sharing economy | Superhype

Welcome to the age of sharing. Thanks to easy-to-use online markets like Airbnb and Uber, consumers are increasingly choosing to share goods and services with each other than buy from big brands. According to Fast Company, the so-called collaborative economy represents a $110 billion market. Now, for the first time, comes a report that helps marketers understand just who is doing the making and sharing of goods and services, and why they’re collaborating instead of buying. Sharing Is the New Buying, co-produced by Crowd Companies and VisionCritical, discusses the results of a survey of 90,112 people in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The report shatters a stereotype that participants in the collaborative economy consist of starving hipsters in Brooklyn or technology nerds in Silicon Valley. In fact, sharing has become mainstream. And brands that want to succeed in the sharing economy must tell stories around value and trust.

“Contrary to the image of sharers as tech-savvy urban hipsters, sharers are very much like the population as a whole: in other words, a lot like your customers,” write authors Jeremiah Owyang, Alexandra Samuel, and Andrew Grenville. “Sharers are part of the mainstream set of customers that businesses cannot ignore.”

Sharing Is the New Buying is an important read for any marketer who wishes to tap into the zeitgeist of the collaborative economy. After all, publications ranging from Forbes to The Guardian cite the sharing economy as an important trend affecting how business is conducted in 2014. So it’s no surprise that big brands such as Patagonia and BMW have been learning how to tap into sharing behaviors by offering ways to share goods instead of buying them outright. Sharing Is the New Buying offers a snapshot into who exactly is doing the sharing. Some key findings:

Sharers are mainstream, making up 40 percent of the general population, meaning 80 million Americans, 23 million Britons, and 10 million Canadians. People who rent and share from each other cut across a broad spectrum of demographics, with women comprising 55 percent of the sharing population.

Sharers are affluent: more than 27 percent of “neo-sharers” (users of emergent sharing services like Uber) have incomes between $50K-$100K, just like the overall population.

Sharers are young: about half of active participants in the sharing economy are between 18 and 34 years old.

Sharers are practical: most people share because of convenience and cost savings, as well as the desire for quality goods and services.

Savvy start-ups have already tapped into the wants and needs of sharing consumers, as have established brands. Airbnb has quickly challenged the hegemony of the larger hotel chains by making it possible for everyday people to Continue reading →

If you have ever rented your home or apartment to make extra income while you were on vacation, or if you’ve used a markplace like Lyft to rent a car from someone just like you, then congratulations are in order: you’re contributing to the rise of the $110 billion collaborative economy.

As consumers become more cost conscious and environmentally aware, we’re increasingly sharing goods and services with each other instead of buying new products from brands — behavior that Danielle Sacks of Fast Company labeled as the “sharing economy” (aka the collaborative economy) in 2011. And brands want a piece of the action, too. On the one hand, a new breed of start-ups such as Airbnb and Lyft have quickly established themselves as popular marketplaces to link people who want to rent to each other. And legacy brands such as BMW and Patagonia are helping consumers either rent (in the case of BMW) or buy gently used products (in the case of Patagonia) from each other.

To help brands embrace the collaborative economy, entrepreneur Jeremiah Owyang has launched Crowd Companies, a council of heavy hitter companies ranging from Ford to Whole Foods. Members of Crowd Companies are committed to helping brands learn new ways to collaborate with their customers instead of selling to them in the traditional way. Where appropriate, the council may foster partnerships among brands and start-ups to co-innovate. The council is akin to a think-tank and educational resource, earning its revenue from membership fees and from speeches and workshops. The organization is owned entirely by Owyang, who is also an active participant in the collaborative economy in his personal life, as he has discussed on his own blog.

Owyang recently took time to share more insight into the launch of Crowd Companies and the significance of the collaborative economy. As he points out in the following Q&A, the collaborative economy is not necessarily new — but the uptake of digital technology, in particular, mobile apps, has fueled an explosion of collaborative behavior among consumers. In fact, as Owyang says, the word “consumer” might become a thing of the past in the new world of economic collaboration. Here’s what he has to say:

How do you define the collaborative economy? How big is it, and why is it here to stay?

The collaborative economy is an economic model where people, corporations, and startups are creating products and sharing them. The traditional model of corporation-to-consumer is not the only model.

You’ve been an active participant in the collaborative economy in personal life. How did the collaborative economy first capture your interest?

We’ve all been active, as we’ve been using social media to source ideas, get confirmation, or share thoughts — so in some ways, the collaborative economy is not new. I’ve been using TaskRabbit for a few years, and before that renting via VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner), and before that eBay; so some of these technologies are not new. However, recently, with the adoption of mobile and location apps, we’re seeing greater velocity in the uptake of these tools. We can get access to idle resources in our own neighborhood (such as cars available on Uber) or even activate thousands of idle workers on CrowdFlower to solve complex problems.

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