Every Business Can Be a Subscription Business

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Teams, Business/management, Marketing, Strategy, Management, Innovation, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Economics, Hbr, Business/entrepreneurship, Harvard, Business, Leadership, Business/marketing, Communication

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Robbie Kellman Baxter, a strategy consultant, says that subscriptions aren’t just for newspapers and Netflix. She says they can help companies from local retailers to giant industrial manufacturers earn more consistent revenue and develop stronger customer loyalty. And she explains how even during an economic crisis, leaders can adopt a subscription business model to give their organizations a better chance of surviving and thriving. Kellman Baxter is the author of the book "The Forever Transaction: How to Build a Subscription Model So Compelling, Your Customers Will Never Want to Leave."

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.6	and practical advice on navigating divorce, disability, and career failures.
0:14.0	Listen for free to H.B.
0:16.0	Women at Work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. In 1926 a book mail order service debuted a new subscription service, the Book of the Month Club.
0:52.0	It started with 4,000 subscribers and climbed to more than a half
0:55.3	million of them within 20 years. The subscription eventually became a brand in itself,
1:00.7	launching the careers of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell, and
1:04.8	J.D. Salinger.
1:07.3	Subscription services are not new.
1:09.6	Newspaper and magazine subscriptions were household norms for a century.
1:13.9	But more recently, digital technology is fueling a new wave of subscription services from America
1:19.3	online a few decades ago to Netflix and Blue Apron today. And increasingly even large enterprises like
1:25.8	IBM and General Electric are shifting from sellers of durable goods to sellers of subscription services.
1:33.8	Our guest today argues that in fact any business can become a subscription business and
1:38.2	thrive because of that decision.
1:40.5	Robbie Kelman Baxter is the author of the book The Forever Transaction
1:44.1	How to Build a Subscription Model so compelling your customers never want to leave.
1:48.6	Robbie, thanks for being here.
1:50.6	Thanks for having me. To start, tell us why you're such an advocate of membership and subscription models.
2:01.0	I love this model. I've loved it for about 20 years and I fell in love with the
2:06.5	model because I had started independent consulting and one of my first clients was Netflix. I'm based in Silicon Valley and they were a startup nearby and that was where it really happened for me.
	...

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