Danny Oosterveer about the future of the sharing economy

In this interview we ask Danny Oosterveer (online) marketer at Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem (and previously at Marketingfacts) and curriculum developer for the track Online Marketing at Saxion University of Applied Science, about the origination and future of the concept of sharing economy.

Could you briefly tell us something about your studies and the career path you chose?

I studied Marketing & Sales Management at Saxion University of Applied Science in Deventer. Then, at 21 years old, I started my pre-master and master in Business Administration at Radboud University in Nijmegen. For my graduation project, I wanted to show that, for the popularity of a certain brand, not the amount of followers of its Twitter account is relevant but rather the sentiment of the tweets as well as the number of responses and retweets. During that time, it frequently occurred that Twitter users bought fake followers to seem more popular. To test this, I teamed up with a friend and two servers to intercept around 150,000 tweets over a period of three months. When I was planning to write an article about this on the online marketing blog Marketingsfacts, I got in touch with Ludo Raedts from Radian6. A day later he gave me a dataset which was almost twice as big and much more complete, so all my work up to that point ended up in the trash can. But on the bright side, the dataset was a lot better. Eventually I showed that retweets, sentiment of and responses to tweets are of great importance to the influence of a brand on Twitter. But I also showed that, contrary to my expectations, the number of followers has a substantial impact on brand popularity. After that I started my first job as community manager at Marketingfacts. After a year I became an online marketer there, which was a highly technical job. Presently I work for Burgers’ Zoo where I am responsible for (online) marketing and customer journey, in which we aim to focus on individual marketing instead of mass marketing.

Could you explain to us what the sharing economy is?

I believe that the attractive principle behind the sharing economy is that it allows us to efficiently and elegantly redeploy excess supply. The central idea is that one attaches more value to access than to ownership. This principle is not new however. To give an example, when I was young we had a neighbour who owned an enormous collection of tools. Everyone on my block knew about this, so therefore no one saw the need to buy these tools themselves since my neighbor shared it with everyone. But recently the sharing economy has become more widespread. Firstly, because ‘having’ things is becoming less important. In the past, and especially in the post-war Netherlands, ownership was considered to be of great importance. People were constantly gathering things, they bought cars, they bought houses, and so on. Gathering things was the way forward. But ‘our’ generation grew up in a world with an abundance of stuff. Why would we want to own everything ourselves? Ownership thus makes way for access, a change that is exploited by platforms such as Netflix and Spotify. Secondly, the sharing economy has become more popular with the rise of the internet and in particular the introduction of such platforms as Airbnb, Peerby and Uber, that facilitate the process of sharing. Where sharing was previously limited to your own street or neighborhood, the scope and range has been greatly increased.

What are important disadvantages of the sharing economy?

I do not see disadvantages per se, but rather challenges, that you often see when new (technological) solutions challenge the existing rules of the game. For example, there are inner cities now where the incentive not to rent out your home but to put it on Airbnb becomes very large. Some apartments are basically becoming hotels, but the owner does not have to comply with hotel regulations. Such regulations are there for a reason. Also, when you look at Peerby, where people can lend stuff to each other, you see that when someone breaks something, Peerby itself is liable. That is an insurance problem that they have not solved yet. But you can also think of Snappcar (where you can rent out your car to someone): who is liable when someone’s car turns out to be unsafe? Those are things that still require some thought. And of course, the sharing economy may bring about some sort of creative destruction in which traditional sectors such as the hotel industry and taxi industry are being pressurized, but I do not think that this is a disadvantage in the long run.

Is the sharing economy popular all around the world?

In the West the sharing economy has surely become popular, likely due to the excess of supply. Also in the Netherlands, where platforms such as Snappcar and Peerby have been introduced. But it is hard to say for the rest of the world. In China for example, which is a fast-growing emerging economy, prestige and status are quite important but I can also imagine that quick access to things is important in a fast growing economy. I think that the sharing economy is primarily popular in Europe and the US, but other countries will follow if they have not done so already.

What does the future of the sharing economy look like, do you think that could become less popular over the years?

I believe that the sharing economy will certainly grow over the years, and that more services related to the sharing economy will be introduced. This is not like a hype, or something temporary. Currently there are a variety of sharing economy related trends, like the before mentioned platform economy and for example ‘service design’. This is a business philosophy in which the service a product provides is at the center rather than the product itself.

This idea is nicely illustrated in an episode of the Dutch tv-show ‘Tegenlicht’. In this show Thomas Rau, an architect, takes the example of Philips. When designing a new building, lighting manufacturers such as Philips will we asked to take care of lighting the building. The incentive of lighting manufacturers is not to deliver lightbulbs as efficient as possible, but as many as possible. Because when a lightbulb breaks, the customer must buy a new one which generates revenue for the producer. Thomas Rau then has the idea not to pay Philips for lamps or lightbulbs (the products), but for light (the service) because eventually, light is the thing you need. This concept is called pay per lux. The incentives change substantially this way, in exchange for payment Philips will organize the lighting as efficiently as possible, with lamps that last as long as possible and as operate as economically as possible. To my mind this is the direction it will take in the future, an economy that is centered around services and access instead of products and ownership.

What advice would you like to give to Tilburg University students?

A colleague of mine at Marketingfacts, Emile Peters, had a simple but clever rule-of-thumb for businesses, but it also holds for individuals. In everything you do during your career you should mind the ‘three p’s’: profit, prestige and pleasure. Hence, you should enjoy something, make money off it and it should be something you are proud of (think of a big customer or an innovative project). The rule is that you should feel good about at least two p’s, preferably all three of course, but you may feel a little less confident about the third p. I always found it to be a very handy model to check where you currently stand. Besides this I would like to add that the internet nowadays offers access to an incredibly large amount of resources. You do not have to be rich or wait until you are graduated to experiment with things that interest you, like building websites for example. That is so easy nowadays, so begin doing things that interest you during your career and do not wait.