Category: Reimagined

Inspired by the following tweet (with expletives removed) from popular electronic music artist Deadmau5, my next Reimagined post will be focused on TicketWeb. However, this is equally relevant for any of the multitude of ticketing platforms available. Even my beloved Liverpool FC have recently been working with private investigators who specialise in ticket touting to tackle these issues, and this is something I believe can be alleviated greatly by a digital solution.

One of the biggest issues as a regular attendee to sports and music events is ensuring you are getting a genuine ticket at a reasonable price. Waiting eagerly before repeatedly refreshing your browser across multiple devices; only to find you have been pipped to the post by a bot. You then must turn to a resale site, and often pay significantly above the retail price. This then transpires to be a fake ticket, which you only find as you get to the event. You receive a refund from the resale site, but you have missed the event.

Ticket platforms need to provide a service which directly tackles the use of bots, guarantees the authenticity of the ticket, and provides the user with a sense of trust. An important component of this is in digitising the tickets, ensuring there can only be one version of each ticket, where ownership can only be transferred via the digital service for the original retail price. This ensures all tickets are genuine and will be owned and only accessible to the person who will be attending the event. One of the great advantages of this initiative will be ownership of the customer record for the ticketing platform, which today is not possible, where often one person will buy a few tickets for their group of friends. This will also ward off bots being used as there is no profit to be made in resale.

The current resale sites are often owned by the original ticketing platform, and so they see a percentage of the resale for facilitating the transaction. This can still be offered as a service for allowing the transfer of the digital ticket between two users, and so is unlikely to reduce revenue significantly, outside of the sales which go to bots and then are not resold. However, by guaranteeing that all tickets are with a real person, and this person will use it at the point of entry to the event, there is the additional potential to gather great user data to improve the service based on actual attendance to events. This can be used to build smarter recommendation engines to provide more personalised recommendations for future events, and possible integration with relevant services such as Spotify.

I often find myself thinking about and discussing opportunities for business model transformation, and so thought it might be interesting to document these in a series I am calling ‘Reimagined’.

For the first edition, I will look at Mothercare. Facing significant slowdown in customer traffic to its high street stores, alongside a recent growth in online sales, Mothercare is actively engaged in a store rationalisation programme. To compliment this, I have suggestions for a complete change in how Mothercare’s customers engage with the brand.

Aiming to be the ‘number one specialist for parents’, Mothercare has a unique opportunity to advise and provide all the good and services that parents will need from pre-birth to the child becoming a toddler. Parents will have a limited time with which they interact with Mothercare, and especially for new parents, will look to them for ‘expert’ advice. A move from transactional one-off purchases, to a monthly subscription or perhaps a 3/4 year agreement, would allow Mothercare to proactively advise and provide all of the required products that a parent will need for their child. This will likely take away significant stress in identifying and finding these products, and allow the parent to focus on themselves and their child. This can also be accompanied by digital services which provide the parents with relevant information they require at the different stages of the child’s journey, allowing Mothercare to provide this ‘expert’ level of advice to its customers.

In order to make this experience more personalised, this new offering could come as an extension of the My Mothercare reward club, building on top of the insight Mothercare has into its customers. Also, due to the time-bound usage of these products, there is the opportunity for Mothercare to create a community and marketplace around recycling and reuse of products, where this is appropriate. This is a market which already exists on generic marketplace sites, and so Mothercare can add value by facilitating the connection between its customers and creating this focused community, and benefit financially via platform administration charges.

Mothercare as a service? Providing all of the goods and services the parent needs during their limited-time interaction with the brand, whilst creating a second-hand marketplace and community of its customers to enable longer term brand interaction and value. Creating more predictable revenue from online sales, as well as enabling a shift of the remaining brick & mortar stores to become click and collect fulfilment centres, advisory clinics and community centres for subscription members.