A screen shot of Rupu site. It will now be known as P Promos. PHOTO | FILE
E-commerce platform Rupu has repositioned and rebranded its business in a transit from being an online purchasing website to a content marketing website known as P Promos.
The pivoting of its business model is a development of its earlier marketing strategy, which may lead to greater success than its opening proposition, it says.
“P Promos is a promotional platform that connects merchants to a larger market without sharing their revenue with us or being fully set up logistics-wise. The model is based on a pay per ad model,” said Stacey Ondimu, the managing director of P Live and P Promos, East Africa.
“The rebrand was influenced by what we learnt from Rupu in terms of what the market and merchants want, thus we adopted a strategy that would offer a practical and relevant solution to our target market.”
In his book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, entrepreneur Eric Ries said that the progress of a company is determined by how fast it learns from the market, especially when its business is facing extreme uncertainty.
“Too many start-ups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they do not care about the idea, the start-up fails,” he said.
“However, once entrepreneurs embrace validated learning and focus on providing the consumers with what they want and will pay for then there is no need to spend months waiting for a product launch to change the company’s direction. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans incrementally, inch by inch, minute by minute.”
An example of a company that changed its business model in order to accommodate the needs of consumers is Groupon, a US e-commerce platform that offers consumers discounted products and services by buying as a group.
It was founded in 2007 as a social media platform called The Point that was designed to help social cause campaign groups to get funding from donors. After a year, however, it was not a success and the founders changed business model into a group buying website.
Within six months of the brand pivot, it had expanded its business from its home city, Chicago, into other cities and by 2011, it was operating in 160 US cities, 35 countries, and was dubbed the fastest-growing company ever by industry experts with a valuation of $1.35bn (Sh135 billion).
In this, pivoting is a strategy that sees brands reach a wider market by staying relevant, remaining competitive and also avoiding disruption as new players come in.
“In today’s market, those forces will make people in every kind of organisation—start-ups, small businesses, corporations, and government—feel the pressure of rapid change.
The pivoting approach will help them meet it head-on, innovate rapidly, and transform business as we know it,” said Steve Blank, an adjunct professor at Stanford University, in his Harvard Business Review article, Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.
In the case of P Promos, the pivot comes at a time when social media platforms have made it easier for consumers to buy products directly from companies rather than from online middlemen, perhaps leading to its change in tack to informing consumers of the discounts rather than selling the products.
“This is a new chapter in enabling commerce online and offline. They can get access to offers, businesses, discounts and so much more on P Promos and the broader P Live platform,” said Ms Ondimu.
-African Laughter
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