The digital age is here. Post-pandemic, every consumer has also become a subscriber. Companies that were providing free services now give subscriptions for early access to the content or services. Although companies profit from this, subscribers have taken the other way out.
The pandemic brought a lot of changes in the way people function. From marketing strategy to a health concern, the way people think is different now. Today, 23% of US consumers have a retail product subscription.
Companies earn a lot of profit from these subscriptions. But after the inflation, users are trying to leverage benefits manifold. Users are using one subscription to run more than one account. This way, even one subscription benefits several people. This also helps in cost-cutting. Users divide the price among themselves, and thus the per person value decreases.
Subscribers also comment that it’s easy to overuse these subscriptions. They do not face any difficulties in doing so. And thus, they will do such things in the future as well.
While designing the product and relating subscriptions to it, the companies could not find this loophole. Due to this loophole, the retail subscription has gone down by 6.1%. Meanwhile, the share of consumers who pay for the retail product subscriptions they use dropped by 16%.
More than half of the subscribers think taking advantage of the subscription is easy. Hence they will attempt it in the future as well. Usually, family or friends bear the brunt of such subscriptions. Almost all age groups are comfortable with shared subscriptions.
Hence subscription exploitation is going to be very common among subscribers. Companies will have to either update their policies or think of something different to make a profit.
The companies cannot play it on the guilt factor of consumers. There is no guilt factor among subscribers. This cheating is more or less ethical for them.
