I don’t think it’s a strategy per se, but I think one thing that all businesses now need to start to look at to see if they can corporate it into their marketing plans and into their financial planning is the Membership Economy. If you go back, particularly when I was younger, if I wanted to buy a film, I bought a DVD or I bought a Blu-ray. If I wanted some music I would buy a CD, but that’s all changed. I don’t think we buy music any more. We pay for a subscription and stream it, we don’t pay for films, we just subscribe to Netflix and people probably don’t even appreciate just how many subscriptions or memberships they have, particularly online. Any business that could look to harness how that works, I think it does a couple of things. One it gives you the ability to almost see how much revenue you have got coming in down the line and it allows you to scale your business a lot more effectively and although the examples I’ve given are on-line based as such or new businesses in this digital world, I think it can work for any business.
enjoy! – my agency has been around now for nearly 20 years and although we run what’s called a retainer model, it’s ultimately a subscription model. Our clients pay a certain amount of money every month, on an ongoing basis for the services that we provide. I’m not saying that all businesses can adapt or adopt to the membership economy but I think looking at it to see how they could package certain things in certain ways to guarantee a residual ongoing income, I think that that’s a strategy that businesses should look at.