In the past few years, Uber has tried out a variety of new services, ranging from on-demand picnics and ice cream trucks to healthcare. The result is “a reputation for testing the market with little things to whet the appetite to then do something big” (Biggs, 2014). For decades, Ansoff’s (1957) framework has been used to map such growth opportunities, but applying this framework to businesses with a multi-sided platform is difficult. In this blog post, I therefore propose a revised version of this framework, called: Growth strategies for two-sided businesses, and provide further explanation by showing how it can be used to map Uber’s growth opportunities.
Consider two news articles. The first article is the most-read Guardian story of 2015, about the Paris attacks (Philips & Rawlinson, 2015). The second article is the third most-read Guardian story of 2015, about flowing water on Mars (Sample, 2015). Whereas the two articles have attracted an amount of readers of similar order of magnitude, the first one has been shared almost 50,000 times, whereas the second time has been shared only 6 times. How is this possible? This effect can be explained by looking at emotional impact, at least that is what Berger and Milkman (2012) hypothesize in their paper ‘What makes online content viral’? The authors investigate the characteristics of news articles and their impact on the amount of email shares. In particular, they focus on the valence of an article and the emotions it evokes. This blog post discusses the research and points out its practical implications.
We all remember those moments when we stumbled upon another interesting article or video, just when we had finally decided to stop scrolling through our Facebook feed. Several years ago, Pocket built a solution to this problem of vacillating between postponing your important tasks for 5 more minutes (again) and risking missing out on something interesting. And recently, utilizing the huge amounts of data they gathered, the company launched a new service: Pocket Recommendations. In this post, I will point out how Pocket has managed to co-create the value provided through this new service with millions of people.
Consumer Value Creation 