The Sludge Strategy: Why Companies Build Friction into Their Business Models
In executive boardrooms and marketing keynote speeches, friction is treated as the ultimate corporate enemy. Corporate leaders spend millions of dollars attempting to streamline user journeys, remove steps from checkout pages, and make purchasing as effortless as a single tap on a smartphone screen. The underlying assumption behind this modern orthodoxy is simple: the easier you make an experience for a customer, the more successful your business will be. Yet, if you look closely at the operational architecture of many highly profitable enterprises, a strange contradiction emerges. The very same companies that make signing up for a service effortless often...
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