October 4, 2010

61) Amazon Prime

危 wēi  danger

Retailer loyalty programmes fall in and out of fashion.  Their supporters describe increased customer stickiness (particularly for retailers that become known for value in price-sensitive markets), increased average spend per customer and valuable data aggregation for market research on shopping habits.  Tesco clearly believes in these benefits as it relaunched its Clubcard last summer, leading to an increase in scheme members to 15 million.  However, the schemes are expensive to launch and run: Clubcard’s relaunch cost c£150m.  In addition, as referenced in this Marketing Magazine blog, Tesco is quite unique: it sees data frequently and across many items, is able to change its offer using that data and can sell the data to its suppliers, turning a cost-centre to a revenue centre.  Given the high costs and uncertainty of benefits Amazon would surely be crazy to launch a loyalty programme open to everyone in a similar way?

机 jī opportunity

Maybe not.  Keith Melker, my friend from HBS, recently brought to my attention a slightly counter-intuitive trend in the introduction of ‘paid’ loyalty programmes in the US, and helped me understand why they’re often smarter than they appear.

Amazon Prime, launched in 2005 is one such example in which members enjoy unlimited free shipping with no minimum purchase amount.  But, instead of giving membership away free Amazon charges $79 per year.

Superficially you might expect this to be taken up solely by Amazon’s most frequent customers and that the programme would be loss-making because those customers place frequent orders (which Amazon would have to foot the shipping bill for).  But that assumes that customers don’t change their behaviour as a result of being a Prime member and a quick scan of various blog posts suggests that they do.  In fact anecdotal evidence suggests that Amazon’s customers go from about $160/yr to $600/yr after they buy Prime.  It appears that once customers pay for Prime they begin to order more (perhaps because they feel that they’re beating the system).  So, assuming the combination of the Prime charge and the increase in margin per member is greater than the value lost through free shipping it’s a business masterstroke.  Had Amazon given it away free the uptake might have been greater and the behaviour change might not have been as dramatic: that could have been hugely expensive.

How About…

  • Re-examining loyalty programmes – perhaps deliberately offering it to a select group (rather than everyone)?
  • Or even charging for it if it might drive positive behaviour change?

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July 20, 2010

59) Levi’s

危 wēi  danger

I have always been slightly skeptical of established US & European fashion brands’ ability to succeed in emerging markets, after all the average income per person in China is around $3,500 and in India it’s $1,000.  Counterfeiting is rife and unlike super-premium brands they seem particularly vulnerable to low end disruption.  The Indian jeans market is no exception – home-grown companies such as Arvind Mills have addressed the low end market with huge success.  The company, founded in 1931, grew to be the fourth largest producer of denim for wholesale over the course of the following 60 years. It realized that India’s poorest couldn’t afford jeans and launched its own label – Ruf n Tuf – in 1995 to address the opportunity.  Its approach was to focus on the Indian consumers at ‘the bottom of the pyramid’, completely redesigning its business model with an emphasis on value.  Arvind Mills succeeded by selling a jeans kit to local tailors for $6/pair – minimal kit variants kept manufacturing costs low and the local tailors quickly became an effective marketing channel.   Subsequently the company has continued to innovate, adopting a full franchisee system for the manufacture and distribution of Ruf and Tuf jeans in 1995.

Surely the established jeans companies of the developed world, including Levi’s (the inventor of jeans) will be unable to service the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ and will be unable to compete, perpetually being disrupted by companies like Arvind Mills and being undermined by counterfeiting?

机 jī opportunity

Although the 1994 entry of Levi’s in India received a tepid response its fortunes have improved recently – it banks heavily on celebrity endorsement, product innovation and a superior retail experience to drive growth.  Most recently it has adopted an innovative “pay as you wear” model in India – the company offers cash-strapped Indians the opportunity to buy their jeans in three interest-free installments.  “A monthly installment scheme makes it easier for people to build their wardrobe with a premium brand like ours” says Shumone Chatterjee, MD of Levi’s in India.  The approach is smart – it enables more of India’s fashion conscious consumers to wear the Levi’s brand without eroding its brand equity or dropping its price points – although Levi’s will never completely straddle the pyramid it might manage to straddle a few more levels…

How About…

  • Defending your market position from disruptors using creative pricing?
  • Examining straddling the pyramid in emerging markets?
  • Empowering another part of the value chain to finish your products and services?

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July 13, 2010

58) Dropbox

危 wēi  danger

MIT-grad Drew Houston was frustrated with how often he forgot his USB drive.  He was sure that there was a better solution, probably a Web-based file hosting service but he couldn’t find one available so he founded Dropbox with a fellow MIT-Grad to build it.  Shortly after receiving seed financing from Y-Combinator in 2007 they released a short video explaining their plans on Hacker News – the video received 1200 Diggs and Houston realised that they must be onto something.  They built the product (which is worth checking out for its wonderfully simple UI here) and officially launched at 2008′s TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference.  Initial users loved the product so the next logical step seemed to be to advertise and they launched an Adwords affiliate programme.  The results were shockingly poor – customer acquisition cost proved to be $233-388 (for a $99 product).  Perhaps the company’s VC backed competitors were overspending and the company would never be able to compete?

机 jī opportunity

The team interpreted the situation differently – they didn’t see the cost of Adwords advertising as the problem, they concluded that their challenge was that consumers don’t search for problems that they don’t know they have.  In other words the team needed to find a way to create demand, not harvest it.  The team knew that users that were referred to the product invariably loved it so they developed a system to incentivise the referral process (gifting both the referrer and the new users free memory – a 2-sided incentive).  The approach worked: user numbers from Sept 2008 to Jan 2010 have increased from 100k to 4m, and 35% of these new users joined directly from the referral programme.

How About…

  • Questioning whether your aim is to create or harvest demand?
  • Using 2-sided incentives to drive sales?

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I like the low-fi introductory video (the only information on their homepage), it reflects the team’s humility and dives straight into the benefit using an analogous situation:

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