Bilibili is an interactive video sharing website themed around anime, manga and game based in China. Due to its exponential growth these years, Bilibili now offers not only animations but also videos about music, dancing, sciences, entertainment, movie, drama, fashion, and live broadcasting rooms where the host of the room and the viewers are able to interact with each on the specific topics. Unlike Youtube, all the user-submitted videos on Bilibili are hosted by third-party sources.
While browsing for some options in how to raise funds in a fun and reliable way, that would allow for me to mix sports and marketing as well, led me to face this crowdfunding platform “GoFundMe”. For those of you unfamiliar with the notion of crowdfunding, it is the action of raising capital from many people through an online platform, which offers little opportunity for careful due diligence and involves not only friends and family but also many strangers from near and far to help (A. Agrawal & all, 2013).
In June 2015, a new crowdsourcing platform has founded in Australia. In comparison with other crowdsourcing platforms, this one is not about raising funds for new ideas, products or problem solving, no this one is something special. In Australia, there are several problems regarding the justice system. Annually, there are more than 150.000 vulnerable people denied from community legal centers. Furthermore, Federal Court fees have become unaffordable for many because of the increasing fees. Therefore, self-represented litigants have risen to 27% in family courts trails. Many justice issues that occur are for instance; housing issues, exclusion from services, credit issues or family breakdowns.
Nowadays, 85% of international transactions are being implemented by banks, due to the fact that people rely on their trust as well as lack of knowledge about the possible alternatives (Lemon, 2014). Though banks provide higher security services and facilitate payments in any required currency, it has the main shortcoming that high amount of fees is incurred on each transaction without the availability of clear and precise information prior to agreement. In the UK, standard payment for each transaction can reach to £20-25 per and 5-7% margin is gained from loaded exchange rates to those banks who claimed they offer “commission-free” transaction option. In total, the hidden fees incurred in the international money transfer can range from 4% to 15% (Lemon, 2014).
People are lazy. We always try to maximize our efficiency by minimizing our efforts. Some would call it progress, others the definition of efficiency, but in fact, it is plain laziness. In dutch we have the following saying: ‘gemak dient de mens’. This roughly translates to: ‘it’s nice not to make an effort’. Nowadays, not making an effort is exactly what we are searching for; in everything that we do.
Almost everything you think of already has a ‘subscribe now’ option. It seems as if humanity is being automated. You don’t even have to decide to buy something; before you notice something is running empty and some new item is already delivered to your residence.
Where the current focus is predominantly on business models that generate economic benefits for both the firm and customer and social benefits for customers through co-creating value, this business model generates also different benefits for both parties.
TTCMobile provides an interactive service that provides people information about either health, agriculture, social & economic topics, education and consumer goods. Where in most sectors people participate because of the efficiency benefits, survival is the main benefit for people participating in the health service. The prevention information on topics as Ebola and HIV/AIDS are examples of this. Furthermore, considering the social services the company provides, one of the main benefits of their business model is next to the profitability the social impact of their service.
Probably everyone has at least one friend in their social network who keeps posting pictures of healthy food, work-out videos or even bikini pictures on social media websites to update all their how healthy they are being. The pictures or videos are probably also accompanied by inspiring quotes, recipes with superfoods or their opinion on how easy and fun it is to get in shape! Yes, I am talking about self-proclaimed ‘fitgirls’ and how they are starting to take over our social media homepages.
The e-commerce industry is growing faster and faster. Last decade we saw a huge shift from shopping offline to shopping online, which will has serious implications for physical stores. For example V&D, after a long time of struggling, the company finally went bankrupt. Following by Perry Sport and Aktiesport, which also went bankrupt last week. However, the shift to online shopping results in a logistical challenge because of all the packages need to be send. The delivery services from these e-commerce companies are becoming more efficient and customer friendly. However, if a customer wants to resend a product or want to ship a product to another place around the world, this will lead to time-consuming and complicated actions for the customer. Shyp provides a solution for these shipping struggles.
Not too long ago e-commerce transformed the way we evaluate and buy products. The ability to search for products from a vast selection, evaluate them based on their ratings and reviews left by other users, mostly strangers, of the products on the online e-commerce platform revolutionized the shopping and browsing habits. The advent of social media has brought about another big upheaval into this trend. Now, we take into account what our online “friends” or acquaintances are saying about those products. The power of our relationships and the higher trust we put on our online friends’ opinions has much bigger influence on our own view to the products we consume.
More than half of us hit the snooze button daily (Greatist, 2014), after all, who wouldn’t like to sleep just for 10 more minutes. However, it turns out that snoozing can actually make the situation worse and we can end up feeling groggier and less energized. Therefore, more and more new products are being produced for us to effectively deal with the trouble of waking up in the morning, from running alarm clocks, to carpets that force you to actually stand up for a minute and listen to motivational quotes.
With certainty I can say that at least 99% of you are familiar with the app SnapChat, which allows you to capture your barefaced party selfies and videos and send them to your beloved friends without regretting it the day after. Since its inception in September 2011, the popularity of the app has been growing at rapid pace and this has resulted in a 100 million daily active user base worldwide. So far so good, all credits to the development team, right? However, as a similar story to most platforms, SnapChat did not even have a thought-through strategy on how to obtain revenues from their fast-growing user base (Morrison, 2015). Yet, quite recently, this has changed…
The rise in popularity of social networking sites has led to user generated content and word of mouth to become popular sources of information. Marketers have identified this trend as well and currently there is hardly any company that does not have their own Facebook page or Twitter account where marketers post content regularly and interact with the customers in name of the company. Both the user-generated content and marketer generated content are popular and everyday used tools, but what exactly is their impact on our purchasing behavior? In this research Goh et al. (2013) want to test this through the following research question: how is consumer purchase behavior influenced by user-generated content and marketer generated content in social media brand communities and if and how do the communication modes matter?
In today’s democracy, politicians have a tough time reaching millennials. In the same way as religion, Western politics currently faces difficulties to create affiliation with the latest generations. Especially, the themes of politics and voting have lost interest of the younger generations over time:
In 2010 Facebook was receiving a lot of criticism because it had changed their privacy policy to require users to opt-out if they wished to keep their personal information private as it made most of their information publicly available (Bilton, 2010). The privacy policy around that time counted an astonishing 5,830 words, whereby Bilton (2010) compares it to the United States Constitutions, which counts, without any of its amendments, 4,543 words. For users that wanted to opt-out and change their privacy settings to hide their information from the public, they needed to go over 50 privacy settings and choosing among over 170 options. On May 26 of 2010, Facebook unveiled a simplified method for controlling privacy on the social media network, and acknowledged that their privacy settings had become to complicated. This change did however not influence the way the algorithm worked to determine, which advertisements was displayed, targeted, because the advertisement platform used anonymous data. In this respect advertisers could still target ads to Justin Bieber fans and personalise the advertising message.
How Betterment.com brings personalized asset management to the masses.
As problems go, being tired from all these lunches with your private banker is one of the better ones to have. While private bankers offer high quality financial advice that enables their clients to successfully build wealth. They are only available to millionaires and even these privileged few pay high annual fees. The less fortunate are stuck with standardized financial services such as mutual funds or stock trackers. What if we could use software to make personalized investment decisions for us? Would it be a digital personal banker for the average Joe?
In today’s market it is increasingly difficult to adjust your products to the quickly changing preferences of customers. One of the consequences is that forecasting the potential sales is getting more difficult. It is very bad for businesses to launch products which turn out to be a failure. Most of the time new products launches suffer from failure rates of 50% and higher. The reason for this is mostly due to the gap between customer needs and the actual product. It is not because the product is not working well or because of bad design. (Ogawa & Piller, 2006)
Do online reviews matter? Yes they do. Word-of-Mouth is a concept most of you are familiar with. WOM occurs when an individual communicates his or her preferences on an item, product or service that they have previous experiences with (Abălăesei, 2014). The traditional definition states it is ‘oral, person-to person communication between receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non- commercial, regarding a brand, product or service’ (Kaijasilta 2013, p.7). However with the popularity of the internet increasing several studies introduced the concept of eWOM.
The use of social media has exploded over the last decade. As an example, Facebook has over 1 billion users worldwide, of which more than 800 million use the platform on a daily basis (Rademaker, 2014). According to the article from Ang (2010), as a reaction many organizations have dived into social media platforms hoping to enhance organizational performance. These organizational efforts to benefit from social media platforms (especially within the functional areas of sales, marketing and service) have been filed under the term social customer relationship management (social CRM). However, for many managers it is unclear how social media platforms can be leveraged to benefit their organization. The author of the article suggests this is partly due to the fact that customers are confused with online community members. The popularized tem social CRM is there for incorrect. He suggests the term community relationship management (CoRM), as it better reflects the characteristics of what people do on social media platforms.
This study examines the relationship between social influence and recommendation decisions among adolescents in the new media environment. Participants were asked to complete the ´App Recommendation Task´, a task that captures neural processes associated with making recommendations to others, with and without information about peer recommendations of the type commonly available online.
Have you ever discussed products online with other customers? Nowadays, a lot of platforms and forums provide the opportunity to share your opinion and experiences with others. According to the article ‘The influence of C2C communications in online brand communities on customer purchase behavior’, several aspects of this C2C communication influence our buyer behavior.
Consumer Value Creation 