The Battle For Customer Interface Is On

"Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening."

This sentence you must have read it hundreds on time on the web either on LinkedIn, Facebook or on blogs. Indeed, the statement is very strong. We are in the middle of a real industrial revolution, that shakes up all kind of business models we ever experienced. But what is far more interesting, is what the article is about: customer interface.

In this blog I don't write that much about customer relationship management as we may have known it: Big data centers with softwares allowing to have an efficient response all through the decision making process of customers.

Because today, customer relationship management is more than ever the core of businesses created value. The real equity built is not much in the brands you build, but rather in the customer interface businesses can propose to customers. What does that mean? That means that you don't need to master the whole components of one product, but the interface you propose to the end user is the key to the real value you propose to customers.

That empowers to me more than ever new mobile devices, but also brick & mortar retails.

Has Groupon A Future ?

Groupon has been the last couple of months the hypest story in the Internet business. Groupon has emerged as a new business model emerged from the web, and has experienced a great growth at a high pace.

In 2010, Groupon has generated $644 million, and the number of users has skyrocketed. What I have always been impressed by with Groupon, was there ability at a very early stage to generate revenues, whereas most of the Web 2.0 actors are focusing on growing their audience than finding an actual business model.

As an evidence of its success, Groupon has seen a lot of copycats blossoming in the different countries where it settled.

Groupon ambitions to go on the stock exchange market soon, but bad news came up, as its audience seems to be decreasing since June. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=157597

Even worst, Forrester forecasts that by 2016 daily deal market will be miscellaneous.

"Standing out above the clutter [will become] harder for marketers as ad exposures grow," Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk explained in a report released last week."Consumers will grow so conditioned to micro-impulse offers they'll lose practice at considered decisions ... Facing a cultural descent into maladroit judgment, employers (and spouses) will blacklist impulse deals to keep people intentional," he noted.

Moreover, it seems that its operating costs are growing faster than its sales.

Here are some thoughts I have:
- In July and August, it is normal that the audience decrease as people go on vacations. Nevertheless, Groupon is still a start up, and despite a decrease in the pace, they should still grow.
- Groupon is probably hurt by its problems of executions. Countless of articles have been written because they oversell their deals. If execution is not there, even though the offer is good it can’t work.
- What is funny is that as a matter of fact, Groupon is not so much an innovation. There were already websites with coupons, they just added the possibility to get great coupons by the large number of people going on the website.

Does Groupon really have a future? I think it will, but its future may not be as bright as people expected. I believe they should focus on their operation and execution, in order to reach profitability. The good point about the story is that they are already able to generate comfortable revenues, whereas other websites of the web 2.0 sphere did not.