BORN Views

BORN Views

Crack the Code:

How to Boost Your E-Commerce Sales This Easter

Easter. It may well be the most important holiday of the year for Christians, but it is also the season for all kinds of celebrations – a time of renewal, hope, and optimism as winter gives way to spring and all the excitement and fun of warmer weather. Celebrations inevitably mean marketing opportunities. Last year Easter-related E-commerce spending reached a staggering $24 billion in sales – an average spend of $192 per shopper. Given today’s robust economy, we expect even better Easter season results in 2024.

As with every holiday season, there’s an obvious retail connection for traditional Easter items ranging from holiday cards to the vast assortment of seasonal candies and gifts. But every holiday season also represents a great chance to market seemingly non-related items. Think spring cleaning, home improvement, vacation planning, and the whole world of outdoor activities. Easter and springtime represent an ideal occasion to ramp up all relevant marketing opportunities.

We’ve got some ideas to help you invigorate your marketing and merchandising efforts during the Easter season, but remember that Easter, like Christmas, is both a religious holiday and a secular one. So whatever you do, be thoughtful and respectful with your marketing messages and strategies. (The safe approach is to stick to the more secular associations of Easter.)

Evoke the season throughout your online presence.

Create an enticing atmosphere that resonates with the holiday spirit to heighten anticipation among your audience. This might be as simple as using Easter-themed imagery across all your digital platforms or as ambitious as creating a lot of new themed content for your homepage, social media channels, blogs, ads, landing pages, and even your SEO strategy. If you can ramp things up even more, look for new ways to differentiate your Easter theme from that of your competitors. (In other words: think beyond the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.)

Create a sense of urgency.

Easter is a big holiday season, but a lot of shoppers will procrastinate – and online shopping nearly always requires some degree of lead time. So instill a sense of urgency among customers through, for example, countdown timers and by leveraging social proof techniques. Highlight your delivery capabilities and incentivize early shoppers with special offers or discounts. You’ll lose the sale if the buyer can’t be confident of delivery before Easter Sunday. You might also create compelling digital products to satisfy the last- minute shopper.

Craft irresistible Easter offers.

Develop exclusive and clever promotions and discounts tailored to the season using messaging that’s relevant and meaningful to your audience. Countdown deals, themed product bundles, and complimentary gifts are always good ideas for compelling offerings. Again, strive for differentiation by connecting Easter and spring themes to your product or market space.

Leverage social media.

Actively engage with your target demographic– particularly the 18 to 34 age group – on social media platforms using Easter-centric themes and messaging. Holidays almost always connect to childhood, so tap that nostalgic feeling with interactive initiatives like virtual egg hunts, contests, and quizzes. Harness the power of hashtags to further to broaden your social media efforts – with plenty of lead time to facilitate conversion. If possible, collaborate with relevant influencers to amplify your social media presence and cultivate even more engagement.

Boost average order value with thematic bundles.

Another tried-and-true merchandising tactic is to encourage higher spending by curating Easter-themed (or springtime-themed) product bundles. Remember that holiday shopping is very different from “normal” shopping, and customers are primed to spend if they find a compelling offering. A well- crafted bundle that embraces and reflects Easter season traditions (or creates new ones) is a great way to enhance your revenue potential.

Optimize email marketing.

Of course, you’ll use email campaigns to promote your exclusive Easter season offers. Work hard to infuse them with the full spirit of this time of year to enhance the success of your promotions, but also work hard to make them stand out from all the Easter-themed emails your prospects are undoubtedly receiving. Holidays are a particularly good time for employing dynamic elements like GIFs and animations that engage consumers. Personalize your emails to forge a more intimate connection with customers while ensuring clarity about your offers. Remember, too, that while a seasonal promotion may have different imagery and messaging, consistent branding is still important to your long-term success. It should always be clear that your emails, no matter how seasonal or topical, are clearly your emails.

Ensure your website is ready.

Holidays like Easter represent good opportunities to make sure your online infrastructure is ready for heightened volume. While you’re planning your offerings and promotion, optimize your website speed and functionality. Enhance product presentation with high-quality images and differentiating descriptions. Prioritize mobile optimization to cater to the growing demographic of mobile shoppers and to ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience across all channels and devices.

By eliciting a sense of renewal and optimism, Easter and springtime may be uniquely compelling in terms of their thematic importance. If you can complement and amplify those feelings with your marketing efforts this year, you and your customers will be well-rewarded.

BORN Views

Color & Your Brand: Be Recognized and Be Remembered

By Nandhini Mehra, VP of Brand

On March 25^th*, Indians around the world will celebrate Holi, a joyous occasion that marks the end of winter, the arrival of spring, and the triumph of good over evil. Holi revelers make music and dance and eat, but most famously, they daub each other with bright colors in what must be one of the most visually spectacular holidays in the world. Indeed, this Hindu holiday is often referred to as the “Festival of Colors.” Red, for example, may symbolize love and passion. Yellow suggests knowledge, prosperity, and happiness. Green represents the new beginnings associated with spring. As Holi celebrants know, color has meaning.

Consciously or unconsciously, all of us make decisions every day based on our relationship with color. We form associations and attach meanings to specific tints and shades; color can evoke visceral, emotive responses. If you manage a brand, you wrestle with the meaning and importance of color because you know that color is essential to your brand identity.

But how, exactly, is it essential? And much more importantly, how do you choose the right palette? It may seem like an impossible task given the wide range of possible emotional responses to color and the equally wide spectrum of a color’s cultural nuances. And here’s the reality: there is no single correct formula or approach, but you can make better choices by understanding color psychology and its effect on branding – and by having a clearly articulated vision for the brand you’re building.

Start With Emotion & Color Psychology

Whether you’re building a new brand or refreshing an existing one, you start by thinking about the emotional response you want to elicit and build the brand palette around that. Are you aiming for a sense of playfulness and fun? Or luxurious and sophisticated? Perhaps boldness and dynamism are central to your vision. A carefully crafted color palette will be a key component of your brand identity, and the colors you choose must support that.

Color psychology is a great place to start. This evolving discipline is based on the reality we can all acknowledge: that, as research has shown, personal experiences, upbringing, and preferences for colors can subconsciously affect the human brain, triggering neurochemical reactions as well as emotional responses. But that’s just one half of the equation. Color psychology also delves into the cultural meanings of colors. To cite just one example, green is associated in the West with nature, luck, and prosperity, while in some Asian cultures, green represents exorcism and infidelity. Being cognizant of these well-established cultural nuances can help you avoid ill-considered choices.

Color psychology won’t give you the precise answer, but it can help you understand and refine your choices.

Understand Trendiness but Focus on the Long-term

Color psychology focuses on how colors work and what they mean based on actual physiological responses and cultural norms. But color also has an element of timeliness: What is cool and on-trend today?

Last year, Pantone’s “Color of the Year” was “Viva Magenta 18-1750,” a shade that “vibrates with vim and vigor” and “revels in pure joy, encouraging experimentation and self-expression without restraint,” according to the global authority on color. This year, the Color of the Year is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz. Pantone asserts that Peach Fuzz “captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.” 

I am quite confident that Pantone is as good as anyone at distilling the current cultural zeitgeist into a single hue, and no doubt they have reams of research and tons of smart people to back their findings up. But I have my doubts about whether this is particularly useful to the brand manager. Remember that trends are fleeting – as even a casual look at the last several “colors of the year” will attest – and focusing on what’s popular today can mean you’ll be heading toward a swift rebrand tomorrow.

As Rebecca Kowalewicz, Vice President of Digital at Clearbridge Branding Agency, said, “Color is not just revolutionary; it’s evolutionary – a kaleidoscope of cultural connotations constantly turning in an ever-changing zeitgeist of perception and trends.”

Understand Your Brand First

I hope it’s clear that I value the insights of color psychology and it’s always at least a little useful to know what’s hot in the world of colors – but I believe neither will fully solve the challenge of developing a new brand palette (or a rebrand). 

Here’s what to do instead. Start by articulating, well and thoroughly, the intent and persona of your brand and, as mentioned above, the emotional resonance you want to convey. Evaluate companies in your competitive space and decide how you want to differentiate your brand. Then choose three colors – a primary base, a secondary accent, and a tertiary neutral tone – that (a) reflect all your inputs and (b) can be applied to the full spectrum of communications opportunities you face. The goal is not to be trendy but to use a palette that makes sense for your audience, your strategy, and your brand.

Getting the palette right is a big challenge, but perhaps an even bigger one is to apply that palette, consistently and thoughtfully, fully: on your website, in all advertising and marketing efforts, on social media, and in packaging and signage. The goal, of course, is to develop a cohesive visual language – a strong, memorable, and resonant visual identity – which in turn improves your brand recognition and deepens engagement, sometimes dramatically. 

Another important consideration for brand palette decisions is accessibility. About 300 million people around the world – about 8% of men and 0.5% of women – have a color vision deficiency. Developing an accessible palette shows that your brand is conscious and inclusive. One aspect of this is ensuring your palette has enough contrast between background and foreground colors. In today’s day and age, this is a very straightforward accommodation to make with several online tools that help ensure compliance.

Color Should Set You Apart

We all believe that color is important in shaping a consumer’s view of a brand, and research backs this idea up. Indeed, according to a Secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo study, “84.7 percent of the total respondents think that color accounts for more than half among the various factors important for choosing products.”  But finding the right color is never going to be easy because colors are packed with meaning and nuance and our response to color is complex, determined by a hard-to-fathom mixture of subconscious preferences, emotional connections, and cultural experiences. By all means, study color psychology and evaluate what’s going on in the world of color. But at the end of the day, work very hard to understand your brand’s persona and mission so that your color palette is based on something unique to your enterprise. Then turn that small set of carefully chosen hues into a unifying, meaningful, and central part of every component of your presence.

Do this well, and your color palette becomes an integral piece of your brand and its potential for success.

*This date varies every year, depending on the Hindu calendar.

To continue this color conversation or to chat about all things branding, feel free to reach out. If your brand is looking for enhancement, BORN would be happy to walk you through our creative approach.

BORN Views

Service Marketplaces: A Business Blueprint

By Ramy Youssef, SVP & Global Head of Marketplaces, BORN Group

Just as online marketplaces have reshaped the way people buy and sell tangible products, digital service marketplaces are revolutionizing the way people and companies buy and sell services.

Marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr have made it possible for businesses to source talent for writing, design, and data entry and for consumers to find resources for small tasks. Online service marketplaces are already substantial—but they have only scratched the surface of the opportunity.

What makes for a successful service marketplace? At one level, success looks a lot like a great product marketplace. A solid service marketplace will feature a strong array of offerings, enable sellers and buyers to find each other, and facilitate fast, reliable, and safe transactions. But successful service marketplaces require special considerations, capabilities and functionalities.

First, marketing and selling services is more complex than selling products. To be a good service marketplace provider, you need a deep understanding of the complexities of service offerings, definitions, and modeling. For example, most service marketplaces operate using one of two models: a bidding model, where providers compete for work with tailored proposals, or a direct hire model, which enables clients to choose a provider based on detailed profiles and explicit service offerings. The platform must have the ability to manage those complexities with your technology architecture.

Second, trust and transparency are critical to any kind of marketplace, but they are even more important for service marketplaces, which means that functionalities like provider ratings and customer feedback are paramount. You’ll need a system capable of managing reputation to ensure marketplace integrity, inform buyer decision-making, and foster public accountability.

Finally, successful service marketplaces tend to be more specialized. A more niche approach is generally better, particularly for higher-end services. Most clients seeking services will gravitate towards a marketplace with a high degree of focus, which makes it easier for them to find the precise set of skills they require and gives them more confidence in the process.

The Blueprint: Getting Started

You start by recognizing how a product marketplace differs from a service marketplace. Product marketplaces require merchants, products, and logistics from ordering to fulfillment. Service marketplaces require service providers and service execution, which is more complex:

• Services involves more significant time considerations including the business/operating hours of the provider, expected response time, lead time and scheduling, and the time required to deliver.
• Services generally involve multiple variants that must be considered for each engagement, such as seasonality, geography/geofencing, and product requirements, all of which make service modeling much more complex.

So when designing, building, and managing a service marketplace, you need to focus on the following elements and best practices to deliver a quality experience and optimal performance:

1. Clear Service Definition and Modeling

As noted, service engagements involve a web of complex variables, including the diversity of service models (discrete services, rentals, subscriptions, and provisioning) and demand a more sophisticated system for matching clients with providers and managing their interactions. This means that service definition and modeling is paramount to the creation of a successful service marketplace. Understanding the dynamics of service time mapping and conversion, especially for national service providers, is vital.

Best practices include:

• Build a proficient team: You’ll want a team with experience in the complexity of service modelling.
• Consistency in the business model: Another component of the partners you choose is ensure some degree of consistency in terms of the services they offer. It’s difficult, and may be impossible, to customize the service model for each provider, and buyers want to be able to make meaningful comparisons between service providers.
• Matching algorithms: A successful service marketplace will use AI and data analytics to create robust algorithms that successfully match customers with appropriate service providers.
• Clarity and confidence: To build lasting client engagement and satisfaction, you’ll want to ensure clarity in terms of the offering and confidence in terms of delivery and execution. When terms are convoluted or uncertain, clients may simply hesitate to engage at all.

2. Attract and Support the Best Service Providers 

This is clear and obvious: You need excellent service providers to make your service marketplace successful. So choose your partnerships wisely to ensure quality and efficiency, prerequisites for building trust. Remember clients will use your marketplace because they trust you as an operator to enable them to find good providers. It also means you should design your marketplace platform in a way that makes the best service providers want to use it.

Best practices include:

• Automate the onboarding process: A smooth and efficient onboarding process can make or break the service provider’s experience. You’ll want to streamline the onboarding journey with automated checks and a minimal number of steps without compromising on the rigorousness needed for trust and safety on the platform.
• Meet the needs of large service providers: In many marketplaces, larger providers are better, so your service marketplace model should be able to handle an intricate configuration of multiple entities under the same provider banner. A large provider will typically need to maintain distinct profiles for different locations and different service tiers, each with its unique pricing, availability, and offerings.
• Subscription and payout structure: Most service marketplaces will need to be able to support single-transaction services as well as subscription-based models with recurring monthly orders. Automated subscription setups have to be carefully designed to manage first order fee, recurring fees, and the associated payout calculations. 
• Payout system: It’s crucial to establish a transparent and reliable payout system that can handle various scenario (such as mid-cycle changes, refunds, or service credits) to maintain provider trust and satisfaction.
• Robust scheduling functionality: Marketplaces need to be flexible, giving providers the tools to indicate their availability accurately while ensuring that customers have access to timely services. A dynamic scheduling system that can handle real-time updates and can integrate with providers’ external calendars is a key component of a successful marketplace.
• Allocation: Most service marketplaces operate on a “first in, first served” (FIFS) booking principle, which can potentially lead to scheduling conflicts and overbooking if not managed properly. Providers must be able to list all their available slots while the marketplace must possess the capability to prevent double-bookings. Well-executed and reliable scheduling is a key component of a positive experience for providers and customers.
• Regulatory and compliance: We noted earlier the incredible importance of trust when it comes to service marketplaces. Marketplaces should invest in automated verification systems that can efficiently validate (initially and as needed) the credentials of providers. A good service marketplace must be able to ascertain and uphold licensing requirements and industry-specific regulations—configured for every service provider and offering—to mitigate risks and ensure marketplace integrity of the marketplace. 
• Incentive strategy: Another key to attracting and retaining high-quality service providers—and boosting provider participation—is designing valuable incentives, such as waiving marketplace fees, a service provider success program, or ways to leverage the network effect. Incentives must be carefully designed to promote marketplace growth without sacrificing profitability.

3. Facilitate Service Execution

Clients expect services to be rendered promptly and competently. Hiccups in scheduling, delivery, or quality will tarnish a platform’s reputation and reliability. Furthermore, the marketplace must provide tangible proof of service completion that satisfies both the provider and the client, safeguarding against disputes and ensuring trust in the platform.

Best practices include:  

• Effective bundling of services with products: The interplay between services and associated products can be complicated by factors such as inventory management, variable pricing, and service quality assurance. For example, consider a service marketplace providing home maintenance. When a provider needs physical products—say, a water filter—this adds a logistical complexity to service delivery. A good service marketplace should enable the creation of linked orders and allow synchronization across payments and returns. This integration reduces the risk of discrepancies and enhances the overall customer experience.
• Encourage the use of the platform: You naturally want to encourage transactions within the platform by making it easy to change the scope of a service engagement. Direct engagements between service providers and clients (negotiated outside the platform) may be valuable in terms of personalized service delivery, they can result in missed revenue opportunities for the marketplace. So create mechanisms and incentives that make it easy to book additional services through the platform itself.
• Enable stackable services: To capitalize on the time spent on service execution, marketplaces could allow for the stacking of compatible services, thus maximizing efficiency and customer value.
• Service completion evidence: Platforms must establish a straightforward and accessible method for documenting and verifying the completion of services.
• Quality assurance: Given the high premium clients place on consistent, high-quality service, marketplaces must implement strict quality control measures. This could include customer feedback systems.

Next Steps

Service marketplaces offer tremendous opportunities for platform operators who understand the nuances and best practices of service marketplaces. Start by thinking carefully about what the needs of the market you want to serve, then work on developing a technology architecture that provides the agility and scalability to go to market and—just as important—to evolve with that market. 

If your brand is looking to learn more about Service Marketplaces and BORN Group’s proven approach, we would love to walk you through it.

BORN Views

Digital Transformation & Airport Marketplaces: Redefining the Airport Experience

By Ramy Youssef, SVP & Global Head of Marketplaces, BORN Group

“Digital is no longer an afterthought addition to existing physical processes; it is becoming an intrinsic part of the airport brand.” — Chris Au Young, General Manager, Airport Authority Hong Kong

Every day, about one million people around the world are in the air — and every one of them spends time at one of the world’s 40,000-plus airports. Airports are already big business, and they are evolving rapidly thanks to privatization, visionary airport managers, changing consumer demands, and — perhaps most important — technology.

In fact, digitalization and experience transformation are taking airports even further as they evolve into fully connected, digitally-powered ecosystems, leading to better experiences for travelers and new opportunities for airport marketplaces.

Digitization and the Airport

In the early days of digital transformation, airports embraced digital technology to automate operations and processes, optimize passenger tracking and security, and leverage data and analytics for faster (and improved) decision-making and more effective management of energy and waste.

A key benefit was improvement in getting people on and off planes more efficiently and with less labor, which saw still further improvement with the onset of the “connected traveler” experience, enabling a much more seamless journey through security, gates, baggage claim, customs, and ground transportation — all the major components of getting passengers to their destinations.

Better operational efficiency and a more connected passenger experience means a better customer experience. When travelers are worried less about finding the gate and making the plane, they have more time for stress-free recreation and shopping. The textbook example of the potential of this investment may well be the Changi Airport in Singapore. As the New York Times put it, “many airports have spots that can delight, if you know how to find them. Changi, in Singapore, for example, is the superstar of airports, worth spending a whole weekend exploring.”

Today, digitization is being extended to airport marketplaces — with good reason. The millions of travelers who pass through airports each day represent a large, captive market — and a substantial opportunity to increase non-aeronautical revenues. The conclusions of two major consulting firms highlight the potential of the airport marketplace:

1. In a September 2023 report on traveler satisfaction, J.D. Power and Associates said: “Satisfied travelers [are] spending more money at the airport: There is a direct correlation between overall passenger satisfaction and spending at the airport.”
2. And according to Forrester’s CX Index, when an airport increases its customer experience score by one point, it generates an additional $3.39 in incremental revenues per customer.

An airport marketplace powered and transformed by digitalization can enhance the customer experience, improve gross merchandise value (GMV), and, ultimately, increase your return on investment (ROI) of non-aeronautical revenues.

Digitalizing the Airport Marketplace

When you transform the airport marketplaces into a digital marketplace, you are reinventing the airport retail business model. Digitalization improves multiple aspects of the customer experience:

• Improved visual merchandising and more omni-channel experiences, in-airport, on the web, and via smartphone apps.
• New possibilities for digital marketing, including predictive retailing, hyper-segmentation, and personalization: tools to attract and engage buyers by delivering superior information and unique offers to the right consumer at the right time.
• Seamless integration of content and commerce: efficient cataloging of products and services and making it easier for buyers to find what they need and want.
• New opportunities for non-aeronautical tenants, making it easier to attract, onboard, and retain them.

These CX improvements enables all kinds of new opportunities for growth. In just a single concrete example of the benefits of a digitally enabled marketplace, Glasgow Airport launched its own app and redesigned its website to improve the traveler experience and found that parking revenues from digital channels increased by 20%.

At BORN Group, we have helped airport retail operations level up by creating state-of-the-art web sites and smartphone apps — backed by a digital-first tech stack —that serve as guides and access points to everything available, from transportation and parking options to opportunities to shop, dine, and relax. While at the airport, flyers can be sent real-time, location-based, and appropriately customized recommendations. The app could, for example, direct a business traveler to the appropriate airline lounge and offer suggestions for a good meal. It could offer shopping,dining, and entertainment suggestions to vacationers or travelers with long layovers (including personalized duty-free offers for international travelers).

The Tech That Drives a Digital Ecosystem

Digital transformation to pave the way to a successful airport marketplace focuses on five distinct streams:

• Enterprise technology: A scalable tech stack to enable enterprise commerce, deliver a high-end omnichannel user experience, and automate personalization.
• Partner & ecosystem management: The ability to recruit and onboard the right sellers/partners efficiently and manage the entire ecosystem effectively to ensure that everyone – including passengers – benefits.
• Retail products & services: Successful airport marketplaces require a modern technology infrastructure that supports retail shops, restaurants, and other consumer service providers. From a macro point of view, this means merchandizing, content strategy, and production at scale. 
• CX management: The customer experience goals of the airport marketplace are similar to those of other marketplaces: multiple and seamless touchpoints for consumers to discover and transact with retailers. The difference is how these touchpoints are designed and delivered for air travelers in the context of the airport and each user’s needs and preferences.
• Fulfillment and assurance: Getting products to consumers is critical to any marketplace, but airport marketplaces pose different challenges, like eligibility (say, for duty free passengers) and product delivery (while most products are delivered at the place and moment of purchase, some are delivered at the gate or the destination airport or shipped to the purchaser’s home).

Effectively addressing these components of the value chain enables airport marketplaces to meet the key factors for ongoing success:

• Onboard enough sellers and the right kinds of sellers.
• Embed the airport marketplace (and its brand) into the airport’s website and digital apps.
• Display high-quality content and product data.
• Build trust through transparency.
• Automate processes wherever possible (particularly when it comes to personalization).

Case Study: A Leading Airport Marketplace

As an example of how digitalization can make a real difference in the success of an airport marketplace, consider the example of a leading airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in Asia that serves more than 100 airlines and more than 77 million travelers per year. Shopping at this airport involves more than 100 brands offering everything from luxury goods and high-end electronics to make-up and fashion to restaurants and convenience stores. 

The BORN Group was chosen as a technology partner to build a curated marketplace for the airport in ways that would enable business growth, align with the airport’s digital transition, enhance its reputation for exceptional customer service, and serve its tenants more effectively. 

We built a curated marketplace that delivered a seamless omnichannel digital experience across all brands. Key challenges included the following:

• Airport stores tend to operate with limited stocks of products, so a real-time, reliable inventory management was a key component of this digital transformation.
• The existing ecommerce platform was not robust enough to handle increased traffic in a secure fashion. 
• Different brands have different content requirements and, typically, rely on their own content producers. This needed to be reimagined and consolidated for the airport’s web shopping portal. 

We approached this massive engagement with a well-defined set of guiding principles:

• Prioritize the customer experience at every step. 
• Adopt a flexible, component-based system architecture.
• Ensure the technology framework is dynamic, capable of growth, and can be seamlessly enhance to meet the evolving needs of tenants, features, and channels.
• Focus on enhancing efficiency and streamlining corporate workflows.
• Offers robust content services to facilitate swift tenant integration, ensure tenants get onboard quickly, and position them for success.

Solution Highlights: A State-of-the-Art Omnichannel Ecommerce System

At the heart of our engagement for this major airport was SAP Commerce, which stitches the many layers of the solution we developed into an integrated whole capable of handling millions of transactions in real-time. The solution includes these components:

• A headless storefront with componentized views.
• An experience-driven content management system (CMS).
• A curated marketing platform.
• An omnichannel order orchestration layer.
• A commerce engine using SAP CX Commerce.
• An order management and fulfillment system.
• A comprehensive analytics layer.
• Managed services layer.
• Security services.

Significant Improvements 

The system the BORN Group developed has been live at this airport for nearly five years and is already delivering substantial progress:

• Marketing effectiveness has increased by 70% across multiple engagement points.
• Operational efficiency has improved by 80%.
• Dramatically improved time to market for tenants in terms of content and product.
• Conversions have been accelerated by 60% and consumer fallouts have declined by 30%.

All told, marketplaces sales have increased by 80% through a combination of cross-selling and upselling. 

The BORN Group Approach

1. Domain expertise in the market sectors featured in airport marketplaces, which typically include beauty, fashion, electronics, food/restaurants, and wine and spirits. 
2. Technology expertise including marketplaces, commerce, content management order management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), point of sale (POS), customer relationships management (CRM), and analytics.
3. Transformation expertise including strategy, consulting, CX, omnichannel, change management, and implementation.

Like most transformation challenges, success demands a true partnership with a provider who understands all of these streams and has the experience and expertise to deliver results.

To learn more about digitization and airport marketplaces, BORN Group would love to walk you through our proven approach.

BORN Views

Marketplace Business Models: Launching & Building a Marketplace

By Ramy Youssef, SVP & Global Head of Marketplaces, BORN Group

Marketplaces are probably as old as human history. You can see their ancient roots in today’s physical shopping malls, supermarkets, hypermarkets (think Walmart and Costco) and transportation hubs—places where sellers can offer their wares and buyers can find the things they’re looking for.

Marketplaces still fulfill the age-old purpose of connecting buyers and sellers, but the web and digitalization have catalyzed a revolution in how marketplaces work—and created powerful new opportunities for commerce online and in the real world.

Ecommerce giants have become household names: Amazon, eBay, Airbnb, and other platform operators demonstrate the monumental power of scaling marketplaces and of reinventing the customer experience. At first, they grew by embracing technologies to scale product listings, transactions, and logistics. They grew even more by embracing technologies to create an entirely new kind of shopping experience with, for example, personalization, real-time notifications on multiple platforms, and robust customer support. Moreover, today’s marketplaces generate new kinds of revenue and profit opportunities because of their enormous traffic. Network effects create a virtuous cycle, attracting third-party sellers, enabling new marketing/merchandising opportunities, and fostering lasting change in buyer behaviors.

Key Benefits of Technology

Marketplaces have been redefined by technology. And their benefits are increasingly attractive to all kinds of enterprises. If you have a substantial presence—online or in the real world—you have a tremendous asset that offers many potential benefits:

1. Diversified Revenue Streams: Obviously, a marketplace expands your sources of revenue, including fees from sellers, advertising/merchandising spends, and monetizing traffic. For B2B brands, a marketplace strategy can also enable entry into a B2C market. A manufacturer that one worked primarily through dealers, for example, can move to a more direct B2C model—and offer relevant third-party products and services to diversify its revenue streams.
2. Reduced Risks: As the marketplace/platform operator, you can add incremental sales without the risks and costs associated with product development and manufacturing as well as inventory and fulfillment.
3. Improved Time to Market: When you function as a marketplace, you can go to market with a more extensive value proposition much faster than if you had to develop products and build logistical support yourself.
4. Expanded Reach: When it comes to online presence, the size of your catalog and the number of products or services you offer are important. A substantial platform pays big dividends in terms of reach and discoverability.
5. Deeper Customer Engagement: A thriving, well-managed marketplace will strengthen your connection to customers and prospects. When you create a multifaceted platform that delivers real value—and is perceived as trustworthy—people will rely on it and make it a shopping destination. This also facilitates cross-selling.

A robust marketplace confers a substantial competitive advantage, enabling you to expand the reach of your brand through complementary product and service offerings with much less risk. Note that, according to Brand Finance, Amazon is the most valuable American brand for 2023.

How Do You Expand?

Given these substantial benefits, how do you approach the challenge of expanding your business or online presence into a true marketplace? Our deep experience in designing and building marketplaces suggests some initial steps:

Step 1: Choose your Revenue Model

Marketplaces typically follow one of these revenue models:

• They can be commission-based, charging a percentage fee on each transaction.
  Examples include Amazon Marketplace or Apple’s App Store.
• They can be membership- or subscription-based, charging users a fixed regular fee for an agreed-upon service level. For consumers, Netflix or the Apple One services use the subscription model, while companies like Etsy, Amazon, and eBay use a subscription model for sellers.
• Other common revenue models are based on listing fees—where sellers pay only for the listings they create—or the hybrid load fee model, which charges a fee for listing and a commission based on sales.

Step 2: Choose your Business Model

Next, decide which of the three predominant marketplace business models is most appropriate for you:

• Marketplace Model: This is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. The marketplace model offers a low-risk way to expand your product offerings and increase revenue without the need to hold inventory or assume title. A typical marketplace aggregates many third-party suppliers who set the retail price but rely on the marketplace/platform to facilitate the transaction. Marketplaces tend to be highly scalable and offer consumers great variety and price transparency. The marketplace model also makes it easy and fast to add products, sellers, and categories to an existing platform. For many businesses, the marketplace model is the ideal way to monetize their digital traffic and deliver more choices and better value to customers.
• Dropship Model: We’re seeing a surge in demand for the dropship model, and it’s easy to see why. With dropship, organizations can expand their product offerings without the hassle and risk of holding inventory, relying instead on third-party sellers to handle the logistics of order fulfillment. The dropship model is also ripe for automation and optimization. With advanced technology platforms, the entire process can be streamlined for maximum efficiency and profitability.
• Hybrid Model: One of the most exciting emerging business models is the hybrid model, combining drop shipping with the more traditional marketplace model. This allows merchants to offer new product categories with minimal risk, while still maintaining and increasing revenue from their core offerings.

How Do You Choose
the Right Technology?

Every marketplace, from online platforms to collections of physical stores, relies on technology—and making the right tech decisions upfront can catalyze success.

This is exactly the approach we have built and applied successfully at the BORN Group. For clients eager to build or enhance their marketplace at the strategy level, we start technology discussions with our analytical approach which includes two key components: The Feature Value Matrix (FVM), and the 5C Analysis.

Feature Value Matrix

BORN has created a frame of reference that outlines a feature and its value to the business. The key output of the FVM is the determination of whether a feature is critical—and therefore should be included in the minimum viable product for launch—or whether it can wait to be included in a fast-follow phase.

The FVM starts with four steps:

1. Understand key business requirements.
2. Learn and challenge the existing system architecture by evaluating applications and the integration landscape.
3. Identify pain-points.
4. Define a solution baseline in terms of technical and business value.

5C Analysis

The BORN Group also developed the 5C Analysis to provide a quantitative representation of technology versus the business objectives and priorities. This helps business users to make more informed decisions. The 5C Analysis classifies each user story to:

• Conform: Identify requirements that can be conformed to OOTB (Out-of-the-Box) features once a platform is picked.
• Configure: Identify requirements that can be supported through configurations in the platform.
• Connect: Identify requirements that are better supported through an integration to a third-party tool.
• Customize: Identify requirements that will need to be built into the platform.
• Compromise: Identify requirements that will be supported by a third-party tool rather than being built into the platform.

Some Final Thoughts

The reality is that the potential of marketplaces—digitally-driven ecosystems for buyers, sellers, and partners—is enormous.

And this is true not just for online businesses. Any place where people gather—airports, train stations, sporting arenas, theme parks, to name a few—is already a marketplace, but they also offer all kinds of untapped opportunities that can be turned into growth by leveraging today’s technologies.

The initial decision to create a marketplace is generally driven by the understandable goal of growing revenue. And while revenue growth is certainly a critical metric for any marketplace, it’s not the only one that matters. At BORN, we’ve found that successful marketplaces are also characterized by high levels of customer engagement and repeat business. In fact, our clients often refer to their marketplaces as “engagement platforms” because they offer a unique and powerful opportunity to connect with customers on a deeper level.

When you can offer a true marketplace, with a wide range of products and services from multiple sellers, you transform your online presence into a go-to destination for customers looking to discover new brands and make informed purchasing decisions.

The result is a virtuous cycle of engagement and revenue, with each transaction leading to increased trust and loyalty among customers. As a result, many of our clients measure the success of their marketplace not just in terms of revenue, but also in terms of customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value.

If your brand is looking to grow your marketplace strategy or design, BORN Group would love to walk you through our proven approach.