Learnings from Previous Week

Blog Entry : Learnings from last week

E-business has seen some classic failures and successes. In the past classes we have discussed the classic case of Napster, which succeeded initially for its attractive offering of p-2-p music sharing platform offering. But it failed because of a heavy hand of IP regulations lawsuit at its time.  We discussed the models of gopepper.com and groupon.com to see what made them tick.

The discussion of the 'Egg model' of understanding these e-business models put these examples in perspective. The Egg model comprised the Yellow Core that represented the need of the target customer, their mindsets, perceptions, and values which are relatively fixed. The middle freeform White Layer part of the egg denoted the activities and resources the business puts to use to cater to those demands. These activities are decided by the business itself and thus they are flexibly designed around the demands of the customer. These activities include the product offering and the service offering. Finally the hard Outer Shell denotes the fixed government policies and regulations (like those that hit Naspter in 1990s). The activities of the business must be within the solid framework that the law of the land has in place.

We further studies cases of phoolwala.com and similar sites to see how the market segmentation is done at a micro level. We observed that the value proposition of every e-business model was unique in spite of having very similar core offering. A case in point was comparison of online retail sites like groupon.co.in and snapdeal.com. This analysis showed us that in dealing with competition, apart from the main (essentially same) offering, the way the information is presented on each website is also part of the package the customer is drawn to. For example Groupon positions its products as high class and sophisticated even through the highly quality detailed images it uses on its site. Thus, Online portals must customizing user interface, customize the information, in a way as if they 'know' each customer.

The discussion reinforced a learning from a previous class that online portals, in dealing with competition, must try to increase both reach as well as richness.

 

 

--
Regards
-Indrani