Begining to understand the business model and customer segments - our first meeting

We are five students / budding entrepreneurs with the aim of solving this problem in 12 short weeks: 

SMEs are failing to maximise the potential of loyalty cards.

We began to first discuss the problem from the perspective of the SME. We agreed as a group that SMEs do not have access to information about their customers and that this is a problem for them. We agreed that SMEs would benefit from market information when making business decisions. 

Here are some questions we stumbled on along the way..... 

What SMEs would most benefit from data on their customer?

We identified Hospitality as an industry where loyalty could be used successfully.

How would SMEs analyse data on their customers? 

We then identified that many SMEs would not have the time/resources to analyse data. Our solution to this would be a weekly market report to send to them on a user friendly dash board that would provide them with relevant information.

How does this add value to the customer? 

We reached a stumbling block as we discussed how there is an abundance of companies providing loyalty cards/ discounts. This devalued the offering to customers.

We discussed ‘digital’ loyalty cards and downloaded an example to use among the group to get a feel for it.

We have marked this one as a conversation to return to!!

Is the concept of loyalty redundant?

At this point we are back to square one. We are going around in circles with the concept of loyalty.

We went back to the problem in hand:

SMEs are failing to maximise the potential of loyalty cards. There is great potential to gain business intelligence however this is not being tapped into.

We identified that the key point of the problem is that SMEs do not have access to data to make business decisions. We then agreed that loyalty cards are not in fact the problem to be conquered. Loyalty cards are simply a gateway to receiving information to build data.

What would be a smart replacement for loyalty cards?

We discussed the marketing idea of ‘gifting’ we discussed the concept of customers receiving a gift from a friend that was supplied by our SME.

This idea was the most favoured by the group as we felt that it has a strong opportunity to go viral.

The concept is simple – a customer can choose from a variety free gifts. They can then choose a friend to ‘gift’ through e-mail/social media. The sender and receiver both input their details and this is added to the database.

We would have a search engine for people to find the ‘perfect gift’ – they would have to put the receivers information such as the occasion, age, gender, interests– this would all then stored. 

The service offering to our SMEs would no longer have to be restricted to hospitality and fitness we could now offer this to any SME. This also means that we do not need to restrict our customers to young professionals. This option gives us the widest span of information possible, hence improving our service offering to both our customer and the SME. 

How will this benefit the SME short term vs long term? 

The benefit at first to the SME would be that the company is receiving new business, for example the gift of a glass of wine may lead to the business of a dinner – of the gift of a  free conditioning treatment in a hairdresser may lead to a  haircut.

The service offering would then be expanded to weekly updates on market information as we build our data warehouse. 

The service could then be further expanded to targeting specific segments of the population. For example if a restaurant would like to advertise to females who are 40 plus living in South county Dublin we can create a list of potential customers and an e-mail marketing campaign offering them each a gift from the restaurant.

Are there any further benefits to the SME? 

We discussed further benefit to the SME such as integrating a charity to the business so that they were building on their corporate social responsibility. 

We also discussed a consultative approach to the business, a plan would be drawn up for each company with their individual goals and the information they needs to reach them. We would ensure to put a face to the company by having quarterly meetings with SMEs to improve the service offering. Our thinking behind this is that SMEs may not have the technical knowledge to absorb data information and utilise it to its maximum potential. 

What is the benefit to our customer?

·         It is human nature to enjoy giving a gift 

·         Quick and cost free process.

·         User friendly and interactive Website to make the process simple

As our world becomes more digital and social media replaces our face to face interactions with friends –  gifting allows us to connect with our friends in a very real way. 

Data Protection? 

The final topic discussed was data protection. We decided that we would not allow the SME access to the data warehouse. We would only allow our company access to the data. We would then analyse it internally and share this information with the SMEs through a dashboard. We need to further research data protection to ensure that we fully comply with legislation throughout the business model. This will also be important when scaling the business to ensure we comply with global legislation. For the purpose of this project we will be looking as going to market in Ireland.   

Conclusions from meeting 1

·         We have decided to keep our service open to every SME and every segment of the market to provide a full service offering

·         We have decided to replace the concept of loyalty card with the concept of gifting

·         We need to further research potential partners/customers that would benefit from our service

·         We need to further research pairing with a social media i.e. Facebook.

·         We need to fully research data protection legislation to ensure our business is in compliance

·         We need to sketch out our hypotheses by filling out our business model canvass

One day down!

We still have a lot of questions left unanswered but we’re excited about the road ahead!