Sharing is a dirty word. “Do we call hotels ‘bed sharing’? That’s way too intimate. Do we call bowling ‘shoe sharing’? Who would want to bowl?” The semantics of the word proved to be a major obstacle for Robin Chase when launching Zipcar. After conducting a sociological study, Chase learned that 40% of the people she talked to had an extremely negative reaction to… sharing. “The word makes people nervous.”
To be fair, sharing isn’t that easy after all. You have to cooperate. You don’t get what you want all the time. And you certainly can’t make any money by sharing, right? What if we were to throw those assumed truths out the window? What if, in 2009, sharing were easy? Yeah, it meant you had to cooperate (i.e. clean up after yourself, be on time, etc.) But what if, you could get what you wanted (almost) all the time? And finally, (are you listening entrepreneurs?) what if you could actually make money by sharing?
Chase’s first lot of Zipcars were eye-catchers – lime green VW beetles sporting the jazzy Z logo. She wanted to make her users feel they were in the know; that they were the ones who had figured it out. Sharing was cool and owning a car was “stupid.” Mark Levine from the New York Times described this transformational sociological shift where, “Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward.”
The way we share, what we share, and who we share things with is undergoing a transformational revolution thanks to advances in recent technology. The social networking internet based tools used in sites such as Twitter and Facebook have broken ground for innovating new ideas such as GoLoco and Connect by Hertz. Companies outside the mobility sector are marketing closed-loop products, such as Tandus, who has found a way to use old carpets to make new ones. Sharing? Maybe not exactly, but the fact that company’s interests are now more closely aligned with the consumer’s means: better quality, cooperation, providing services consumers want, and revenues which allow for company success.
Originally published at: Tragectoires Fluids | Groupe Chronos
