The Blog

  • September 11, 2013
  • The Subscription Culture

    I have been writing about the subscription economy for five years and I have enjoyed my ringside seat following this latest and most important disruption of our time.  The subscription business model, and not CRM per se, is the disruption that got Salesforce going and changed the front office software industry entirely.

    Today we’re well beyond software as a service (SaaS) because just about everything you can think about can be delivered as a service, though some things may be best left out.  Commodities like sheet steel might be one of those things to leave alone except that if you look at the supply chain and the just in time inventory approach that commodities producers all subscribe (no pun) to today, you realize that manufacturers subscribed to sheet metal services long before the term was coined.

    Give some credit here to the Japanese who pioneered just in time, which I think is the grand dad of subscriptions.

    The subscription economy and the transformations it is causing in our society have important down stream effects.  As subscriptions have reached critical mass they are changing the ways customers think about their relationships with vendors.

    Consider critical mass for a moment.  It’s an apt term borrowed from atomic energy and it refers to a mass of fissile material of sufficient purity that chain reactions, in which one atom splits and activates another, can become self-sustaining.  Critical mass doesn’t mean that all the atoms are radioactive at once, just that there are enough to make the reaction go on without added input.  It’s like riding without training wheels.

    I think that’s where we are in the subscription economy.  We’ve been successful enough at promoting the benefits that adoption is no longer in doubt.  No, everyone is not a subscriber today and every company is not a subscription vendor either, but there’s critical mass — subscriptions are here to stay — and that’s why I think it’s time to introduce the idea of the subscription culture.

    All of the subscription culture’s impacts are not known yet but let me focus on one that is or can be.  It’s the effect on customer attitudes and behaviors.  At critical mass, customers, i.e. you and I, are more or less trained to expect certain things like the ability to change or adjust an order with ease, a vendor with a call center and website tuned to taking care of our needs without a great deal of hassle.  Good or even great customer service.  We have also become accustomed to sharing our ideas and experiences with other subscribers — good and bad.  Most important, we really like the ability to pay as we go and to go, as in leave, when we please.

    You can do a quick mental comparison of the subscription culture’s values with a traditional transactional business model and while traditional relationships still have advantages and their loyal supporters, there is no arguing about the impact that subscriptions are having on business.

    That’s why I think we’re at critical mass for subscriptions and why the next step in the evolution of the subscription economy is the subscription culture.  Even if a company has no interest in offering subscriptions and even if a customer prefers to make purchases as he or she has always made them, the culture is changing, some might say liberalizing (in the best sense of the term).  Cultural norms are shifting in favor of the customer and subscriptions and customers are acting more and more like subscribers regardless of the model.  Subscriptions may be the most important thing to affect CRM since, well, subscriptions.  All this suggests that if you are a vendor, the subscription model is something you can’t ignore.

    Next week, in San Francisco, I’ll be attending Subscribed, the annual Zuora user group meeting.  I am on two panels, moderating one of them and I expect to learn a lot.  Zuora is riding high in the wake of a successful series E funding round that raised another $50 million for the company.  If you are out there, please find me, I’d love to understand your perspective on subscriptions.

     

    Published: 11 years ago


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