The emergence of the collaborative economy

1

Escola Universitària d’Enginyeria Tècnica
de Telecomunicació La Salle
Final Thesis

THE
EMERGENCE
OF
THE
COLLABORATIVE
ECONOMY:

PRACTICES
FOR
SUCCEEDING
WHEN
BUILDING
A

COMMUNITY
IN
A
P2P
ENVIRONMENT

Student Promoter
BRUNO
BORRÁS
INSA

RICARDO
TORRES
KOMPEN

2

ACTA DE L'EXAMEN
DEL TREBALL FI DE GRAU

Meeting of the evaluating panel on this day, the student:
D. BRUNO
BORRÁS
INSA

Presented their final thesis on the following subject:
THE
EMERGENCE
OF
THE
COLLABORATIVE
ECONOMY:
PRACTICES

FOR
SUCCEEDING
WHEN
BUILDING
A
COMMUNITY
IN
A
P2P

ENVIRONMENT

At the end of the presentation and upon answering the questions of
the members of the panel, this thesis was awarded the following
grade:
Barcelona,
MEMBER OF THE PANEL MEMBER OF THE PANEL
PRESIDENT OF THE PANEL

3

Abstract

In the 21st century, one of the ten ideas that will change the world is the philosophy of
sharing instead of owning (Time, 2011). Under this premise, society is welcoming the
emergence of the Collaborative Economy (CE) as a disruptive economic model by
unleashing a movement
eager
to
collaborate
and
benefit
from
the
disintermediation

of
third
parties.
This
thesis
brings
together
success
factors
to
take
into
account

when
building
a
community
for
companies
that
work
within
a
Peer-‐to-‐Peer
(P2P)

environment.

4

Contents
page
and
work
count

Abstract
....................................................................................................................................
3

Contents
page
and
work
count
..........................................................................................
4

List
of
Tables
and
Abbreviations
......................................................................................
5

Acknowledgements
...............................................................................................................
6

Executive
Summary
..............................................................................................................
7

Introduction
............................................................................................................................
8

Literature
Review
..................................................................................................................
9

Technological
Perspective
............................................................................................................

9

Internet
and
Empowerment
of
Sharing
among
Individuals
.........................................................
9

Heading
to
Collaborative
Digital
Marketplaces
.............................................................................
11

Social
Perspective
.........................................................................................................................
13

Communities
as
Result
of
ICT
................................................................................................................
13

Trust
and
Reputation
in
the
Collaborative
Model
.........................................................................
15

Economic
Perspective
..................................................................................................................
17

Moving
towards
a
Collaborative
Economy
.......................................................................................
17

Traditional
Companies
in
the
Forthcoming
Economy
.................................................................
21

Background
...........................................................................................................................
23

Segments
in
the
Collaborative
Economy
.....................................................................................
23

P2P
Business
Model
and
Verticals
................................................................................................
25

Legal
Framework
in
the
P2P
Disruption
.....................................................................................
26

Future
and
Sustainability
..............................................................................................................
28

Methodology
.........................................................................................................................
30

Research
findings
&
Analysis
...........................................................................................
32

Field
Research
.................................................................................................................................
32

Results
...............................................................................................................................................
39

Discussion
.........................................................................................................................................
41

Conclusions
...........................................................................................................................
45

References
.............................................................................................................................
46

Appendix
................................................................................................................................
50

5

List
of
Tables
and
Abbreviations

List of Tables

Figure 1: Collaborative Economy Drivers

Figure 2: Trustman 1

Figure 3: Trustman 2

Figure 4: Startups Investment 2014

Figure 5: Havas Worldwide

Figure 6: Nielsen

Figure 7: HoneyComb

Figure 8: Content of Tweets

Figure 9: Airbnb Regulation Request

List of Abbreviations

P2P Peer to Peer

B2C Business to Consumer

CE

Collaborative
Economy

ICT

Information
and
Communication
Technologies

DIY Do It Yourself

SEO Search Engine Optimization

6

Acknowledgements

First of all I would like to thank my supervisor Ricardo Torres, I highly appreciate all
the help and support he has given throughout the thesis process. He opened the door of
his office from day one giving advice on the research question and the value proposition
of the paper. From there he guided me providing regular feedback that made my work
change for better when there was room for improvements. It has been a pleasure to have
him as an advisor and I hope we meet again in the future.

I would also like to thank those who have took their time to read the work and give me
their opinions, especially to professor Kerem Gurses and Cristobal Gracia from
Ouishare, whose points of view were key for the correct structure of the project.

I also express gratitude to my interview partners: Alexandra, Juanjo, Claudia, Andrea,
Nono and Enric, who willingly took time to answer the questions that triggered the
research findings and results.

Last but not least, I wholeheartedly want to thank my parents for giving me the
opportunity to study at La Salle. They are also responsible for all this work through
their support and constant motivation.

Thank
you!

Bruno
Borrás

7

Executive
Summary

The democratization of the access to Internet together with the advent of mobile
technologies have empowered individuals with cheaper and more efficient options at the
time to communicate, learn and consume. These improvements are responsible for the
boost of a social promotion of trust and a consequent economic development where
people interact without intermediaries and take advantage of the collaborative benefits
that technology brings. The result is a powerful P2P movement in which individuals are
sharing underutilized skills and stuff while getting goods and services from each other;
a more sustainable movement evolving at a speed and scale never seen before.

In this new economy, the main role for companies is to provide a place that enable
Internet users to act as on/offline resource providers/consumers when it suits them,
giving to everyone the option to become a taxi driver, to sleep in endless private places
around the world, or to teach virtually others through the net for example. So the
diversity of businesses within the CE is huge but all of them have 2 main points in
common: they are supported by a technical platform and need from a community of
members that participate in the initiative.

Internet’s collaborative value to consumers is affecting traditional players that are
experiencing how new ways of doing things in established sectors have not displaced
entirely the old ways but often changed them. The emerging model is now big and
disruptive enough for regulators and companies to have woken up to it while claiming
that collaborative companies blur the boundaries between doing things for personal
reasons and professionally, resulting in a legal gray area. Either way, the trend is
increasing its figures year after year demonstrating it is not a passing fad but has come
to stay, and old players will have to adapt themselves to the current situation rather than
relying on public institutions to regulate against the interests of society.

8

Introduction

This paper presents and analyzes the strategies that have led to six featured companies
who work collaboratively to create a community of members that benefits from sharing,
swapping, renting, bartering or even giving away their idle goods, services and
knowledge. To do so, qualitative research in form of interviews is used as a source to
highlight the main topics and categories formulated. The objective of these interviews
was to identify commonalities among their practices even though they operate in
different sectors, and come up with a roadmap supported by some recommendations
about how to build successfully a community in a P2P environment.
The research will
help to better understand how these companies incorporate their collaborative approach
in a world dominated by the traditional B2C and B2B economic models.

Previous to that, the emergence of the collaborative system is explained through the
breakdown of the three main drivers that have transformed the economy:

- The Technological driver approaches how Internet has empowered sharing among
individuals and has led people to collaborative marketplaces.

- The Social driver gives a point about how communities emerge as result of the
technological improvements, emphasizing the importance of trust and reputation in this
model.

- The Economic driver explains how society is moving towards a collaborative
economy due to the other drivers, and gives a sneak peak about how traditional
companies must behave in order to survive.

This paper also provides a background in order to clarify the meaning and scope of the
collaborative economy, going from the segments, business models and verticals that
conform it to the legal issues and sustainable benefits that brings with it.

9

Literature
Review

A new system enabled by the convergence of technological, social and economic
drivers is promoting collaboration in ways and on a scale never possible before. These
drivers are moving people away from centralized and individual forms of life toward
one of cooperation in which the sharing and exchange of assets, knowledge and skills
result in market efficiencies and business growth. Sometimes called sharing economy,
the Collaborative Economy (CE) is an economic model where ownership and access are
shared between corporations, startups and people (Owyang, 2013).

In the following pages, the literature review will be approached from three perspectives
listed as the main change drivers:

Technological
Perspective

Internet
and
Empowerment
of
Sharing
among
Individuals

The Internet started out as nothing more than a giant Bulletin Board System (BBS) that
allowed expert users to exchange software, data, messages, and news with each other
(Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Before 1995 individuals had no access to it, belonging
only to laboratories or research centers in military order. From that year onwards,
corporate web pages started giving the option to companies to create sites where
individuals could consult and make use of the content posted by the professionals of the
correspondent informatic departments. At that time the net was seen as “the archetype

10

displayed to represent all intelligence and interdependence” (Kelly, 2003) where
individuals may come across with all the information they found interesting and
important. By 2004, the advances in technology transformed the way to interact on the
net by democratising the communication and encouraging users to create, post and share
their own content transforming the way to relate with companies, states and other
people therefore welcoming the known by all Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). It was the first
time in history that the emergence of a new technology affected both the production
system and the way people transmit their knowledge (Roca, 2012) modifying so how
people learn, produce and organise as a society. Becoming a society where people had
some kind of access to the public sphere, in contrast with the other where citizens
approached media as mere consumers (Shirky, 2010), represented a revolution that
made possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content
without having to rely on intermediaries (Cohen and Schmidt, 2013) and resulted in a
hyperlinked world where solving problems anywhere, solved problems everywhere
(Diamandis and Kotler, 2012).

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of people connected to the
Internet worldwide increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. At the end of this
second decade, the number of people connected will reach the 7 billion (Cohen and
Schmidt, 2013) and this is in large part due to the rise and establishment of a new media
technology powered by the growing availability of high-speed Internet access: Social
Media stands for a group of Internet-based applications build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-
generated content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). It facilitates the social interaction
among people that create, share or exchange information and ideas in virtual
communities and networks (Ahlqvist; Bäck; Halonen and Heinonen, 2008). Social
Media has turned around the World Wide Web to what it was initially created for: a
platform to facilitate information exchange among users (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)
and because people have been using these sharing networks for over a decade, they are
used to the idea that someone on the other end of the Internet have something of value
that are willing to share and that makes people get comfortable transacting throughout
digital interfaces (Sundararajan, 2013).

Thanks to the several improvements that mobile technologies have experimented in
terms of hardware and software, another factor that has changed the way people interact
is the emergence of Smartphones. In the first decade of the 21st century the number of

11

mobile-phone subscribers rose from 750 million to well over 5 billion (Cohen and
Schmidt, 2013) which means the effects of the mass adoption are fully global and never
before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much information
and communication available at their fingertips. The rise of the Smartphones and such
hyperconnectivity have boosted the emergence of location-based technology where
GPS-mapping in real time gives users the possibility to locate the closest match of
goods/services at any place wanted at any time needed. At the same time, intelligent
Internet account and payment systems have facilitated the establishment of trust and
assurance for payment between strangers by providing easy invoicing and quick
transactions. The settlement of the above factors have empowered sharing between
individuals by transforming the way to collaborate, along with the way to build
businesses and use assets. Pretty much all the information in the world is available
digitally (Harris, 2011), making every scrap of knowledge that humans possess and
every thought considered worth preserving accessible, and that is why people begin to
imagine themselves as commoners asserting the human right and capacity to participate
in managing resources critical to their lives (Bollier, 2014).

Heading
to
Collaborative
Digital
Marketplaces

With the establishment of the Internet, society has started to look for new ways to
produce and exchange value, ways that are more open and efficient. Technology is a
resource-liberating mechanism that can make the once scarce the now abundant
(Diamandis and Kotler, 2012) and in consequence, people now live in a global village
where they can mimic the exchanges that used to take place face-to-face but on a scale
and in ways that had never been possible before (Bostman and Rogers, 2010B).

In any digital business all starts with a piece of software based on computer code
(Evans; Hagiu and Schmalensee, 2006) named ‘Platform’ that can be programmed and
customized by outside developers or users adapting it to countless needs and niches. It
mediates in the management of supply and demand by encapsulating and embedding all
kind of sophistications, but the platform itself does not have value since is a place that
fundamentally connects individuals who have assets or capabilities with people who
need these assets or capabilities (Sundararajan, 2013), so the value relies on the
community around it. The lower the friction in connecting the various sides, the greater
the value to the platform provider (Evans; Hagiu and Schmalensee, 2006).

12

As mentioned in the last topic, during the early adoption of the Internet all the content
generated came from developers and professionals in charge of the platforms, resulting
in a unidirectional transfer of value where users were seen as mere consumers of that
content. Nowadays things have changed and users can either adapt to the role of
consuming content or producing it becoming ‘Prosumers’ (Toffler, 1980) that establish
bidirectional communication (O’Reilly, 2005) with others and where the ones who take
the role of producers transfer units of value in multiple ways such as uploading videos,
generating tweets, writing posts in blogs or helping to fulfill pages on the Wikipedia.

The idea of sharing and collaborating has been around for a long time, and in the same
way Social Media has managed to connect worldwide people creating virtual networks,
these platforms intend to do so in the real world by building communities that exchange
value not only through the online but also crossing the borders of the offline in order to
share their assets, skills and knowledge. Online P2P platforms are making it cheaper
and easier to meet supply and demand when needed, empowering two-sided trading
platforms called ‘Marketplaces’ for efficient exchanges between producers and
consumers (Bostman and Rogers, 2010B) that can take both collaborative positions:
buyers & sellers, lenders & renters, teachers & students... (Owyang, 2013). This is
creating an ecosystem of disruption that is affecting many industries that claim for
regulations. Generally,
when
governments
step
in
a
marketplace
and
need
to

intervene
is
because
the
market
can
not
manage
itself,
what
is
happening
now
is

that
platforms,
due
to
trust
mechanisms
such
as
online
review
systems,
are
taking

over
some
of
the
rules
to
prevent
market
failure
that
historically
needed

governments
for
(Sundararajan,
2014). Every advancement of technology promotes
social trust, pushing trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people powered
marketplaces in an ecosystem of fair payments that ensure the safety of its community.
This safety provided is helping to blow up the industrial model of companies owning
and people consuming (Forbes, 2013) and now the way production is organized starts to
move from within corporations that employ thousands of people to P2P platforms that
employ a handful (Sundararajan, 2013).

13

Social
Perspective

Communities
as
Result
of
ICT

Individuals always had the desire to communicate and socialize with others in their
surroundings, and with the arrival of the Information and Communication Technologies
they got the option to reach it in real-time at a global scale. One of the main reasons
why people talk is because they want to belong to a group (Sernovitz, 2008) and this
necessity of belonging makes them to get organized in networks and take part in
communities across the Internet. In this digital world where everybody can be a value
producer and shared experiences are forms of social currency (Solis, 2011) members of
communities are increasingly defining themselves by their social profiles and what they
share rather than what they own (Cañigueral, 2013) which position the effects of
technologize the communication beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle
(Kelly, 2003).

Historically, brands were created to convey information about products at a time when
it was hard for consumers to get information, and companies were able to control the
information available through strategically placed press announcements and good public
relations managers. People chose what they wanted influenced in part by advertising
that had them “chasing cars and clothes, working in jobs they hate so they can buy shit
that don’t need” (Bostman and Rogers, 2010A). Today fewer intermediaries and
constraints are a reality due to the ease of communication among individuals, resulting
in direct P2P relationships that in most cases lead
to
a
humanization
of
the
exchanges

beyond
solely
commercial
purposes. In this context, companies can only influence
destiny instead of controlling it (Lowitt, 2013) while they have been increasingly
relegated to the sidelines as mere observers, having neither the knowledge nor the
chance to alter publicly posted comments provided by their users (Kaplan and Haenlein,
2010); Comments that could lead to both good or bad image. This hyper-networked and
data-engorged era is challenging the very reason for mass-market branding, because
what people want is governed not by advertising but what they hear about from their
communities (Sundararajan, 2013) and not necessarily their specific neighborhood but
their Internet enabled communities.

14

So a key factor for any business lies in creating a community around the brand. Users
interact in sites where there are already other users interacting, and in case nobody takes
profit of the platform it becomes useless.

In the case of the CE the inventory is brought by users, which means it is necessary for
companies to persuade an initial amount of them in order to have products to supply.
These early adopters are the ones that initially add value to let the companies keep
increasing their communities. The bigger the community, the bigger the value that each
member can extract from it. For instance Airbnb, a service that lets homeowners rent
space to a temporary renter, scales not by scaling inventory but by increasing the hosts
and travellers and matching them with each other. When the website launched in 2008 it
had only a few users in the major US cities that were producing value only to people
that looked for a place there. Today however the community has expanded to more than
34.000 cities from 194 countries benefiting from a place to sleep in almost every corner
of the world.

In the traditional economy, the users of a platform do not necessarily need to have
commonalities apart from being interested in the same product or service offered, so
they are not motivated to talk to each other beyond sharing a good advertising practice
through their communication channels. In the case of CE, being a member of a P2P
platform implies having to interact with the community in order to establish some
agreement that benefits both supply and demand. P2P platforms are the place where in
most cases the community interact without having direct contact with the brand, which
creates a marketplace that belongs to its users and the brand acts as a regulator agent.
Ultimately the experience that people value in the collaborative economy is the genuine
interaction with others which is most likely the most important benefit next to the
monetary rewards (Böckmann, 2013). This creates an environment where companies
can no longer think of its users as prospect clients but as a powerful community
(Cañigueral, 2013), businesses are the sum total of what people do and think when
interacting with their stuff (Sernovitz, 2008) so their job is to provide a place that
empowers the community to share their resources and capabilities.

15

Trust
and
Reputation
in
the
Collaborative
Model

‘Do not talk to strangers’ is an advice that is becoming outdated over time, thanks to
technology nobody is a stranger in the broadest sense of the word anymore. The Internet
stores a tremendous amount of information about users, ranging from the things they
buy, the places they visit or what they may be interested in based upon their browsing
activity. All this online activity is creating a digital footprint that coupled with the
profiles in the Social Networks makes the Internet a place where there is barely space
for anonymity. What Facebook has done, is that it has taken all of the real world social
capital that we have, digitizing and making it available for people to use and trust others
(Sundararajan, 2013) and this opens the door for the CE. The
ease
of
sharing

through
online
sites
has
come
to
make
it
simple
and
sensible
to
share
ownership
of

items
(Cañigueral,
2013)
and
so
offering
the
infinite possibility of cooperation to the
benefit of all.

Trust between strangers is the most important ingredient to get right, without this as a
stable building block, it is very difficult to achieve the right level of critical mass at any
given platform (Anderson, 2011) and through building this trust, systems scale rapidly
to support users who all have an inherent belief in the value and success of the system
(Lapsley, 2011). The most successful systems have built-in mechanisms for effectively
establishing that trust, such as CouchSurfing’s reference system and eBay’s buyer
feedback process (Anderson, 2011).

Once users become producers of value, the key for them to create trust is by taking care
of their online member profile, in late 2012 the ride-sharing company BlaBlaCar
released a study after collecting 631 responses among the members of its community on
how to assess trust. The report first asked participants to range from 0 to 5 how much
they trust friends, family, neighbors and strangers:

16

The study then took five ‘profile types’ in its online community: members with empty
profiles, just a photo, just a verified phone number, just positive ratings, and someone
with a complete member profile (photo, verified number, ratings, etc.):

Results show that members of an online community with a complete online profile are
almost on the same level of trust as a Friend or a Family member (Chronos and
BlaBlaCar, 2012).

The most important part in this process is to gain and maintain an acceptable reputation,
which basically represents the measurement of how much the community is trusting a
member so far depicted through online review systems (numeric rankings, stars, etc). In
the individual model, the invention of traditional credit transformed the consumer
system and the access to stuff was governed by how much money people have or how
much credit they can get. In the collaborative model, the new trust networks and the
reputation they generate are reinventing the way to think about the wealth, markets,
power and personal identity. All this is creating an ecosystem where the access is
governed not by the credit but by how well a member has used the shared asset
(Bostman, 2012A; Sundararajan, 2013).

The value of reputation is not a new concept to the online world, ratings and comments
have lead to incentives and recognition for many years, the difference today is the
ability to capture data from across an array of digital services such as Ebay, Amazon or
Etsy where members leave a trail of how well they can or cannot be trusted with every
trade made, comment left, spammer flagged or badge earned (Bostman, 2012A) and
ultimately with every connection they have built.

17

Economic
Perspective

Moving
towards
a
Collaborative
Economy

Once society feels comfortable with the idea that its real world identity is represented
online by social networks or system reviews, a much greater level of trust is facilitated,
and when there is a change in society’s trust mechanisms then a shift starts of what is
possible in the economy (Sundararajan, 2014). As pointed out in previous review, the
Internet has promoted the transfer of value for free, and the difference now is that this
idea is overstepping the boundaries of the virtual heading into the physical space to the
extent that the cost of transferring value through platforms that impact the real world
will be 0 (Rifkin, 2014) challenging thereby many market forces like the way to
produce, consume and distribute goods and services. While the past decade was about
finding new collaboration and innovation models on the web, this decade is about
applying them to the real world so that now is not only about the digital world where
people can be value producers (Anderson, 2012).

Revenue flowing through the CE directly into people’s wallets surpassed $3.5 billion in
2013 with a growth exceeding 25%. At that rate P2P sharing is moving from an income
boost in a stagnant wage market into a disruptive economic force (Forbes, 2013). An
increase in the interest of companies related with the CE can be recognized by the
amount of capital invested by business angels and venture capital societies in 2014 so
far, summing up a quantity that surpasses the $2.5 Billions (Owyang, 2014B):

18

Those who see the current entrepreneurial explosion as merely another dotcom bubble
(Kraay and Ventura, 2007) should think again since today’s digital primordial soup
contains the makings of the economy and perhaps even the government of tomorrow
(The Economist, 2014). “First, the people running the old economy don’t notice the
change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And
by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered
most of the time they had to adapt” (Shirky, 2012). It is time to witness the emergence
of a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part collaborative (Rifkin, 2014)
standing on some fundamental changes:

1) Access to assets triumphs over ownership: For the last 50 years the model of
consumption has been individual, if people wanted something they had to buy it and
own it in order to use it (Sundararajan, 2013) but what digitalization of media assets
such as photos, music or books has done is to allow people to experience that in most of
the cases what they wanted was not to own the physical product but to have access to
the service that it provides (Cañigueral, 2013). Companies like Spotify have disrupted
their industries by providing digital services that allow users to access to all the music
they want without having to buy physical CD’s that may only listen a few times. These
practices have changed the way to consume and while the 20th
century was about hyper-
consumption based on ownership of assets, consumption and simple disposal, the 21st
century is about collaborative consumption based on shared access (Bostman and
Rogers, 2010A). In early 2014, a total of 10,574 people from around the globe were
surveyed to develop a better understanding of people’s feelings about consumerism in
relation to economic growth and their own personal happiness. Results showed that
more than a half of respondents agreed that their country’s current economic model is
not working and claimed they could happily live without most of the items they own.
(Havas Worldwide, 2014):

19

In another study to measure the appetite for participation in share communities around
the world, Nielsen polled more than 30,000 Internet respondents in 60 countries to
identify who is joining. Results showed that more than two-thirds of global respondents
are willing to share their personal assets for financial gain and they are likely to use or
rent products and services from others. (Nielsen, 2014):

This collaborative boost is quietly turning millions of people into part-time
entrepreneurs and disrupting old notions about consumption (Forbes, 2013).

Once people have access to shared assets they increase the scope and variety of
consumption dramatically, and increases in variety lead to increases in the economic
activity (Sundararajan, 2014) driving the emerging intangible economy (Kelly, 2009)

2) Efficiency triumphs over scarcity: Nowadays thanks to the digital revolution every
sector of the global economy is being affected by the relentless drive for efficiency, the
world is basically moving to a new extremely efficient economy with a new mindset
and a new speed (Rifkin, 2014). This phenomenon essentially goes from an economy of
production where scarcity of resources makes impossible to satisfy all needs and
desires, to an economy of efficiency where resources are being used as effectively as
possible to satisfy people's needs and desires.

20

Even though people are buying less stuff from companies it is not slowing down the
economy because economic value is fundamentally created from economic
inefficiencies. When people use their assets more efficiently the productivity increases,
and productivity gains tend to lead to economic growth (Sundararajan, 2014) which
creates new value and replaces existing businesses. There may be a short-term negative
for the economy but long-term economic efficiencies result, and that’s ultimately good
for everyone (Forbes, 2013).

3) Distribution of value triumphs over concentration of value: Instead of thinking of
traditional employees and outsourcing the tasks that are not core to the business,
companies in the CE think about empowering their communities (Cañigueral, 2013) to
the extent that in lieu of working only in their jobs, its users start to become suppliers to
the platforms. At this point is clear that technology has empowered users by giving
them tools to decentralize the pyramid structure in which value is concentrated by a
few, bringing transparency to the information about the products, services and
companies. The dynamic of the society increasingly obey the logic of networks.
Understanding how horizontal networks work is the key to understanding how economy
works (Kelly, 2003) and the future belongs to enterprises that distribute control and
wealth with their community rather than concentrating it (Gorenflo, 2012). Companies
in the CE have no need to own a central infrastructure where to manage the assets, since
the inventory are the assets that belong to the users of the community.

In the traditional economy was each company’s job to have a full control of the quality
by means of employees checking that everything was working correctly as well as the
R&D projects are internal and secret. In the CE part of the workforce is the own
community, that takes control of the quality adding value through reviews and
uploading information about the inventory while the R&D projects are open and co-
created (Cañigueral, 2013) offering a greater feeling of connection and trustworthy
(Gansky, 2010). This might result in a reinvention of work where in a short time people
might not be working for one corporation but might be suppliers of assets and skills on
a variety of different platforms (Sundararajan, 2013).

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Traditional
Companies
in
the
Forthcoming
Economy

In the 20th century technological progress and development in companies was driven by
the needs of businesses. The 21st
century has experimented a change and the focus has
shifted to consumers, and now the big technologies are being developed not for
businesses and adapted to consumers but for consumers and then adapted to businesses
(Sundararajan, 2013). That results in sites where individuals want to take part and the
best example are Social Networks like Facebook or Twitter that have been able to
gather 1.23 billion and 232 million active users respectively (Tapin, 2014).

For traditional companies it is time to understand that their mission should not be to
waste time explaining how important they are, but do things that matter to people
(Stalman, 2014) because this is not an era of change, but rather a change of era in which
brands are defined by those who experience it (Solis, 2013) thanks to the powerful
speaker that Social Media has provided to society. At the same time, companies can no
longer act as monolithic, centralized, short-term revenue generation machines, instead
they must become inclusive, create shared value, and thrive amidst radical change
(Cicero, 2012). The focus should switch from protection to creation and from enclosure
to inclusion having in mind that companies are no longer the sole creator of a brand, it
must be co-created by consumers through shared experiences and defined by the results
of conversations with them (Solis, 2011).

The forthcoming economy is not just about new forms of retail transactions, it is about
an entirely new way of thinking about consumption, one that involves individuals not as
passive consumers but as active participants. Companies should be facilitators of
meaningful change whose inspiration comes directly from society at large, an entity for
which the future-proof enterprise shall necessarily provide more roles to contribute than
being just consumers (Cicero, 2012). In this case the discussion is not only about the
P2P movement but about a system and way of thinking that benefit both corporation
and individuals (Chase, 2012).

It is true that new collaborative startups enable people to get what they need from each
other instead of from big corporations, which opens the challenge for traditional
companies that should aim for the mission to become unique, inimitable and essential.
This can be achieved by leveraging a community, by creating a tribe of supporters and
fans around its services and products (Cicero, 2012). The way to do so is by providing

22

an essential corporate framework with its standards and brand promises, but it is not as
simple as building a platform and expecting people to show up, since platform users
need to be empowered by businesses who manage the resources and co-production
mechanisms in order to encourage the community to create and exchange value (Chase,
2012), but in any case companies can manage the community itself. Community
organizing is all about building grassroots support, it is about identifying the people
around with whom they can create a common, passionate cause. And it is about
ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by
very different rules (Peters, 1999) leveraging the innovative capacity of users and
transforming it into business growth.

23

Background

In order to better comprehend the distinct factors that affect the CE and the current
situation of the movement, the following pages seek to explain which are the segments,
P2P business models and verticals that are nowadays transforming the traditional
economy. Following, it gives a fast vision of how collaborative disruption is struggling
with the legal framework and impacting sustainability.

Segments
in
the
Collaborative
Economy

According to the collaborative and non-profit organization ‘Ouishare’, the CE is defined
as practices and business models based on horizontal networks and participation of a
community. It is built on distributed power and trust within communities as opposed to
centralized institutions blurring the lines between producer and consumer. These
communities meet and interact on online networks as well as in offline shared spaces.
The phenomena leverages technology to empower individuals or organisations to
distribute, share and re-use excess capacity in goods/services resulting in an ecosystem
where to take profit of each others stuff, abilities, money and knowledges. It is seen as
the sum of the following segments:

Consumption

Collaborative consumption gives its name to the seamless circulation of products and
services among individuals fostering access over ownership and reducing waste. It
describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being
reinvented through the latest technologies and P2P marketplaces in ways and on a scale
never possible before (Bostman and Rogers, 2010A).

Companies in the collaborative consumption compete in established industries in a
different way. They have noticed that people are surrounded by underutilized assets like
housing space, idle cars or even untapped skills, so what companies essentially do is to
leverage technology to build P2P marketplaces and bring down the price point for
consumers while improving the take-rate of suppliers, that are the own community.

24

Production

Because of the expertise, equipment, and costs of producing things on a large scale,
manufacturing has been mostly the provenance of big companies and trained
professionals (Anderson, 2012) but all these years of web development have served to
reach the point of maturity for bits to open a new dimension to the atoms by using
digital tools to create new product designs and prototyping.

Open design and manufacturing democratize the process of designing, producing and
distributing physical goods by combining open knowledge with distributed
infrastructures. They rely on tools such as 3D printers or laser cutters, spaces such as
co-workings or fablabs, communities and marketplaces that are fueled by the maker
movement and the DIY culture.

Knowledge

Over the next years, three billion new individuals will be coming online joining the
global conversation and contributing to the global economy with ideas that will result in
new discoveries, products and inventions that benefit society (Diamandis and Kotler,
2012). Such ecosystem will be possible because knowledge no longer comes from a few
individuals certified as professors or researchers, but from anyone around that has
access to the internet.

Open knowledge enables everyone to freely use, reuse, and redistribute knowledge such
as content, data, code or designs. This principle is the foundation of commons-based
peer production (such as free software, the creative commons or open science) as well
as open education, open data and open governance. “The illiterate of the 21st
century are
not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”
(Toffler, 1993).

Finance

In the last century, financial innovations such as mortgages, insurance, venture finding,
stocks, checks, credit cards or mutual funds have completely reshaped the economy. As
tremendous as the influence of these financial inventions has been, the influence of
network inventions will be greater (Kelly, 2003). Actual consequences of the CE are
crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, P2P money lending platforms such as Kiva
or even cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin that enable new forms of circulation of the

25

capital between individuals. That means funding no longer depends on banks but may
also depend on a community that offer credits with better conditions, challenging so
older institutions that are witnessing the emergence of strong financial alternatives.

P2P
Business
Model
and
Verticals

The first wave of collaborative companies pursued business-to-consumer (B2C) go-to-
market strategies. In this model companies acquire, maintain and rent products acting as
upgrades of the old rental businesses providing more convenience for the end users but
not much innovation in terms of business model. For instance the car-sharing company
Zipcar acquired a fleet of cars in order to rent them to their members who shared the
assets without having any personal contact, but costs of managing car fleets were
substantial and the company spent 71% of 2010 revenues acquiring and servicing cars
(MIT, 2011).

In the 21st century the emergence of new web technologies and an increase in the
Internet bandwidth and availability combined with an increase in the accessibility of
Smartphones and other mobile devices have enabled the community-based business
model, a P2P model in which the community is the main resource for the delivery of
value proposition.

On one hand this model is much more capital-efficient than their B2C counterparts
because it does not require any capital investment to acquire assets, it relies on a
community to supply the assets typically in exchange for a revenue share of the
transaction. Companies play as a matchmaker bringing supply and demand together in a
P2P marketplace that costs very little to set up. Companies take a cut of the transaction
for the cost of developing and maintaining the technology as well as for profits. On the
other hand, due to its P2P nature, in many cases the acquisition of new users comes
from the community itself so that enables companies to scale in a fast pace and hence
helping the business with economic viability and growth capacity. As an example, some
articles (Watt, 2014) show that Airbnb has amassed the same number of rooms for rent
in just four years that it took 65 years for the Intercontinental Hotels Group, the largest
hotel chain in the world.

In the following representation (Owyang, 2014A) the CE outlook is organized in P2P
verticals that englobe the six sectors disrupted so far: goods, services, food,
transportation, space and money. For a clearer understanding, each sector is broken

26

down into 2 or 3 sub-classes that include different examples of companies such as Ebay,
Kickstarter or Uber:

Legal
Framework
in
the
P2P
Disruption

In the economy that has ruled the physical world for many years, mechanisms of
democratic politics and constitutional law have worked to protect citizens rights
drawing the lines between doing things for personal reasons and doing things
professionally. What is happening now is a blending of both personal and commercial
profiles since people’s physical lives depend on what they can or cannot do in the new
digital spaces (MacKinnon, 2012; Sundararajan, 2014). This is triggering an innovative
disruption that turns non-professional individuals in occasional taxi drivers, hotel room
providers or restaurant owners among others. In the words of Clay Shirky, writer and
professor of the New York University, any innovative disruption goes through 5 stages
of adoption: technical possibility, social adoption, regulatory reaction, civil

27

disobedience and negotiated settlement (Scola, 2014). In the case of the P2P disruption,
the process is now at least on stage two witnessing how the innovation is requested by
the society and therefore becoming unstoppable. Once it arrives to the third stage, the
situation represents a lot of regulatory challenges in a lawless environment that is ahead
of the current laws, depicting a market in which new services are being used before
legality can even catch up.

Traditional players are seeing how new companies with a P2P business model are
progressively taking over part of their market share. As an example, a recent study
released by the Boston University concludes that a 1% increase in Airbnb site’s listings
in a given market would result in a 0.05% decrease in quarterly hotel revenues (Zervas,
Proserpio and Byers, 2014). As result, corporate lobbies are now pushing governments
to take action against these companies as they claim are unfair competition to them, but
institutions need to reflect the will of the people as a whole, as distinct from
representing mainly special interest groups (MacKinnon, 2012). Neelie Kroes, Vice
president of the EU Commission, declared that “We cannot criminalise a whole class of
citizens, or drive tourists away from places that need money, in order to protect a few
industries that think they can be exempt from the digital revolution. It’s not fair on
everyone else, and it’s not realistic” (Kroes, 2014). She also posted the following tweet:

If political rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are
indispensable to make political rights real and keep them in operation (Bauman, 2011).
In the CE when a company faces regulatory tensions, instead of lobbing it can delegate
their users to campaign on its behalf. Individuals within a community band together to
come up with a solution that will work for them, and so unleashing the fourth stage of
civil disobedience. For instance, after a Catalan government’s decision to fine Airbnb
with 30.000€ in 2014, more than 600 hosts and supporters from Barcelona’s small
business community gathered offline to show their support for home sharing. Also an
Airbnb host started a petition in the platform www.change.org that gathered more than
8.000 signatures, in which asks the Mayor to work with the Catalan government to
adopt new fair rules for home sharing (Change, 2014):

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Future
and
Sustainability

Today capitalism ignores the environmental and social impacts of business activities
while the public sector allows to prioritize the interests of the few at the expense of the
many (Lewitt, 2013). Humanity is using thirty percent more of the planet’s natural
resources than it can replace and if everyone on this planet wanted to live with the
lifestyle of the average European or North American, it would need from three to five
planets worth of resources to pull it off (Diamandis and Kotler, 2012). In a recent study
that surveyed 10.574 people around the globe, seven in 10 respondents agreed that

29

overconsumption is actually putting both the planet and society at risk (Havas
Worldwide, 2014) evidencing that society has the responsibility to react in the interests
of the common and future good by empowering a new economic model to secure the
future (Lewitt, 2013). By mid-century roughly three billion more people will be joining
the planet, and businesses that figure out more efficient ways to use the earth’s
resources will be the ones that thrive (Gansky, 2010). In this context, the CE opens the
door to a far more efficient way of using what people already have by proposing a P2P
model that optimizes resources to the benefit of other consumers and the environment.

Through reusing, sharing, repairing and redistributing goods society can significantly
reduce the inefficient consumption and therefore their residual footprint on earth. In a
sense, the model also gives a solution to fight the planned obsolescence in which
manufacturers shorten the life of the products to increase sales, because it allows users
to have access to someone else’s goods without having to buy new ones, resulting in a
more sustainable way to behave in the long-term.

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Methodology

The reading of featured articles and bestselling books together with the use of other
academic tools such as Google Scholar has helped me to make use of secondary data
mainly summarized in the Literature Review and the Background.

Since the objective of this paper is to identify successful practices when building a
community in a P2P environment, primary research was also needed in order to seek
answers to that question. In this context, I decided to use a qualitative method looking
for a more specific way to approach the narrative and inquire into recommendations, so
decided to conduct interviews via email, face to face and skype to 6 professionals
representing companies that hog the verticals where the CE is present so far (Goods,
Services, Money, Space, Transport and Food).

According to the website ‘meshing.it’ there are over 9.000 companies that foster the
P2P movement as the main asset of their value proposition, but only a few have
managed to attract the attention of a community of users engaged as an active part in
their platforms. I have taken as a sample 6 companies recently established (less than 5
years of life) that have succeeded in building a community of more than 10.000
members and in turn have managed to raise at least 350K€ of financing from investment
funds and business angels (Except Goteo which is a non-profit company). The
interviewees were:

- Alexandra Ramio, Marketing & Communications Manager at SocialCar

- Andrea Ruani, Community Manager at Eatwith

- Enric Senabre, Projects Coordinator & Community Manager at Goteo

- Juanjo Rodriguez, Co-Founder & CEO of Knok

- Claudia Peyri, Marketing Manager at Trip4Real

- Nono Ruiz, Co-Founder & CEO of Chicfy

I used the same questionnaire in all the interviews conducted as a way to find
company’s best practices and detect common phenomena on why their strategies have
stood out from the rest. To do so, I developed a questionnaire containing questions
focused in 5 marketing topics: Branding & Awareness, Trust & Security, New Members
Acquisition, Reach & Visibility and Loyalty & Engagement.

31

After translating the original version in English, Interviews are analyzed using the
Coding method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), in which a qualitative analysis of data is
processed in order to highlight relevant pieces that will be called ‘codes’. Pieces are
labeled as codes when are repeated in several interviews, when the interviewee
explicitly states that something is important, when I have read about something similar
in previously published academic articles, when pieces match with concepts and
theories explained in the literature review or when the I consider them surprising and
worth to remark. After applying the coding method to all the interviews, ‘categories’ are
created by bringing codes of different respondents together in order to conceptualize
and make sense of unstructured data. A hierarchy among categories is established based
on the number of times a similar code is endorsed throughout interviews. In a further
step, connections among categories are drawn allowing a discussion of the results
coming up with interpretations formulated.

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Research
findings
&
Analysis

As a way to structure the fluency of the research within the paper, a DIKW Pyramid
model (Ackoff, 1989) is adapted going through the layers of data, information and
knowledge.

First of all, qualitative data is collected from 6 interviews conducted to companies
related with the different verticals previously shown in the Background. After
answering the research questions, each interviewee brings statements (codes) that not
necessarily need to have relation with the views and opinions of the other interviewees,
so the heading Field Research announces the impressions of all respondents without any
correlation sought. In the next step, the qualitative data provided by the 6 respondents is
used to identify relationships in answers in order to obtain information bodies
(categories). The heading Results aims to extract meanings of the various points of view
by detecting commonalities among respondents while understanding the different
practices carried out regardless of the diverse sectors that form the sample. Ultimately,
knowledge occurs when the data from interviews is represented in a collection of
information bodies that connect in order to convey useful messages. These inputs will
be formulated under the heading Discussion as recommendations about practices for
succeeding when building a community in a P2P environment.

Field
Research

This section summarizes the interviews taken to the 6 partners that agreed to collaborate
in the research of how to succeed when building a community in the CE:

SocialCar’s Interview

Alexandra Ramio is Marketing & Communications Manager at SocialCar, a P2P car-
sharing company founded in 2011 that has a community of more than 35.000 members
and managed to raise 1M€ from investors. Taking into account it is an innovative
alternative of mobility, Alexandra explains the most important matter when starting the
company was to put all the efforts in making people understand the benefits of using the
business and the value they can extract from it. ‘The challenge for any marketplace in

33

the CE is to transmit correctly the message either to supply and demand, all having in
mind that the platform will be the same for both sides’. To do so, is required to set the
initial resources into providing a great customer service, offering clear ways to contact
and resolve queries as well as being active in Social Networks looking out doubts that
the community may have. ‘Being transparent all the time is the best way to create trust
and come up with a service with all the necessary safeguards’. She states that the
subsequent step is to invest in communication in order to position the brand as a
referent in the top of mind helping to increase the awareness among potential members.
In any case, even though channels like Google Adwords work fine, she proclaims as the
best acquisition channel the word of mouth due to the following three reasons: 1) It is
free 2) Is viral, so acquires new members exponentially 3) Creates more loyalty than
any other channel since a recommendation from a person you know is the best
marketing campaign possible. It is remarkable that suppliers act like micro-
entrepreneurs that promote their assets through all the communication channels they
find available, which boosts the reach of the business. Another way to tackle the reach
strategy is by promoting partnerships with other companies as long as the alliance
makes sense when thinking about benefits for members and as long as exists synergies
between the two communities, otherwise might be perceived as intrusive advertisement.
Once talking about developing loyalty among members, Alexandra stands that is
important to have presence in physical meetings such as conferences, fairs and
congresses to demonstrate that there is a team of people behind the platform eager to
tackle the problems of their community. ‘The online world always needs of an offline
relationship with users’. This match of both worlds brings back a main advice that she
gives to all the companies that do not experiment an increase in their communities,
which is to attend to featured events in order to boost their visibility and foster
networking with people that may become users or may have an impact in reaching other
users.

Eatwith’s Interview

Andrea Ruani is Community Manager at Eatwith, a P2P meal-sharing company founded
in 2012 that has a community of more than 30.000 members and managed to raise
900K€ from investors. Andrea explains they set out their promotion strategy by
frequenting physical places where it was already a collaborative environment

34

established such as co-working spaces. ‘That was our touchpoint with the real world,
wherein we leveraged as well to arrange meetings with the first early adopters with the
purpose of helping us grow with their opinions and concerns. In an early stage is crucial
to take off the role of employee and put yourself as a member, that is when you
understand that the same experience might have several points of view’. Since Eatwith
represents a disruptive way of consuming, in order to provide security to visitors they
realized it was essential to create a high-quality platform with a clear identity and a
defined interface. ‘The intention was to first ignite curiosity in the ‘techie’ users, which
is a profile of user eager to discover new services and experiences, so through their
interest end up approaching other profiles that are not that internet-oriented’. From there
the company based its itinerary in pushing the use of the word of mouth among the
members of its community seeking to create trust around the business. To do so, they
made available to members a bunch of tools ranging from business cards, customized
URL’s (to share through Social Networks) or Facebook Ads promotions on the supply
side, to providing rewards or discount codes for members that write reviews about their
experience on the demand side. Nevertheless, he gives the advice of constantly
overseeing the progress of the community because in his opinion, the website should
not lose the value of showing empathic connections among members rather than
lucrative purposes. When asked about another reach techniques, he claims that working
with bloggers or influencers is good to a certain level, and companies must opt for the
ones that have a small community of active followers over the ones that have a huge
volume of them. In the last matter discussed, Andrea stands that the importance of the
offline events lies in the generation of a context wherewith have the option to
brainstorm with the community while is also an opportunity to inspire the members that
are suppliers. He also highlights that ‘The main goal when supporting campaigns is to
let the community create loyalty by themselves in a natural way, so that every action
conducted is not perceived as an effort but as a pleasure’.

Goteo’s Interview

Enric Senabre is Projects Coordinator & Community Manager at Goteo, a
Crowdfunding company founded in 2011 that has a community of more than 50.000
members. He started the interview pointing about the importance of spending time and
conversations, rather than money, when building the brand. ‘We tried to get into

35

discussions and reflections about our field even before having the platform completed,
so by the time we launched a bunch of people were promoting us for free’. These early
adopters are also crucial in the confidence and security campaigns because infect other
people to check the service and encourage potential members to trust in the platform.
There are other basic mechanisms to promote trust as well for example by refunding the
money quickly in case of failure, permit members unsubscribe easily, keep an updated
back office or taking seriously the customer service. The latter also affects in the fight
of being perceived as a transparent business but requires time and constancy, the same
happens in the promotion of awareness through own communication channels, which is
a constant job of thinking out loud in Social Networks and updating frequently the blog.
When asked about the acquisition methods his response is unequivocal, Goteo only
acquires new members through the word of mouth and do not spend money in paid
channels. At the same time, they rely on fostering partnerships with public and private
institutions as well as with influencers with a high reputation on the field. ‘This strategy
has produced a boost of visibility and prestige of the business while cross-diffusion
dynamics have helped us validate new developments for the website’. In a more
advanced point of the interview, to work conditioned on the feedback provided by the
community and come up with a minimum viable product are his main advises. He
recommends giving voice to members as soon as possible co-designing the service with
them and work under a beta stage as long as possible progressing slowly but surely. In
his opinion events are essential not for creating loyalty but as an opportunity to interact
with the community in a closer way. ‘Events are an excellent choice for sharing
progress and open participatory dynamics with members, this kind of interactions result
in learning and a consequent improvement of the platform’.

Knok’s Interview

Juanjo Rodriguez is the Co-Founder & CEO of Knok, a P2P space-swapping company
founded in 2011 that has a community of more than 60.000 members and managed to
raise 500K€ from investors. When asked about how to proceed in the initial steps of a
collaborative business, he refuses the option of investing in Branding since is very
difficult to get the minimum amount of money that might let a small company stand out
from the other competitors that are fighting to gain the attention of users. ‘Companies
that manage to create a correct Branding are those who deal first with offering

36

something that people may be looking for, so get a significant amount of members
before moving to invest in the brand’. Following, he explains how the difficulty of
creating trust in the community depends on the service provided, since user’s
confidence demands vary based on how risky or innovative the service is. Creating trust
should be a priority for any company, and these are three critical points based on his
experience: 1) Provide a good technology, the platform must be attractive and user-
friendly 2) Make easy for users to contact in case of necessity, customer service is key
3) Oversee that the general behavior and conduct among the members of the community
meet with the values the company wants to transmit, because brand’s image and trust
also depends on the current users. Later on, Juanjo illustrates the importance of the
word of mouth claiming that at least 50% of the acquisition of new members should
come from this organic method. That figure depends on how viral is the service and
whether it is free or requires the user to pay, free services are more likely for the word
of mouth. ‘It is true that other paid channels such as Facebook ads or Google Adwords
are very useful in many phases of the business but is complicated to keep the
sustainability when depending on them’. He advises that companies in the CE should
focus on getting a core of members that begin to experiment with the platform and rely
on them to spread the word, ‘In practice is a much better reach strategy than promoting
partnerships with other companies or working along with influencers or bloggers’. At
the same time, is indispensable to listen the opinions and suggestions of the early users
since almost all the businesses see how their initial idea gets modified and end up doing
something different depending on the feedback they receive from their communities. In
his opinion, the best way to retain members is by making sure they like what they see
on the platform, all other marketing actions such as events or contests are secondary. ‘I
rather invest in product development because having the best website is the easiest form
to achieve loyalty actions’.

Trip4Real’s Interview

Claudia Peyri is Marketing Manager at Trip4Real, a P2P experiences-sharing company
founded in 2013 that has a community of more than 15.000 members and managed to
raise 1M€ from investors. In her opinion, is interesting to run a branding campaign
during the initial months of life in case the company is related with an innovative
concept of doing things that requires of an explanation from scratch. ‘In our case it was

37

very important to be disclosed through media communication campaigns in order to let
the local users know about the existence of our service’. From there it is extremely
important to count with a customized customer service that provides immediate
responses to the questions and problems that either the actual community or the
potential members may have. A close contact is necessary to generate engagement and
open the door for people to spread the word about the business. ‘Members that get to us
because of the word of mouth become more involved with the brand, since it means
they have been told our service is worth it’. In addition, Claudia explains they are likely
to work with bloggers after making sure which ones are appropriate for communicating
to the audience they want to arrive. ‘The best case scenario is when bloggers generate
quality content about us and include links to our website producing an impact in SEO as
well’. On the other hand, influencers and partnerships represent a remarkable strategy as
long as there is a shared philosophy and values between both sides, Trip4Real has
experimented this phenomena by joining forces with the worldwide known Ferran
Adria. As a main advice, she recommends to never stop generating contexts wherein
make some noise whether it is through breaking content or creative campaigns in order
to stretch the line between being a member and become a brand’s fan. ‘It is all about
learning-by-doing, testing with the trial and error method until get it right and approach
virality’. In the last question, she claims that apart from developing a detailed email-
marketing strategy, the most important thing when dealing with member’s loyalty is to
have in mind they like to feel identified and be protagonists, so beyond seeking auto-
promotion, physical events are great to make the community participate and that is
when the brand gets positioned in the top of mind. ‘Besides all this, Trip4Real has a
quality control department to emphasize our philosophy is applied to any of the
activities offered’.

Chicfy’s Interview

Nono Ruiz is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chicfy: a P2P goods-trading company founded
in 2013 that has a community of more than 20.000 members and managed to raise
360K€ from investors. Under his experience, when a collaborative company is in its
beginnings should not invest much money in Marketing but rather invest in time to
investigate in product development. ‘The most important Marketing strategy is to
recruit a small group of people (Type A) and convince them to be the first members of

38

your community, these users should be able to naturally inspire and provoke others to
check the platform as well’. He insists about the importance of selecting accurately
these 5 to 10 early adopters since they will be in charge of creating trust around the
business. He advises the minimum effective dose (MED) as a work measure to adopt,
which means asking what is the minimum number of type A members that will lead to
a rapid product growth and who are this members. The bigger the time spent analyzing
them, the higher the guarantees than other similar users (Type B) might use the service
addictively and beneficially to the community. ‘Once usage addiction and product
traction are achieved it is time to go for the rest of the users (Type C)’. He defends this
strategy by claiming that members obtained through the word of mouth present better
metrics and conversion rates than members obtained through paid channels. This occurs
because the firsts browse the website by their own choice exploring and asking about
how to get the most out of the service while the seconds leave if do not like what they
see at first sight. Ultimately, he summarizes the interview with the following tips: 1) It
gives very good results working with profiles able to promote the use of products by
imitation 2) The adoption of type A members must be associated with an excellent
customer service and an extreme fixation in improving the product development 3) In a
community-based model members are king and companies should facilitate the most
their interaction with the platform.

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Results

This section summarizes all the interviews into a large table in which columns are
broken down in marketing topics, codes, categories and endorsements. Marketing topics
are subsequently explained:
Branding seeks giving the business a recognizable identity that differentiates it from
other companies that offer similar services. Awareness stands for making people aware
about the business and position the brand in the top of mind.

Trust and Security are necessary for the development of the business. User’s
confidence has been a main aspect of the digital space since the arrival of the Internet.

Acquisition of New Members is key in order to enlarge the supply and demand sides
of any collaborative business.

Reach Strategy & Visibility refers to alternative ways of getting to a target of users
who may become members of the community.

Member’s loyalty & Engagement focus on the process of retaining existing members
through incentives and other programs.

41

Discussion

In order to clarify the results obtained in the previous section, the following scheme
indicates the connections established in the the process of building a community in a
P2P environment. These connections are drawn with thick and thin arrows depending
on whether they point out particular categories or the whole marketing topic:

42

After conducting the interviews and disclosed the consequent results, this scheme
makes clear that despite the fact that the six companies work in diverse sectors,
nevertheless have similar advices and strategies regarding how to approach
communities. I have come up with some guidelines based upon the previous scheme:

I) As any collaborative business implies a new innovative alternative of doing things
(swap your house with foreigners, share your car with strangers, invest in other people
projects...), the first step lies in building a minimum viable product to corroborate
whether the service you are developing is moving towards the right direction and meets
the needs of the audience targeted. To do so have in mind that P2P platforms aim to
provide a place wherein members can connect without the direct intermediation of the
company, being a marketplace that belongs to the community. It is vital to plainly
transmit the value proposition of the brand in order to make people understand the
benefits of using the website, and a good way to tackle the matter is through owned
media. By adopting a corporative blog and having presence in the appropriate social
networks, you can start creating distinctive content for the sector while promoting
awareness and receiving helpful inputs about your project even before launching the
beta process.

II) Once value proposition is clearly defined, the question of how to start building the
brand arises. The interviewees have clearly emphasized their bet on bootstrapping at an
early stage, which means spending time and conversations with users that may lead to
improvements rather than employ the initial resources investing in marketing actions.
Such conversations, along with the creation of a high-quality platform and the
demonstration of an attentive customer service, are key factors to persuade an initial
amount of people to become the first members of your community and begin to
experiment with the platform. These early adopters are essential to spread security
around the website and ignite interest in other potential members that will end up
trusting as well, welcoming so the emergence of the word of mouth as an acquisition
channel. In a more advanced stage of the business, after gaining scale with a significant
amount of loyal members and maybe raise some funding from investors, it is a good
strategy to invest in media in order to promote branding of the collaborative business
and position the brand as a referent in the top of mind.

43

III) As mentioned in the Results, creation of trust and security is indispensable in any
digital company and even more so in the ones that disrupt sectors operating in the same
manner for a long time. The level of trust required really depends on how risky or
innovative is the service, considering that is not the same to get into the car of an
stranger than swapping clothes with other people without having direct contact.
Interviewees point out three significant aspects to inspire confidence in potential and
current members: The most important one in order to be perceived as a transparent
business is the configuration of a relentless customer service. It has to offer clear ways
to contact with the company, be available at any time in case of necessity, provide
immediate customized responses and be active in social networks. The combination of
these variables will open the door for members to spread the word about the excellent
treatment they have received while it also can be used as a tool for getting feedback.
The second aspect relies on the technology behind the platform; the interface must be
attractive, user-friendly and defined with the identity and values you want to transmit.
Product development functionalities like permitting members unsubscribe easily and
refunding the money quickly in case of failure enhance security with the company. The
last aspect has to do with the behaviour of the community; companies in the CE never
have to try to manage the progress of the community but rather oversee that the general
conduct meets with the values desired to transmit and get feedback about their
connections and purposes.

IV) The acquisition strategy always needs to be depicted around empowering the word
of mouth. Members acquired through this channel are the most valuable since they have
been told by other users that the service is worth it, and such recommendation is the best
marketing campaign possible. It is why word of mouth creates trust and security
beforehand, which makes new members become more engaged with the brand and
willing to browse the website by their own choice exploring and asking about how to
get the most out of the service. Since the supply side of a collaborative business act like
micro-entrepreneurs eager to promote their assets, interviewees recommend to provide
them tools like business cards (to remain in the top of mind) or customized URL’s (to
reach a higher audience through social networks). Moreover, paid channels such as
Google Adwords or Facebook Ads aid to acquire new members in many phases of the
business but companies should not depend drastically on them to build the community.

44

V) An additional way to boost the acquisition of new members is through exploiting
other channels that do not belong to the company itself, so represent an opportunity to
get visibility and raise awareness within a target of users that are more difficult to reach
at first. Interviewees highlight three channels to communicate through: The option more
endorsed is to partner with bloggers and influencers because it gives good results
working with profiles able to promote the use of products by imitation, but at the same
time is necessary to make sure which ones are appropriate for communicating to the
audience you want to arrive. Look for professionals with a high reputation on the field
and take into account that is better to opt for the ones that have a small community of
active followers over the ones that have a huge volume perhaps plenty of fake
followers. Another option to partner is with other companies as long as the alliance
benefits your members and exists a shared philosophy of values between the two
communities. This kind of synergies might bring prestige to the business but might also
be perceived as intrusive advertisement in case of abuse. Finally, is interesting to
communicate in mass media when your company is pushing a new way of doing things
that requires of an explanation from scratch as well as for promoting your brand to a
biggest audience.

VI) The last recommendation has to do with the management of the loyalty of your
community, this topic aims to retain the actual members by learning from them and
come up with improvements to increase their engagement. Under this premise,
interviewees point out physical events as a great choice for making members feel
protagonist and strengthen the relationship with the supplier side of the community by
creating participatory dynamics. Events are also the perfect moment to share the
business progress and connect with the channels mentioned in the point V because they
facilitate a context plenty of interesting content and networking. At the same time, are
favorable to open a relation towards receiving personal feedback shaped like concerns,
suggestions or even brainstorming with active members. It is necessary to work always
conditioned on the feedback provided, and other ways to get such opinions are through
learning from the customer service and the community behaviour. Once you know the
areas for improvement, invest in product development to implement them and thereafter
loyalty actions are achieved via your platform is better than the rest. Reinforce your
messages with a detailed email-marketing strategy and establish a fair incentive
program as an acknowledgement to the heavier members within the community.

45

Conclusions

This
thesis
sought
to
address
the
emergence
of
the
CE
and
looked
for
good

practices
about
how
to
build
a
community
in
a
P2P
environment.
It
first
has

provided
the
reader
with
an
overview
of
literature
helping
to
understand
the
key

concepts
related
to
the
topic
and
its
prevailing
issues.
Then,
thanks
to
interviews

conducted
to
six
professionals
related
with
the
sectors
affected
so
far,
one
can
see

how
these
successful
companies
bring
similar
advises
that
have
been
depicted

through
marketing
topics
and
categories
in
order
to
facilitate
the
understanding
of

their
business
strategies.
This
paper
has,
thus,
provided
recommendations
to
those

who
are
stucked
in
the
process
of
creating
a
P2P
community
or
those
who
are

about
to
start
a
company
related
with
the
field.

The
main
limitation
to
this
thesis
was
the
fact
that
the
collaborative
economy
is
a

relatively
new
topic
and
brands
have
only
recently
acquired
visibility
and

recognition,
so
despite
its
growing
in
practical
importance,
there
is
a
dearth
of

empirical
studies
and
a
lack
of
academic
research
on
how
to
create
a
community.

Companies
selected
as
part
of
the
sample
share
information
about
how
big
is
their

users
database,
but
another
limitation
is
I
really
do
not
know
the
number
of
active

members
within
their
communities.
When
talking
about
the
interviews,
it
is

necessary
to
mention
that
each
company
interviewed
belongs
to
a
different
sector

so
they
might
present
particular
cases
for
the
market
they
operate
to.
It
is
also

remarkable
that
even
though
each
one
of
the
interviewees
was
asked
in
the
same

way,
questions
were
open
so
they
might
come
with
different
interpretations,

which
means
that
interviewees
may
perfectly
support
categories
that
they
haven’t

mention
explicitly.

For
further
research,
it
would
be
interesting
to
analyze
the
factors
that
encourage

people
to
belong
to
a
certain
community
from
the
member’s
point
of
view.
This

would
give
a
broader
and
more
complete
perspective
of
the
best
practices
to
carry

out
when
building
a
community
in
a
P2P
environment.

46

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50

Appendix

The research interviews were based on the following questions:

1) Do you recommend to invest money in building the brand in order to make
people know the value your company is providing?
2) How do you get to transmit trust and security when you are starting to build the
community?
3) How important is the word of mouth in comparison with other paid acquisition
channels?
4) Is it a good strategy to work with influencers, bloggers and partner with other
companies with the purpose of increasing in the community?
5) What is the main advice you would give to someone that does not know how to
create the community?
6) What kind of marketing actions would you recommend to fidelize members?
Why is it important to arrange meetings with the community?
7) What is the main value offered by your company that lets you differentiate from
competitors?

The emergence of the collaborative economy

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