If there is something as popular as new year's resolutions, it is "old year" retrospectives. At the end of every year, most people, companies, TV shows and whatever kind of institution or entity you think of will take a moment to look back and reflect on what they accomplished in the past 12 months.
That can be motivated by strategic needs, self-development or pure nostalgia but, whatever the reason, retrospectives are something most people relate to. That being said, it's not a surprise that businesses around the globe would try to monetize this concept.
In this article, I will explore a particular industry segment using that approach with varying degrees of success: digital apps.
Spotify Wrapped case
I don't think Spotify was the first app to introduce the "retrospective" concept, but it was probably the one that made it famous.
Launched in 2016, "Spotify Wrapped" is a marketing campaign that runs every year and allows Spotify users to view a compilation of data about their activity on the platform over the past year (from January 1 through October 31) and share it on social media.
The retrospective includes data like most listened to artists, favourite genres, minutes listened and other data, and it usually floods the feeds on social apps such as Instagram at the end of every year. I must admit that even though I'm not a heavy user of traditional social media, I look forward to seeing my friends' Spotify Wrapped posts and sharing my own.
Spotify Wrapped has been running every year since it was launched, and new features are added at every edition, proving that it is a very successful campaign.
All this success would not go unnoticed, and it didn't take long before other digital apps started doing the same. "If it worked for Spotify, it will work for us, right?". Maybe that was said more than once in multiple physical or virtual meeting rooms across tech companies.
A couple of particularly interesting cases were those of iFood - the biggest food delivery app in Latin America - and Uber.
Both companies have their own version of "Spotify Wrapped, " which is very similar to what the music streaming service does. The results, however, are very different.
There are key differences in the business model of those apps and the message that usage data delivers in each case.
The backfire
There is no such thing as "listening to too much music". Sure, you can argue that it can be distracting and stuff like that, but in our minds, there is no direct correlation between the time you spend listening to music and harmful behaviours. There is no threshold etched in our heads that says, "you are listening to too much music!". Many people listen to Spotify to help them concentrate while working or at the gym, for example.
Additionally, due to Spotify's business model, listening to more music doesn't mean you are spending more money. If anything, it's the other way around, as the subscription fee is fixed, so you are actually making the most of your money the more minutes you listen.
The same cannot be said about Uber and iFood, and that's why their retrospective campaigns backfired slightly.
To many people, it's not exactly the best thing to learn how many times you ordered food (especially when it's junk food) in a year. It takes little time for them to do the math and figure out what they could have bought if they chose not to order food online.
A similar thing happens with Uber, but not with the same intensity, as some people have no choice but to use that service.
I found many cases on Twitter, Reddit and even Linkedin of people sharing their regret about how often they ordered food online and how expensive and unhealthy that was or how they should be using public transportation, walking or biking more often instead of spending so much on Uber.
I'm sure some people couldn't care less about how much they spend on those apps, and despite not having the slightest idea of how many people regretted what they saw on their retrospectives, I believe this is an excellent example of a great idea that potentially backfired due to poor implementation.
We all know that copying other companies' ideas is a common thing in any industry, and it's arguably a good thing even, but there are things that need to be considered when you try something like that, especially if you are translating one idea to a completely different industry segment or business model.
Final thoughts
Doing retrospectives is a great idea and can do wonders for user engagement, as Spotify Wrapped clearly shows, but it's important to consider how and why your users interact with your product before you throw data at them. Some say data is the new gold, but I guess it can also be plutonium.
Will this bring revenue down for those apps and ultimately destroy them? Certainly not. But it definitely has given a lot of people something to think. The retrospective achieved its goal after all, but perhaps not as those companies thought it would.