The Myth of Transferable Success: Why Netflix’s Onboarding and Candy Crush’s Gamification Don’t Always Transfer to Other Sectors

When looking at successful platforms in different industries, it’s tempting to think their winning strategies, like Netflix's frictionless onboarding and Candy Crush’s engaging gamification, can be replicated across different industries.

While these approaches can offer valuable insights, their success is often not directly transferable to other sectors. Here’s why.

Sector-Specific Dynamics and User Expectations

Netflix's Frictionless Onboarding vs. Financial Services

Netflix’s onboarding process is smooth, intuitive, and designed to get users watching content as quickly as possible. It’s a model often admired and replicated by other tech-driven businesses. However, consider trying to apply a similar onboarding process in highly regulated sectors like financial services.

For instance, banks and insurance companies need to collect vast amounts of personal information due to compliance requirements such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. This legal obligation necessitates a more complex, and sometimes lengthy, onboarding process that can’t be easily simplified without compromising security and legal compliance.

Different Engagement Models and User Motivation

Candy Crush’s Gamification vs. Healthcare Apps

Candy Crush has mastered the art of gamification—using rewards, streaks, and levels to keep players engaged. This ‘stickiness’ is often cited as a benchmark for other industries, such as healthcare apps designed to encourage healthier behaviours.

However, while gamification can boost engagement, it doesn’t always translate into meaningful behaviour change when applied to other contexts. For example, a fitness app that simply copies the game-like elements of Candy Crush might succeed in getting users to log in daily but fail to lead to sustained lifestyle changes. Motivation in health and fitness is deeply personal, and an approach that works for casual gaming—quick rewards and low commitment—may not effectively drive long-term behavioural change in health.

Rocca learned this the hard way when building the Move More Sheffield app. This took several iterations and approaches to get traction, and all against a backdrop of a diminishingly small budget. The lesson being that gamification very seldom works ‘out of the box’ and success depends on continuous tweaking post launch, based on user feedback. The realisation was that different applications of gamification require different approaches. So, again doing a Candy Crush on health just wouldn’t work.

Scalability and Infrastructure Challenges

The Netflix Model vs. Traditional Retail

Netflix’s recommendation algorithms and streaming infrastructure are designed to scale efficiently, handling millions of concurrent users without significant degradation in service quality. Retailers, inspired by this digital-first approach, often try to implement similar data-driven models.

Scaling a recommendation engine in retail involves complexities such as supply chain logistics, inventory management, and varied customer touchpoints (online and in-store). These factors make it difficult to achieve the seamless personalization Netflix delivers. Retail is bound by physical realities that do not constrain a digital-only platform.

Cultural and Market Differences

Gamification in Gaming vs. Workplace Productivity Tools

Candy Crush’s gamification thrives on universal appeal. Simple rules, vibrant visuals, and instant gratification. Translating this into a workplace productivity tool is another story. While gamification can make work tasks more engaging, it must be balanced with professionalism and respect for user autonomy.

Popular instant messaging platform Slack, for example, incorporates subtle gamification elements like streaks and badges but stops short of turning work into a game. The need for professional environments that foster serious, goal-oriented productivity means only some elements of gaming success can be successfully ported over.

The Iceberg Illusion

From experience, the significant item that is overlooked when looking to port ideas over is that successful platforms – although simple at the user level – are monumentally complicated behind the scenes. So although making a user interface look similar to Netflix’s is relatively straightforward, the onboarding process itself isn’t. Segmenting audiences, setting user milestones and indeed incentivising users to join in the first place are often missing pieces of the puzzle when reviewing these platforms as influencer.?

Adapting Success to Fit Sector Specifics

The allure of success from tech giants like Netflix and Candy Crush often leads other sectors to attempt direct replication, but success in one field doesn’t guarantee success in another. Each industry has unique challenges – regulatory, motivational, or logistical – that must be carefully navigated.?

The key takeaway for businesses: inspiration is valuable, but direct copying rarely works. Instead, adaptations should consider the specific context, user needs, and constraints of the target sector to truly leverage what makes these popular models so effective.?