Member-only story
When Your Boss Doesn’t Care About Doing the Right Thing
Don’t let unethical leadership define the limits of your work
“Anyone who doesn’t understand how free trials work is a fucking idiot. I’m sorry, but have they used the internet?”
I was presenting months of brand research to the CEO of a company I no longer work for. (We’ll get there.) Customers, employees, and members of our target market all had good things to say about our product but respondents in every category gave us low ratings on trustworthiness. Why? Our heavily promoted “free” offerings were only available as part of a short trial that required a credit card and auto-renewed.
Our business’s reliance on forced continuity was shitty and unethical, in my opinion, but that didn’t seem like a great way to open the meeting. So instead, I talked about it from the perspective of the brand and business.
We could build a better brand and stronger, more valuable customer relationships if we explored more transparent ways of offering — or at least communicating — our trial. By focusing on free products at the top of our acquisition funnel, we were attracting the wrong type of customer and missing an opportunity to communicate the value we offer once the trial is up.
