Five business models of the sharing economy

DaDa / tr. by Phil Newell)

Sharing your personal interests, experiences, achievements, or feelings will give you a sense of satisfaction. After many people do or finish something, they often want to share it with family and friends, or strangers. If these people recognize, enjoy, or interact with themselves, then the sharers themselves will be very happy. This is the pleasure of sharing. There is also a kind of sharing, that is, the sharing of existing goods or services, with the help of a sharing platform, to help others find the goods or services they need more quickly and effectively. And this can also bring the joy and benefits of sharing, all of which means the advent of the sharing economy.

Under the deduction of Internet thinking, the sharing economy has sprung up everywhere, and it has also achieved five typical business models.

Model 1: by paying attention to the new things happening around you, and then sharing them with the public anytime, anywhere from a novel perspective, which leads to Weibo, or micro-blog for short.

Weibo is a platform for information acquisition, sharing and dissemination based on user relations. Users can form personal sharing communities through a variety of clients. With Weibo short blog, send messages through "private messages" to achieve one-to-one point-to-point transmission, through "attention" to achieve a pair of N-point-to-point transmission, through "forwarding" to achieve N-to-N that is fission transmission. Therefore, Weibo has the communication advantages of immediacy, collectivity, extensiveness and self-media.

Facebook is a social tool that helps users keep in touch with real-life friends, colleagues and people around them and share their life experiences. It is also the number one photo-sharing site in the United States. On Facebook, users get to know their friends by sharing pictures and posting links and videos. The significant advantage of Facebook is that the vast majority of users are real-name system, so we can achieve more accurate advertising through the subdivision of user behavior data.

Wechat is the largest mobile social interaction platform in China. Through Wechat, users can share text, pictures and video and audio information in real time, greatly enriching the form and content of communication and improving communication efficiency. Wechat society integrates three channels of QQ friends, mobile phone address book and "people nearby", so that communication is no longer limited to fixed social groups, expands the scope of making friends, and realizes the integration of virtual social circle and real social circle. Social marketing based on Wechat platform is aimed at the "acquaintance model" to achieve peer-to-peer and peer-to-peer circle marketing, so it is favored by countless merchants.

In fact, the social business model is an open platform + moments, using the social platform, based on user communication and concerns, starting from the individual's information footprint and interpersonal relationship chain in social media. the promotion of offline products or services is skillfully integrated into the invisible hands of social interaction, forming "word-of-mouth marketing" to a certain extent, and then through interaction, more circle groups are inspired to form geometric levels of communication. In order to create better brand value or sales growth.

Mode 3: share the experience with specific groups through life experience and resume, thus achieving Pinterest and Mogujie, or strategy for short.

Unlike Facebook, which moves relationships between friends offline to online social networking sites, Pinterest is based on interest maps. In the era of reading pictures on the Internet, users have the need to see and collect pictures. Pinterest realizes a series of requirements such as uploading, browsing, collecting and sharing. The intuitive information of pictures is more related to personal preferences and suitable for interest discovery and sharing.

Similarly, Mogujie is gathered together based on consumer experience, positioning himself as a shopping guide website, and its core is the sharing economy. Mogujie's development strategy is to integrate the fashion community and e-commerce to be a fashion guide platform for women. Share what users like to Mogujie into public resources and guide other users to consume. The three-in-one way of platform + media + marketing also solves Mogujie's own profit problem.

Mode 4: through technology, in-kind, service and other resources, to provide resource sharing to the people in need, resulting in Uber, Didi Taxi, etc., referred to as resource-based.

Uber, the originator of car-hailing software born in the United States, in addition to providing ride-hailing services, the "shared economy" it advocates is one of the differential strategies. Using existing technology to build a commonweal ride-sharing service platform, car owners who apply and qualify on the Uber platform can become car-sharing drivers.

Uber's model is that online needs are equipped with offline services, allowing idle resources to flow continuously in the way they perform tasks, but they don't even need to have a Uber car that is entirely their own.

Mode 5: by sharing experiences, experiences and experiences with specific groups based on specific regions and specific interests, and sharing specific resources, that is, the combination of mode 3 and mode 4, referred to as talent social hybrid (or talent).

Rover, a pet babysitter information platform from Seattle. Through the software platform, people can hire people who take care of or temporarily adopt their pet, who are screened dog lovers. Today, Rover has about 25000 certified pet nannies in more than 5000 cities across the United States.

While the advent of the sharing economy has achieved a variety of business models, its rapid development is bound to bring about 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 idle resources with others to earn some income. In fact, the concept of commodity sharing is not new, but with the development of digital technology, today's consumers use the Internet to bring the sharing economy to a new level. The traditional boundaries between businesses and consumers are weakening. People begin to give up the traditional way of buying goods and services, and instead look for commodity sharing services on the Internet. With this more convenient, efficient, and low-cost new way to meet their needs.

Business change: users are the prerequisite for business realization and success

The source of business change is the demand of economic development, while the source of economic development is driven by market demand. For Internet enterprises, especially mobile Internet enterprises, there are only three points to think about: who is the user? What value can it bring to users? What barriers did you encounter on the way? As for the business model, it is nothing but advertising, value-added services and e-commerce. Only when you win the users can you win the market.

Service change: the need to fundamentally improve products and services

The emergence of sharing economy corresponds to the demand gap of the market. The biggest challenge in promoting the sharing economy is the cultivation of users' consumption habits. Although there is market demand driving the sharing economy, for example, the founders of Uber thought of using idle resources precisely because they found a huge demand gap in transportation services, but if they cannot cultivate users' consumption habits as soon as possible and build trust and goodwill towards the corresponding service brands of the sharing economy, it will be difficult to popularize the sharing economy. To cultivate users' habits, it is necessary to fundamentally improve the quality of mobile Internet products and services.

Technological change: demand-oriented, technology-driven

Sharing economy realizes the optimization of products and services on the basis of investigating the needs of users, in which technology is the most important driving force. Technology-driven to create products and services that meet the needs can be recognized by users.