It's 100 days in for BlueList (see 30 second video), our new service which gives merchants a low-cost, data-driven way to broadcast realtime offers to nearby consumers' smartphones.
We've learned some amazing things about the nature of Two-Sided Marketplaces. They're fierce beasts, and they need to be tamed like the Wild Animals that they are.
In the case of BlueList, the "taming" is the fact that there are two sides of the Market: 1) The Consumer; and 2) The Merchant; and they are highly dependent upon one another.
This presents a field of play at the intersect between a merchant’s right-now cry for business and a consumer’s right-now need for lunch, a haircut, a workout or a pair of shoes.
BlueList is the only right-now connection between local merchants and nearby consumers, and from a systems perspective, it is built to be dynamic, self-service and sustaining.
In what we've come to call an Offers Market, the consumer will either pay attention to the offer (and thus, the merchant) or not, based upon whether the offer elicits engagement right then and there; right now.
A consequence of this is that for the central purpose of BlueList to be realized, most every merchant has to have compelling, successful offers.
Towards this end, we now know three things.
We know that consumers like to eat, drink, be entertained, exercise, shop and get stuff done pretty much every day.
We also know that consumers tend to do the actual consuming within a narrow band of space (i.e., a five minute walk or drive from their home, school or office).
This means that the relationship between the merchant and consumer is fundamentally local and (pseudo) permanent.
That gives it a natural synergy that is worth investing time and energy into, and with dedicated effort, can be grown into loyalty.
But the big thing we know is that the Smartphone is the New First Screen. There is no disputing this point, right?
Relative to the PC and desktop Web, Mobile delivers it's own native, cloud ready experience, so we've dedicated ourselves to building experiences that are proximity aware, current, customizable, transparent, personalized, and social.
For the merchant, we have created something we call an Offer Management System (OMS) that makes it dumb simple to create, target, brand and broadcast offers that the free consumer app can spotlight by proximity, popularity, personal taste, and discount "depth."
Best of all, the merchant does so knowing that the recipient consumer is within a five minute drive away. That changes the game.
But success in cultivating a two sided marketplace is not merely a set of exercises. It's something that must be grown organically. It requires having feet on the street.
It rewards re-thinking the the way one can engage consumers, the tools that can be put to bear to help merchants, and how the model can work at live events of all stripes.
This is the conversation we are having every single day, to the point that every day represents a new launch event for BlueList.
The underlying story here is that anyone who has been in a Starbuck’s knows that Starbuck’s has absolutely nailed mobile — to the point that they are averaging over 7 million mobile transactions in their stores **each** week. That is transformational.
Well, you know what? Most merchants can’t afford and lack the wherewithal to cultivate a Starbuck’s type of endeavor.
But for a buck a day, they can have a Starbuck’s-like offering they can use to reach out and connect with their customers.
On the BlueList.
UPDATE: BlueList 2.0 for Android, which adds personalized notifications, a hot deals discovery tab, and a bunch more, has just shipped. Check it out.
Related
