AMPERAGE Marketing & Fundraising

One-Minute MarketerWill the Sharing Economy Change Your Business?

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Will the Sharing Economy Change Your Business?

It is unknown if the sharing economy is changing our world, or if the digital economy is pushing the sharing economy forward. We’ll let the economist argue that one. For us marketers, we must be mindful of the trends and associated potential changes in user experience. rent-the-runway

NN/g offered 3 examples of the sharing economy making giant changes and disrupting markets and marketing. The 3 examples are Rent the Runway, Uber and Airbnb in an article titled Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries.  I found that the wardrobe rental service the most intriguing because it is being driven by cost, of course, and social media photography concerns. The problem with clothing is that if you are not careful, you may end up in the same clothing in all your Facebook and Instagram photos. So, enter “Rent the Runway.”

A simple straightforward approach, better than any clothing retail outlet, helps you find the right clothing for the right event and then you rent it for a fraction of the costs. According to NN/g, users are offered a “convenient, seamless start-to-finish user experience.”  The sharing of clothing seems perfectly acceptable and a bit glamorous and solves a problem for those not wanting to caught in the same clothing for all the event social media photos.

The thought of sharing a room, sharing a car, sharing clothing is not new. What is new is how this is becoming the norm, not the outlier. It is one of the first lessons we learn in kindergarten. And it is a real trend more billions.

 

Written by:

Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.