Consumer goods

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A Dutch farmer took a different approach for selling his vegetables with his concept EtenPerMeter.nl (Dutch) (English). He tries to sell his commodities (because that is what potatoes are) as an experience. You as a consumer come over the farmer and for one day you may feel what it’s like to dig in the mud, looking for your potatoes and onions. At least that is the positive feeling he tries to sell. Back to nature! You then pay for your vegetables per meter you’ve worked. (€ 0,75/mtr). Since you do all the work, you pay significantly less than in a normal store.
Although the transaction here is rather straight forward, the approach is quite innovative. In a normal situation where commodities are being sold as an experience it is by creating an exceptional good service around it. Think of selling coffee in such a pleasant environment as Starbucks. The creating of such a warm atmosphere with all the branding and so on, is more expensive for a company. To earn back all this efforts, Starbucks asks significantly more for his coffee. And if you do it right you can ask even more what leads to large profits margins. This Dutch farmer did manage to take away a service and sell that as an experience. He enlarged his profit margins, not by first making more costs, but by cutting down on labor expenses. As for now, Etenpermeter seems to be a big success.

Entertainment & tourism

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In a sector where everybody is fighting to offer the most positive experience as possible, the Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego tries to compete by offering just the opposite. Instead of luxury retreats, customers can choose the ‘survivor package‘. For only 19 dollar a night one can sleep in a room without a bed. By doing this they offer some type of un-experience where a company just tries to solve a customers problem without extras. Hereby they strip the normal hotel experience down to a basic service. Many companies already showed that there is money to make on bad or negative experiences. Recently we gave 10 other examples of initiatives that are doing just that. Ryanair for instance tries to focus solely on getting you from A to B without the expectation of any positive experience. Often a business model can arise out the inversion of the so called differentiating aspects or USP’s of a competitor. What could you invert of your competition to boost your own business?

Consumer goods

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“What would make your Starbucks experience perfect?” On MyStarbucksIdea.com people can post their ideas and see how Starbucks puts those ideas to work. Ideas range from Birthday drinks, a punch card system, locally baked goods to Coffee ice cubes. On top of being a simple Suggestion Box 2.0, the community can vote to select the best ideas. Or as the company puts it: “Together, we will shape the future of Starbucks.”

Corporate crowdsourcing of product and service ideas is not unique, as Dell’s IdeaStorm, Innovate with Kraft and a list of other examples illustrate. While My Starbucks Idea is fully company branded (powered by the Force.com platform of Salesforce), other companies opt for a specific idea challenge on intermediary platforms like Fellowforce.com, Atizo, IdeaConnection, InnovationExchange, or IdeaMagnet. In contrast to challenges on those platforms, My Starbucks Idea does not reward customers for their ideas. Apparently the experience Starbucks offers its customers is strong enough for people to want to contribute by offering free product ideas. Underlining again the importance for companies to create unique experiences, it sparks the question whether it will be sustainable to ask for free advice. Would you be able to gather free contribution and involvement from your customers?

Banking & professional services

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The business concept of Nexicon is quite exceptional. Their monitoring service tracks down IP’s of illegal content distributors on bittorent and other peer-to-peer networks. I suppose that this service towards copyright owners like movie studies and record labels can be bought with a some form of subscription. Once identified Nexicon’s system will automatically send out a settlement agreement to the ISP who has to forward it to his own client. In such a letter Nexicon threats with legal action if this distributor doesn’t choose to settle within 10 days by paying 10 dollar per illegally shared item. Nexicon will take a commission on each transaction. Although 10 dollar is far less then normally asked in settlement agreements it can generate an reasonable profit for Nexicon if they are able to track down these p2p-users in large amounts.

‘Experiences’ as we use it in our business model framework are characterized by the emotional impact on a user. Contrary to other ‘experience’ sellers Nexicons tries to offer such a negative experience (fear) that will convince a user to pay a small amount of money. An example of the opposite would be a pay-what-you-want restaurant that tries to offer such a pleasant experience in order to receive a reasonable payment from each client. In the end this shows that you as company should take control over the experience of your customer, even when this is a negative one.

Internet & media

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A trip to Las Vegas  for a painting! New York artists Christine Santora and Justin Gignac are painting portraits of all the things they wish to get on WantsForSale.com. Wants For Sale is not new yet interesting to look into further. It is a nice variation on the Intention Economy in which the buyer’s intent shapes the production and delivery of a product or service, as in “I would like to have this” (similar to Igglo, Zillow, Eventful; yet offering a painting instead of money now). Each painting represents things like a new bikini, a month’s rent, gambling money, a customized Adidas shoe, and special experiences on a trip to Las Vegas. People buy the paintings by paying the value of the painted item or by delivering the item or experience itself.

Wants For Sale also follows along the lines of The Million Dollar Homepage and One thousand paintings – selling paintings of all numbers from 1 to 1000. Once featured on BBC, WIRED, boingboing and others, they create enough buzz for companies and individuals to be interested in the exposure and reputation – like iRobot for example. Wants For Sale brings an interesting concept which almost begs to be developed in a broker platform where everyone can post a painting, a song, a performance… for something they want to get! I am sure companies/brands would be interested in their fan’s productions.

Consumer goods, Internet & media

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eBay has pioneered the concept of online auctions where people buy and sell goods from and to each other. As discussed in How to build any business model with only 10 blocks,  companies can change a business model by moving from products to services or experiences – keeping all other transactions the same. The evolution of online (peer-to-peer) auctions is an excellent example:

Online product auctions: eBay.com

Online product auctions like on eBay.com bring together buyers and sellers, and take a listing fee or commission on successful transactions. This is a straightforward example of the broker business model, which in principle does not change when moving to transacting services or experiences.

Online service auctions: Zilok.com

On Zilok.com people can rent anything from anyone, from a nice heater to party cooking gear. The transaction is not the ownership of a product, it is the service to use it for a period in time. Myngle.com is another example of online service auctions, bringing together teachers and students on a global language marketplace.

Online experience auctions: Sweemo.com

As a next step, Sweemo.com enables people to buy, sell or swap special experiences or “sweet moments” (after which the UK-based start-up is named). In their own words: “Sweemo is the live auction community where people come to trade real-life experiences”. The auctioned experiences range from a role on a soap opera to an exclusive safari, a backstage pass or a look behind the scenes of a reality show. Experience sellers pay a commission on the final selling price.