market is transgender influencers? How many of them are out there? And of that market, how many of them are big drinkers of shitty light beer? How much of it do they drink? So hooray, you just won the transgender attention whores who drink shitty light beer market. At the cost of the older blue collar guys who like sports and hanging out market. Well done. Top-notch planning.
Shit, I've wasted too much time on this. And don't have time to really dig into Disney. But long story short, they have, over decades, established a reputation of reliable quality family friendly entertainment. They've added to their brand in a strategic manner, filling in niches where they weren't competitive with subsidiaries (Miramax was an early example). ABC was the last big TV network I trusted because I know Disney's mission is (was) to appeal to families and the broad demographic. The only reason I gave the "Star Wars" sequels a chance is because Disney was doing them and Disney knows how to handle entertainment and franchises. But then they decided to go woke. They got Star Wars and Marvel because they knew Disney is best known for its Princesses and wanted content that was older and male. Then they decided to make all the Star Wars and Marvel characters female and/or people of color. Iron Man is now a black lesbian zoomer. Well done. You've figured out a way to flush literally hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet with each new release, Disney.
Basic marketing is, when you're entering a market dominated by big established competitors, you find a little niche that isn't attractive to get into the market and expand out into larger markets as you get established and build positive cash flow. Budweiser and Disney flipped that on its head and threw away a dominant market position to chase after crumbs--all while alienating their existing base. And I'm astonished that companies this big can repeatedly make such a basic fundamental mistake.