The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [13]
As a member of this Mesh “ecosystem” you are: (1) eating healthy food; (2) getting in a little exercise walking to the car-share garage; (3) congratulating yourself on lowering your cholesterol and your carbon footprint; and (4) collecting a bonus from your health insurance and getting money in your bank account, which you can leverage for discounts at businesses whose offers are specifically tailored to you. Maybe a deal on a family ski vacation in Aspen? Your four-door hybrid—with tire chains in the trunk and a (shared) Thule ski rack on top—is waiting.
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The Mesh Advantage
WHAT’S HERE: network power, leveraged; panning for gold, or meet my friend, the filter; spice up your mesh with partners.
Wayne Huizenga was in waste management before he started Blockbuster. I met him years ago when I was at AOL, and I said to him, “Wow, you must be really into entertainment and film.”
“Eh, I don’t give a crap about that stuff,” he said. We were in a high-rise building in downtown Manhattan.
“You know what I care about?” he said. “Look out that window. It’s a beautiful site, isn’t it?”
I looked out the window. “All I see down there are Dumpsters,” I said.
“That’s what I mean! I’m all about renting,” he said. “I buy it once, and wherever it moves, I keep making money on my old investment.”
Wayne is a serial entrepreneur. All of his businesses, from trash to movies, revolve around the same theme—buying something once and renting it many times. Wayne understands: when you sell to own, there’s only one major transaction. That’s the ownership model.
Like Wayne’s businesses, the Mesh model is based on a series of transactions, on sharing something over and over. Creating a share platform is the first, necessary-but-not-sufficient building block of the Mesh. The second is to create an information infrastructure that takes advantage of mobile, Web, and social networks. Then each interaction, and transaction, becomes an opportunity to gather and exchange information with a customer. (Blockbuster, as we shall see, failed to implement this critical second feature of the Mesh, at great cost to the company.)
Good Mesh businesses are smart about combining more frequent customer contact with enhanced information sources to create and refine superior experiences, partnerships, products, and offers. That, in short, is the Mesh advantage. This chapter explores that advantage in depth and paints a picture of an altogether new and different business landscape made possible by the Mesh.
the value of data is in its transformation.
Every Mesh transaction is an opportunity to deliver on the promise you make to your customers—to give them convenient access to customized goods and services. And every time you deliver on your promise, you create a greater bond of trust with the people, communities, partners, or markets you are serving. That in turn creates more opportunities to collect useful information from them, which helps you further tailor and personalize your offering. This dynamic is now common on the Web. Expedia knows you’re going to New York and offers discount tickets on Broadway. Kayak, Travelocity, iTunes, Lovefilm, Netflix, Amazon, Chegg, Barneys, and many others make customized offerings designed to improve over time. As the timing and relevance of the offers improve, so does consumer satisfaction and trust in the brand. Greater trust translates into recommendations through your customers’ social networks, expanding your reach. Customers become more receptive to additional offerings from your company, or from your trusted partners, who in turn can help you expand your market. Call it a “virtuous circle of trust”: Learn. Test. Play. Engage. Then rinse and repeat.
Just on the basis of the number of transactions that occur, Mesh businesses are in much better position to be an everyday part of their customers