Marketing & Business Strategy
In class we explored different business models and considered which ones aligned most with our vision. There were three models we took into closer consideration, and we ended up deciding on a combination of two of them.
Business Models
As a business model, Aikido stands for offering something completely opposed and different to the image and mindset of the competition. It is meant to attract customers who prefer ideas and concepts opposed to the mainstream.
We believe that the big energy companies are missing this market opportunity and muddle the waters with too much information that the everyday user does not understand, making decision-making for renovations delayed and less efficient.
Barter is a business model based on exchange. Goods are given away to customers without actual costs and no transaction of money takes place. In return, the customer provides something of value to the company, often consisting of data.
We offer our users a platform that helps them save energy and costs, and alleviates their decision-making. In exchange, the users help the calculator improve by using it and thereby uploading data. The more customers we have, the more accurate our calculator becomes.
Pay Per Use is a business model where the usage of a service is measured and the customer pays on the basis of that calculation. Depending on effective consumption, the price differs, attracting customers who wish to benefit from additional flexibility.
We felt that making our calculator free would broaden our user group and lower the threshold for using our product. This was done with the essential consideration that a major part of our target group are people who struggle with the high cost of living, adding costs for the calculator seemed unethical.
We decided on a merge of features from the Aikido and the Barter model. Our platform has an active exchange with its users, helping them save energy and costs while they help us improve the platform with their data. This, coupled with our strong belief in equal opportunity and efficiency, separates us from the competition that often charges their users and doesn't necessarily provide clear information. Our platform is there to make decision-making for renovations faster and more energy- and cost-friendly for the user.
Inspiration: DoctoLib
We took inspiration from DoctoLib, a French platform founded in 2013 with the unique value proposition of making access to healthcare and appointment-making easier for patients. DoctoLib's service is free, it does not charge the patient for its distribution and appointment-making system. Instead, it charges doctors' offices; any payment the patient has to make is done directly with the medic providing the service. DoctoLib is purely an intermediary, not the product or employee, but the bridge needed to make the model work.
Similarly, in our strategy we represent a bridge between the user and renovation companies, one that makes the crossing (decision-making) easier without charging the users. We even considered charging renovation companies, similarly to the doctors on DoctoLib, but as we are still at the beginning of our process we moved this decision to the farther future.
Marketing
For marketing we considered two different approaches, especially regarding two of the strategies we had discovered during the Bootcamp in October of last year.
The first strategy was one we had talked about in class and one we felt did not quite resonate with the project's goals. It consists in building a social movement around the project's core idea and the issue it tackles, a more indirect approach to marketing. In the context of ÉcoWatt, it would have been possible to build this movement around energy efficiency and environmentalism.
Our research and user interviews showed that the main incentive for people to use our site was monetary, not out of concern for the environment. Trying to start a social movement would therefore have been risky and seemed out of scale with where we are.
This was the strategy that seemed most effective and spoke strongly to us. It consists in documenting the process of building the product publicly, something we started doing through LinkedIn. We further published on Facebook groups for rentals and housing in Paris to test interest and interaction, though with limited results: most members post their own searches rather than engage with other content, leading to minimal interaction in groups with over 40,000 members.
To appeal to both owners (mainly active on Facebook) and renters (mainly active on Instagram), we plan to post on both platforms once we are close to launching, and to continue documenting our progress on LinkedIn. In early March, the main Forward College account published a post about ÉcoWatt on Instagram and LinkedIn, seeing how positively it was received greatly encouraged us to keep posting.
