A Full Analysis of Five Sharing Economy Business Models
By DaDa
Sharing your personal interests, experiences, achievements or moods with others brings you a sense of satisfaction. After doing something or finishing something, many people often want to share it with family and friends, or even strangers. If these people approve of, enjoy, or interact with the share, then the sharer will also be very happy, and this is the pleasure that sharing brings. There is also another kind of sharing, namely the sharing of existing goods or services, where with the help of a sharing platform, others are helped to find the goods or services they need more quickly and efficiently. This too can bring the joy and the benefits of sharing, and all of the above signals the arrival of the sharing economy.
And under the interpretation of internet thinking, the sharing economy has blossomed everywhere, giving rise to five typical business models.
Model one: sharing new and interesting things happening around you with the public at any time and from anywhere, from a novel perspective, which gave rise to Weibo, or the Weibo style for short;
Weibo is a platform for information acquisition, sharing and dissemination based on user relationships, where users can build personal sharing communities through various clients. With Weibo-style short blogs, messages are sent through "private messages" to achieve one-to-one, or point-to-point, dissemination; through "following" it achieves one-to-N, or point-to-area, dissemination; and through "reposting" it achieves N-to-N, or viral, dissemination. Therefore, Weibo has the dissemination advantages of being instant, group-oriented, wide-reaching and self-media in nature.
Facebook is a social tool that helps users stay connected with and share life experiences with friends, colleagues and people around them in real life, and it is also the number one photo-sharing site in the United States. On Facebook, users share pictures and post links and videos to deepen their understanding of their friends. Facebook's notable advantage is that the vast majority of its users use their real names, so by segmenting user behavior data it can achieve more precise ad placement.
WeChat, meanwhile, is the largest mobile social interaction platform in China. Through WeChat, users can share text, images, and video and audio information in real time, greatly enriching the forms and content of dissemination and improving communication efficiency. WeChat social networking integrates three channels: QQ friends, mobile phone contacts and "people nearby", so that communication is no longer limited to a fixed social group, expanding the scope of making friends and achieving the integration of virtual social circles and real social circles. Social marketing built on the WeChat platform precisely targets the "acquaintance model", achieving point-to-point and point-to-area circle marketing, and has therefore won the favor of countless merchants.
The social-style business model is in fact an open platform plus a circle of friends. Using social platforms, and taking user communication and points of interest as the basis, it starts from an individual's information footprint and interpersonal relationship chain in social media, and cleverly integrates the promotion of offline products or services into social interaction as an invisible driving force, forming "word-of-mouth marketing" to a certain extent, and then through interaction stimulating more circle groups to generate geometric-level dissemination, thereby creating better brand value or sales growth.
Model three: sharing insights with a specific group through life experiences and résumés, which gave rise to Pinterest and Mogujie, or the guide style for short;
Unlike Facebook, a social networking site that brings relationships among offline acquaintances online, Pinterest is built on an interest graph. In the internet image-reading era, users have a need to look at and collect images, and Pinterest fulfills a series of needs including uploading, browsing, collecting and sharing. Behind this intuitive image information lies a closer connection to personal preferences, making it suitable for the discovery and sharing of interests.
Likewise, Mogujie's users are brought together based on consumption experience. It positions itself as a shopping guide website, and its core is the sharing economy. Mogujie's development strategy is to integrate a fashion community with e-commerce and become a fashion shopping guide platform for women. It turns what individual users like and share on Mogujie into public resources, guiding other users to consume. The three-in-one approach of platform plus media plus marketing also solves Mogujie's own profit problem.
Model four: providing resource sharing to people in need through resources such as technology, physical goods and services, which gave rise to Uber, Didi Taxi and others, or the resource style for short;
Uber, the originator of ride-hailing software born in the United States, not only provides private car hailing services; the "sharing economy" it advocates is one of its differentiation strategies, using existing technology to build a public-interest carpooling service platform. On the Uber platform, any car owner who applies and passes qualification review can become a carpooling partner driver.
Uber's model is online demand carrying offline service, allowing idle resources to flow continuously in the form of completing tasks, and it does not even require having a car that is entirely one's own Uber car.
Model five: sharing experiences, know-how and insights with a specific group based on a specific region or specific interest, and sharing specific resources as well, that is, a combined model of model three and model four, or the expert social hybrid style for short (or the expert style)
Rover, a pet sitter information platform from Seattle. Through this software platform, people can hire people to care for or temporarily adopt their beloved pets, and these people are all screened dog lovers. Today, Rover has about 25,000 certified "pet sitters" in more than 5,000 cities across the United States.
While the arrival of the sharing economy has given rise to all kinds of business models, its rapid development will also inevitably bring changes in business, technology and services
With the help of the internet, consumers can not only easily find the goods they need, but also share their own idle resources with others, thereby earning some income. In fact, the concept of goods sharing is not something that only recently appeared, but with the development of digital technology, today's consumers are using the internet to take the sharing economy to a new height. The traditional boundary between enterprises and consumers is constantly weakening. People are gradually abandoning traditional ways of buying goods and services and turning instead to the internet to find goods-sharing services. They are meeting their needs in this new way that is more convenient, more efficient and low in price.
Business transformation: users are the prerequisite for business realization and success
Business transformation originates from the demands of economic development, and economic development is driven by market demand. For internet enterprises, especially mobile internet enterprises, there are only three things to think about: who are the users? What value can be brought to users? What barriers will be encountered along the way? As for the business model, it is nothing more than advertising, value-added services and e-commerce. Only by winning users can you win the market.
Service transformation: products and services need to be improved fundamentally
The emergence of the sharing economy corresponds to a gap in market demand. And the biggest challenge in promoting the sharing economy is cultivating users' consumption habits. Although market demand is driving the sharing economy -- for example, Uber's founder thought of using idle resources precisely because he discovered a huge gap in demand for transportation services -- if users' consumption habits cannot be cultivated as quickly as possible and trust in and goodwill toward the corresponding service brands of the sharing economy cannot be established, it will be very difficult for the sharing economy to become widespread. And cultivating user habits requires fundamentally improving the quality of mobile internet products and services.
Technological transformation: demand as the foundation, technology as the driver
On the basis of researching user needs, the sharing economy achieves the optimization of products and services, among which technology is the most important driving force. Only by using technology as the driver to create products and services that meet demand can user recognition be gained.