As an event organizer are you bored of renting places that are analogous? Seeking for something novel and unique? As a space owner do you find it often pity that your space is being vacant most of the time? Want to help others but at the same time also benefit yourself?
Well here is the solution. Splacer, a new venture, operates on a business model similar to that one of Airbnb, but instead of overnight stays Splacer allows event organizer to multipurpose the vacant properties offered by space owner (figure 1; Splacer, 2016).
As sharing economy continues to grow; “numerous marketplaces have mushroomed in recent years, helping to organize “sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping” of goods and services on the peer-to-peer basis” (Botsman & Rogers, 2010, p. 30).
One of the reason for this sharing economy to emerge, in particular for hospitality industry is that the space in the major city has become more and more scarce due to ever increasing urbanization. The opportunity that Splacer discovered within this context is that many places remain totally unoccupied during certain time period (e.g. apartment of office workers from 9am to 5pm) and therefore unutilized. Splacer wants to establish the connection between people who have unutilized spaces and strangers in need (figure 2; Weller, 2016). Hereby a mutual incentive is realized which is a prerequisite for value co-creation to occur (Saarijärvi et al, 2013).
Just like Airbnb, the renting procedure on Splacer is transparent in the sense that the renters can arrange related matter directly with the space owner without the interference of a middleman. But what sets Splacer apart from other similar platforms is that they utilize a network of local scouts and affiliates to review all the spaces to ensure that only unique and high quality spaces are offered on the platform (Splacer, 2016). Unlike customers of hotels who are being protected by the strict regulations that these hotels are subjected to, customers of these peer-to-peer platforms often suffer from information asymmetry regarding the quality and safety of the suggested offerings (Botsman, 2012; Edelman and Luca, 2014; Green, 2012a, 2012b). By having personnel specifically dedicated to assessing the quality of the offerings, the concerns of consumers regarding safety and quality can be mitigated to a certain extent. Another convenient feature of Splacer is that through Splacer you can get in contact with different services providers to enhance your event experience (figure.3). Moreover, Splacer will highlight amazing spaces and hosts on their homepage. Among all the different value-co creation approaches, Splacer follows a S-D logic approach, where service becomes the fundamental unit of exchange (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Vargo et al., 2008)
The company started out in Tel Avi, Israel and has currently expanded to New York, United States. So far, the company’s vetting process has shown promising results. Currently, more than 1000 people in New York offers their spaces on Splacer (Splacer, 2016). With company upcoming plans to expand to more space-deprived cities and the fact that P2P platforms are being more and more recognized and accepted due to its undisputable advantages, it can be foreseen that these numbers will only increase exponentially (Weller, 2016).
Author: 373227yj
References:
Botsman, R., Rogers, R. (2010). “Beyond Zipcar: Collaborative Consumption”. Harvard Business Review 88 (10), 30-30.
Botsman, R. (2012). The currency of the new economy is trust. Interactive transcript, http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_currency_of_the_new_economy_is_trust/transcript? language=en#t-151759
Edelman, B. G., Luca, M. (2014). “Digital discrimination: The case of Airbnb.com.” Harvard Business School, HBS Working Paper Number: 14-054.
Green, C. H. (2012a). White Paper: Trust and the Sharing Economy: A New Business Model, http://trustedadvisor.com/articles/trust-and-the-sharing-economy-anew-businessmodel
Green, C. H. (2012b). Trusting and Being Trust in the Sharing Economy, http://www.forbes.com/sites/trustedadvisor/2012/05/02/trustingand-being-trusted-in-the-sharingeconomy/
Saarijärvi, H., Kannan, P.K., Kuusela, H. (2013). “Value co-creation: theoretical approaches and practical implications.”European Business Review, 25(1), 6-19.
Vargo, S.L., Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68 No. 1, pp. 1-17.
Vargo, S.L., Lusch, R.F. (2008a), “Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 1-10.
Weller, C. (2016) This company is the Airbnb for everything, from vacant churches to hip garages, http://www.techinsider.io/splacer-just-made-meetings-so-much-better-2016-2
Anonymous sources:
Consumer Value Creation 