Month: September 2026

Signing up for a subscription often takes less than a minute. Enter your email, add a payment method, click a button, and you’re done.

Cancelling that same subscription can be a completely different experience.

Suddenly, the process involves multiple pages, confirmation screens, special offers, and questions about why you’re leaving. Some companies even require customers to contact support to complete a cancellation that originally required no human interaction.

This isn’t always an accident.

Subscription businesses depend on recurring revenue, and customer retention is one of their most important performance indicators. Every customer who continues paying contributes to predictable income, even if they barely use the service.

Making cancellation inconvenient can therefore become a profitable strategy.

The practice is often associated with dark patterns, interface designs that manipulate or obstruct users rather than helping them make informed decisions. A cancellation button might be difficult to find, while the option to keep subscribing is prominently displayed.

Companies frequently justify these obstacles as opportunities to improve customer retention. But there’s an important difference between convincing someone to stay by offering genuine value and making it unnecessarily difficult for them to leave.

The irony is that these tactics can damage the very customer relationships businesses claim to protect. Someone who struggles to cancel a subscription is unlikely to remember the company positively.

A business shouldn’t measure loyalty by how many customers fail to escape its cancellation process.

If joining is simple, leaving should be simple too.

Almost every industry has its own awards. Best employer, most innovative company, fastest-growing business, outstanding leadership, excellence in customer service. The list seems endless.

And somehow, an extraordinary number of companies manage to win something.

Business awards are supposed to recognize exceptional performance. In principle, they can help customers identify trustworthy organizations and give deserving businesses recognition for their achievements.

But the business of giving awards deserves some scrutiny of its own.

Some award programs charge entry fees, sell expensive ceremony tickets, offer promotional packages, or require additional payments for marketing materials. While charging fees doesn’t automatically invalidate an award, it raises questions about how commercial incentives influence the recognition process.

There’s also the issue of evaluation. What exactly makes one company the most innovative? How is the best employer determined? Are winners assessed through independent research, measurable results, employee feedback, or simply the information companies submit about themselves?

Without transparent criteria, impressive titles can become little more than marketing assets.

Companies then use these awards in advertisements, websites, recruitment campaigns, and sales presentations, creating an impression of independently verified excellence that may not be entirely justified.

This doesn’t mean all business awards are meaningless. Some have rigorous evaluation processes and genuinely recognize outstanding achievements.

But recognition should be judged by the credibility of the organization granting it, not by how impressive the trophy looks.

Winning an award is easy to advertise. Proving that you deserved it is considerably harder.

Businesses love rewarding loyal customers. At least, that’s how they describe their loyalty programs.

Points, discounts, membership levels, exclusive offers, and personalized rewards are presented as ways of thanking customers for their continued support. But these programs serve another purpose that companies are considerably less enthusiastic about advertising.

They are designed to influence behavior.

A customer who needs to spend another €20 to unlock a reward may purchase something they never intended to buy. Someone who has accumulated thousands of points with an airline might choose a more expensive flight simply to avoid losing the perceived value of those points.

This is particularly interesting because the reward often feels like something the customer has already earned. Instead of evaluating each purchase independently, people begin considering what they might lose by choosing a competitor.

Loyalty programs also provide businesses with valuable information. Every scanned membership card can reveal purchasing habits, preferences, frequency, and spending patterns. This information helps companies personalize offers, forecast demand, and encourage additional purchases.

None of this means loyalty programs are inherently bad. Customers can genuinely save money, and businesses benefit from stronger relationships with repeat buyers.

But there’s a difference between rewarding loyalty and manufacturing it through incentives.

Real customer loyalty should come from consistently delivering a product or service worth returning for.

If customers only stay because they’re afraid of losing their points, perhaps they aren’t loyal to the business at all.

Some of the most valuable digital services in the world are available without an upfront payment. Search engines, social media platforms, email services, and countless applications offer users access to sophisticated technology for free.

But free doesn’t mean a business isn’t making money from you.

Many digital platforms operate through advertising, data collection, or business models built around user engagement. The longer people remain on a platform, the more opportunities it has to display advertisements, collect behavioral information, and influence purchasing decisions.

This creates an interesting conflict of interest. A platform that earns revenue from attention has a financial incentive to keep users engaged, even when spending more time on the service provides little additional value to them.

Recommendation algorithms, endless scrolling, and constant notifications aren’t necessarily designed exclusively to improve the user experience. They can also support the company’s commercial objectives.

Of course, advertising-supported services have made technology accessible to billions of people. Not everyone can afford paid subscriptions, and free access has genuine economic and social benefits.

The problem arises when consumers don’t understand the exchange they’re participating in.

Traditional transactions are relatively transparent. A customer pays a price and receives a product. With free digital services, the exchange is more complicated because the economic value of attention and personal information isn’t immediately visible.

A product can be free to use and still be extremely profitable.

The important question isn’t whether you’re paying for it, but what the company receives in return.