Why Netflix said its biggest competitor is sleep

Transcript

Every great brand is trying to tell a story, and in every great story there's a villain. Netflix once said that its biggest competitor was sleep, which sounds ridiculous, until you understand what they were actually competing for. There's an interview where Reade Haste thinks the CEO of Netflix was asked about companies like Amazon Prime and HBO, and his view was basically the entertainment market is enormous, and the real constraint is your time. You see, every night Netflix is competing with whatever else you could be doing, working out, going out, scrolling, gaming, and vite coding, and eventually going to bed. So sleep became this perfect villain of their story, and there's a really useful branding lesson in that, which is naming the villain. Because your customer has something that they want, and usually something is staining in the way. The interesting villain is often much bigger than the competitor selling something similar to whatever you're selling. Let me give you some examples here. If you sell accounting software to small business owners, well then your villain is probably Sunday night admin. If you sell running shoes then maybe it's the voice convincing you to stay on the couch because you've had such a long day and you deserve to rest now. And if you sell AI software then maybe it's spending half your day doing something that a machine should be doing instead of you. Once you name that villain, your story becomes much easier to understand. Because suddenly now it feels like there's something we're fighting together, and your customer gets to be the person who beats it. The so-called hero is not a killer, what have said. So forget your competitors for a minute and ask yourself what is my customer actually trying to defeat and then name that and use it your story.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.