>In business, particularly digital services or businesses relying on a subscription revenue model, trust works in the same way. Wired into those products and services is a “trust thermocline.” It is a point which, once crossed, otherwise healthy businesses and products suddenly collapse.
>In most cases, that failure follows a pattern: the company or service will be growing, whether in users or revenue, and perhaps rolling out new products that are bundled within an expanded subscription, or showing good adoption on their own. In many cases, there will not even seem to be a new rival in the market, with existing ones failing to threaten them through market share. Then suddenly, over a short period of time, sales and user numbers collapse. Consumers move to seemingly inferior products or simply disengage completely from the business.
>The thermocline has been crossed.
>At its simplest, the trust thermocline represents the point at which a consumer decides that the mental cost of staying with a product is outweighed by their desire to abandon it. This may seem like an obvious problem, yet if that were the case, this behavior wouldn’t happen so frequently in technology businesses and in more traditional firms that prided themselves on consumer loyalty, such as car manufacturers and retail chains.
>These collapses happen because most businesses fail to properly understand how a reliance on emotional engagement changes the way consumer trust in their product works. That reliance is particularly common with digital products or social media, where personal image, follower count, and “influencer” behavior are a critical part of the user experience.
>As a result, many of the issues that cause a consumer to approach —and ultimately cross—the trust thermocline can have happened in the past. “Stickiness” is for real: a consumer will persist in a bad economic or product relationship beyond the point where it makes logical sense to do so because an element of the trust, and emotional commitment, remains.
>But once that thermocline is crossed, there are few routes back. There is no “final straw”—a price cut, a promise to “do better”—that can be reversed to draw them back in, nor was there one that could be avoided. The triggers for each individual are different, but their effect on the group is cumulative.
I warned you, Nijisanji. With Pomu quitting, and soon to be Selen as well, there's nothing you can do repair your brand in the west. The decline will be irreversible, and it's entirely self-inflicted