Context

Auditing and market research are important for companies to get an insight into how they perform in the market. When doing an audit suppliers often check if retail stores keep to the agreement which they make, such as the display of a product for instance. With market research companies gather deeper insights about costumers’ needs and preferences, to be able to make strategic decisions for the future. Although both insights are valuable for companies, these methods are not always practiced due to their high costs.

Unique proposition of the business idea

BeMyEye is a research company that offers a platform where companies can obtain street-level data from physical stores, through crowdsourcing. Within this platform, these companies, which are called the ‘clients’, offer tasks to the users of the platform. This obtained data is used the clients in various ways such as; to check whether stores are fulfilling their arrangements, how prominent their products are being displayed, how much stock there is still available from a particular product, and to collect street-level data for mapping enrichments or to identifying new opportunities for the company. This type of crowdsourcing is called information pooling. Within this type, contributions are characteristically identical and the crowd is usually asked for their opinions or to gather location-based information (Blohm, Zogaj, Bretschneider & Leimeister, 2018). This revolutionary way of auditing and market research is interesting for companies because it has a high degree of reliability and is much more efficient and cheaper than current methods. This reliability is partly obtained by deliberately allocating the tasks among a large group of people with both customers and non-customers of the product. Customers who also use the product, to which the task relates, could be positively biased when they provide the client with their perceived data, because they could be a huge fan of the brand.

BeMyEye’s business model and how it works.

BeMyeye uses a two-sided platform. On one side of the platform are the companies which offer various tasks which they call ‘clients’. Examples of well-known clients include Nestle, Samsung, Heineken, Lavazza, and Coca Cola. And on the other side are the BeMyEye app users which are called ‘the eyes’, these eyes could be described as ‘secret shoppers’. As soon as the clients need information about certain things in the market, they write a task and set a reward for completing this task. When the consumer logs in on the app on his phone, he sees where there are tasks in the vicinity of his current location and which rewards have been allocated. Assignments often include submitting photos of certain shop displays and completing a corresponding questionnaire. One of the newer tasks that can be assigned on BeMyEye is checking your brand reputation. Here, the eyes reveal the preferred brand choices and reasons of influential retail staff, such as a pharmacist, when approached by customers. When eyes start with an assignment, they check with their current location at the destination of the task as proof that they are in the right place, then they answer the questions the app asks them (O’Hear, 2018). These questions function as a step-by-step guide to be able to standardize the collation of the data which the clients receive. Fees usually vary from three to sixteen euros depending on the duration and level of difficulty of the assignment. After the assignment has been carried out, it needs to be verified, and when everything is fine, the eye will receive his reward and will be paid directly. In this way, companies can quickly obtain data from multiple geographical locations and no longer have to hire auditors who physically go to stores, which is often time-consuming and inefficient. In this way, companies can reduce their related costs, which can significantly improve their ROI for these business activities. This is an interesting concept for the eyes because they can quickly earn some extra money while already being at a certain location. BeMyEye earns money within this concept through a certain fee per completed assignment that they receive from the companies.

The rapid growth of the company and future use of their products

BeMyEyes now has more than 1.5 million active data gatherers in more than 21 countries and are currently the largest crowd of real-world data gatherers in Europe. In order to enlarge the network, BeMyEye uses an aggressive strategy to quickly obtain more data gatherers. They do this by offering people a new way to earn something in a fun way, and by acquiring similar business models that have large numbers of active users.  They started with this strategy in 2016 when they acquired Local Eyes, which was a similar French mobile crowdsourcing app. Shortly after that, they acquired other competitors such as Task360 in 2017 and Streetbee at the start of 2019 (O’Hear, 2019). With these acquisitions, they did not only take over the business models and users, but also the supporting employees, who helped the company grow even faster due to shared knowledge. These acquisitions are financed with money that the company has raised in several new financing rounds. Now, the company’s biggest focus is to maintain its market position in Europe and to enter the US market to further expand its platform (Kharpal, 2016).

Nowadays, most questions the eyes get while performing a task are easy to answer and do not require any knowledge about the products. However, the question is how far could BeMyEye go. To what extent are ‘normal’ people capable of answering questions that need a certain level of interpretation or expertise? And how can BeMyEye guarantee that the questions which are asked to the eyes are correctly interpreted?

I think this way of auditing will become the standard for consumer products in retail stores because of its efficiency and low costs.  However, it should be examined in the future to what extent ‘normal’ people can be used for these tasks, or how they possibly could be trained.

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Sources

Blohm, I., Zogaj, S., Bretschneider, U., & Leimeister, J. M. (2018). How to manage crowdsourcing platforms effectively?. California Management Review, 60(2), 122-149.

Kharpal, A. (2016, May 19). BeMyEye, an ‘Uber for mystery shoppers’ app raises $7.2M and eyes US expansion. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/19/bemyeye-an-uber-for-mystery-shoppers-app-raises-72m-and-eyes-us-expansion.html

O’Hear, S. (2018, January 16). BeMyEye, the startup that lets companies crowdsource in-store data, acquires rival Task360. Retrieved February 23, 2019, from https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/16/bemyeye-task360/?guccounter=1

O’Hear, S. (2019, January 16). BeMyEye acquires Streetbee, a Russian crowdsourcing and image recognition provider. Retrieved February 24, 2019, from https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/bemyeye-acquires-streetbee-a-russian-crowdsourcing-and-image-recognition-provider/