In a study, around half of newspaper readers with auto-renew paid for subscriptions they didn’t want.
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If you pay a monthly fee for a movie site you rarely visit or a newspaper you never read, you know that people who sign up for a subscription that automatically renews will keep paying for a product or service for months or years, even if they don’t use it.
Just like objects in motion or at rest, consumers are subject to inertia — they tend not to act and instead stay with the status quo. “There’s this widely documented pattern of people not changing their auto insurance or mobile phone carriers,” says Navdeep Sahni, an associate professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “And for good reason. There’s a lot of inertia out there.”
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up : https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails ) ]