PHASE 0: MEET OUR TEAM
Maxim Moncalvo
MAXIM MONCALVO
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I'm an Italian CEMS International Management student at Bocconi University.
My past experiences include consulting (Bain & Company), Supply Chain Management (Rolls-Royce), Banking and Finance (UniCredit) and Business Planning (JEME Bocconi).
Ekaterina
Zhivaia
EKATERINA ZHIVAIA
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I'm an MSc International Management Bocconi student from Russia, Moscow.
I have a lot of experience in case championships and project management. Currently I'm working in the field of startups (WanderBuy, KHAMAMA and CVipe).
Annika
Frilling
ANNIKA FRILLING
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I'm a Master student from Germany, currently studying Accounting, Financial Management and Control at Bocconi University.
My past experiences include consulting (Zeb), Asset Management (Union Investment) and Banking (German Cooperative Bank).
PHASE 1: THE IDEA
WanderBuy - The innovative treasure hunting App that will bring online shopping on a whole new level
BENEFITS FOR USERS
​A new, interactive, social and fun way to discover and shop for trendy items of any sort. Users may decide to participate even without buying because of the social experience:
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Shopping on the go - no need to carry heavy shopping bags, your purchases will be delivered to your home (or you may collect them in the store);
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Start hunting for the exclusive products of your favorite brands, exclusively launched for a specific location;
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Share with your friends for fun and rewards!
FEATURES OF OUR APP
WanderBuy is a social shopping App that connects customers and companies by providing a unique shopping experience. Our platform provides an integration of geolocation technologies, shopping and gamification: the users need to physically move around to discover new products or to find and purchase the items they are looking for.
The App is a powerful marketing tool for companies that want to create a strong social media presence by creating word-of-mouth and buzz for their new product launches. This offers the chance to reach their customers on a new, emotional level.
BENEFITS FOR COMPANIES
WanderBuy is a powerful and customisable marketing tool that makes brands stand out from the competition:
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Show and sell your products through a unique, innovative platform targeting a wide group of consumers;
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Set up virtual pop-up stores (without having to worry about city-center rent costs!), where users can purchase your new products, receive discounts or gifts from your company;
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Host launch events in any location, physically moving users around the city!
PHASE 2: CONCRETIZATION
Creating a Value Proposition, sketching a Lean Canvas, anticipating our customers and understanding better the users of our App...
THE LEAN CANVAS
THE CUSTOMER
Who can best exploit our services to improve their profitability?
We believe that for our idea potential prospects are companies seeking for new and innovative marketing channels to reach their customers. In particular we want to address companies with a high social media affinity and which are interested in using our services to expand their marketing strategy. Therefore the application can be used by a wide range of different prospects from different sectors such as:
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Fashion companies (apparel, shoes, bags, accessories etc.)
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Luxury companies
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Design companies (interior design, lifestyle products)
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Fast moving consumer goods companies
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Magazines
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Gourmet food stores
Due to this great variety of potential customers we expect a high potential in generating revenues through their product placements. With our application we can offer the companies an appealing new marketing channel for their end customers.
THE USER
Who is going to download and use our App?
As users we consider the clients of the companies we cooperate with: people using our App on their smartphones.
We believe that our users will be mainly urban females aged 18-29. To be attracted by our product we also expect them to follow a certain lifestyle – in particular we want to address users with a high social media affinity and frequent online shoppers. Influencers and Bloggers are therefore important groups we want to address.
Regarding the spending behaviour of our potential users, we assume they are people seeking for exclusivity and willing to spend part of their income to reward themselves.
NEXT STEPS
Analysis of the market
What does the average user of our App look like? Did we individuate the right needs of the target companies? Are there any more features that we didn’t think about but that could add value to our product?
To answer all these questions (and more) we will go out there and speak with our two target groups:
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The users. We will first circulate a survey, trying to spread it over a population that is not limited to our peers. This will give us a rough estimate of how could the typical user of our App look like in terms of age, gender, interests and habits. After collecting and analysing the results we will run some focus groups with our main target users.
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The customers. We will try to obtain direct contact with companies that we think may be interested in our services. We will collect as much information we can during interviews, keeping an open mind to their suggestions.
PHASE 3.1: EXPLORING THE MARKET
FOCUSING ON OUR SOLUTIONS FOR THE COMPANIES
Solving the most fundamental marketing issue: connecting with customers
EXPANDING CHANNEL CHOICE
Companies are trying like never before to connect with customers on a personal level. Every brand has built a social media presence which tries to reflect its values: but are they effective? The conversion of a social media user from follower to customer is not straightforward. WanderBuy is providing a channel designed to do exactly that: linking digital marketing to sales.
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DIFFERENTIATION
There is a major problem in digital and social media marketing today: it is difficult to stand out from the competition. The first mover advantage is long gone, and now the only focus is better content. But with the massive amounts of new images, video, comments and advertising that are uploaded every minute on the internet is is difficult to be noted. We are helping in doing exactly that.
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PROVIDING THE EXPERIENCE
Reaching your customer and be noted is not enough. With one click separating a purchase decision to a walk-out, it is important to grab and maintain positive attention. With the positive track record of geolocated applications to "standard" products and services in the market (maps, social and gaming), we believe we are on track for the next success.
Did we picture the "right" user?
In our second stage we assumed our users to be young female adults with a high affinity for online shopping and social media – but did we picture the right users? To test whether our assumptions hold we designed a survey consisting of 7 questions and an introduction to our idea.
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- Demographics -
We tried to reach the widest and the most diverse audience we could without losing the quality of the responses, but despite our efforts we can't assume that our demographics results, so far, are not influenced by our personal networks. As we will collect a wider numbers of responses (250 +) we will start assuming that demographics reflect the market conditions.
In the first round we collected circa 50 fully completed questionnaires, of which 65% were done by female, prevalently aged 19 - 24 (77% of the total respondents). In total, 50% of the respondents were aged 19 - 24 and are female. (As we take the quality of the responses in higher consideration than the quantity, we decided not to include incomplete questionnaires in our analysis).
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- Habits -
It is important for us to target people who are affine to technology and online shopping. 77% of our respondents declared using an App for purchase inspirations. This is a very positive result for us, since we assume that being already accustomed to using the smartphone to look for new influences facilitates the acceptance to users of our App.
Of the most widely used social networks, Instagram appears to be clearly the number one when it comes to looking for new trends. Surprisingly, the second place for trend sources was given to "Friends". Again, this is an encouraging result for us, since part of our strategy is using the influence of friends and social media together to spread world-of-mouth.
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- Online shopping tendencies -
We wanted to understand how often do our potential users shop online and what do they purchase.
73% of the respondents buy online once a month or more frequently, with almost 20% shopping more than once a week.
Surprisingly, when it comes to shopping for clothes, accessories, bags, shoes etc., the frequency of buying once a month or more often drops to 31%. We are not discouraged by this result, because it might mean that, even if people are comfortable with shopping online, they might prefer other channels when it comes to fashion.
Will we be able to bridge this gap with our new channel?
In our opinion, this is the single most interesting figure to be studied more in depth and will be the focus of future analyses.
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- The product offer -
Regarding the products our respondents would like to shop for, we can see that the top categories fit the ones we expected:
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Accessories (18% is interested)
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Books (12% is interested)
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Shoes (12% is interested)
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Bags & Purses (11% is interested)
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Gourmet Food & Beverages (11% is interested)
With these answers in hand, we can start interviewing companies and will be prepared to show them what kind of users they can expect to reach.
By circulating the survey, we also wanted to understand the possible success of our idea (i.e.: are people actually interested in this service?). To do so, instead of asking a direct question, we gave an option to provide us with the contact details in order to be informed on our progress: 15% of the respondents did so; we think this is a great result, since the attention span for this kind of surveys is usually very low, but we apparently managed to catch their interest!
The survey is available at the following link:
https://wanderbuy.typeform.com/to/GRlLee
OUR RESEARCH ON USERS
First round
OUR RESEARCH ON COMPANIES
Are we addressing the right companies and their needs?
We want to offer an innovative marketing channel for companies, but did we select the right business sectors? And do we help the companies in overcoming their main obstacles?
Since we want to talk with them in depth about our idea, we don't want to use surveys, but direct contact: we are currently reaching company representatives from those business sectors we were able to identify in our users survey.
It's proving hard for us to obtain a high enough number of contacts, but, thanks to our network and the help of Bocconi alumni, we were able to schedule our first appointments for the middle of November 2017.
After collecting the first impressions from the market, we plan to design a survey based on our findings, so to collect the impression of those companies we were not able to interview directly.
PHASE 3.2: VALIDATING OUR PROPOSITION
OUR RESEARCH ON COMPANIES
We had a very clear idea of our customers and who we wanted to address, but after two years we realised that we were wrong with some assumptions and had to readjust some things
Anon
Why small stores are more willing to become your clients? They are struggling from lack of clients and you’re promising to bring them back!
Jan Tenenbaum
Country Manager - Italy, Khamama
The idea is amazing and courageous: come back to us when you'll have talked with some potential customers and we will talk about the development
Davide Scaglia
We have been meeting companies and startups from various industries since the middle of November and we are planning to keep doing so: this process is lengthy due to the difficulty of finding free spots in the representatives' agendas but we are making great progress. The main points that were raised during our face-to-face interviews are the following:
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Gamification
Consider including a gaming-line experience in your App. This might increase users' loyalty and frequency of use. -
Prototyping and developing
Both users and customers have to understand how our UI looks and the App would work. For this reason it is important to try to develop a first prototype to simulate our App. -
Focus on free samples
We might collect a significant amount of users that are interested to our proposition, but for sure we will collect a huge amount of users and attention if we start by offering "freebies". This might be a good strategy to build our customer base. -
Tradeoff between decreasing offline shopping and increasing online shopping
On one hand, there is an increasing trend in e-commerce, on the other, offline shopping is shrinking in favour of alternative solutions. For some companies, only building an online presence is not enough, we might be the right tradeoff for those companies. -
Gain customers by pricing low or free at the beginning
Companies may be reluctant to pay for a service they haven't seen in practice yet. This is why we might consider operating at a loss for the first few partner companies in order to stimulate demand for our services. -
Think about packages to offer
For the same reason as above, at the beginning, we may have to attract companies by offering them all-inclusive and cheap packages.
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- NEXT STEPS -
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Our new focus is to build a prototype of our product. With this tool, we will be able to approach both users and companies with a more concrete offer. We will keep meeting company representatives even before having the prototype ready because we think there are more information and opinions that we might collect that will be useful in the creation of the App itself.
On the users side, we tested the value added of our proposition (see below), but we plan to do it again after building the prototype, this time either in focus groups or in one-to-one interviews.
- PART 2 -
"ARE WE ADDING VALUE?"
We wanted to test the hypothesis: is our channel is adding value to the products that are being sold?
To answer this question we measured two variables across three different channels. The variables we studied are:
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Willingness to Pay (in €)
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Appreciation of a product (1 to 5 scale)
The three different channels we tested are:
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Instagram marketing and online purchase
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E-commerce marketing and online purchase
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WanderBuy marketing and in-App purchase
Our experiment was designed to provide respondents with one of the three random tests and study the two variables for that channel. The settings across the three experiments were similar with the difference of the marketing and purchase channel.
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A total of more than 100 single respondents participated in our surveys. We found that:
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The same product is consistently priced higher when advertised on our channel with respect to the e-commerce(+8%);
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In the case of Instagram marketing and e-commerce, users still prefer to see the item in store before purchasing, while this preference is not shown with WanderBuy;
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Users are willing to pay extra (on top of the +8%) to purchase an item on WanderBuy when it is not (or not yet) present in the stores.
Although these results take only the users side into consideration, we can state that there is potential for adding value. Moreover, we believe that most of the value added will be on the customers' side (companies advertising on our channel), so this is an excellent result, that we hope to see corroborated in the next experiments on both the users and customers sides.
