I have to wonder if any heads rolled at Netflix. I mean, okay, you announce a significant price increase and boom, the company gets 4,000+ negative comments on its blog and 79,000+ responses on its Facebook page. I can only image how many tweets were generated over this.

No customer like price increases, especially in a depression like economy such as we continue to experience. That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to do these things.

The “right way” is when a company combines a very carefully thought-out and surgically implemented market research initiative to garner current customer happiness, willingness to pay more, and testing different price models among other metrics. Armed with this scientific intelligence your marketing team is better positioned, and more confident in proceeding with a price raise.

Perhaps Netflix did this. If so, they ought immediately fire the market research firm and/or their own market research team over this that worked on this project.

Powerfeedback has aided thousands of clients over the years who have been faced with increasing prices for services and goods. While never easy, done right, the outcome does not have to be as big of a PR nightmare was what Netflix is experiencing.