Relationships in the age of collaboration: Finding opportunities for Qurrent

Relationships in the age of collaboration: Finding opportunities for Qurrent

Govers, F.S.

Buijs, J.A. (mentor)
Roscam-Abbing, E. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovation Management

Master of Science Strategic Product Design

2013-04-23

This report explores opportunities for Qurrent in the age of collaboration. Qurrent, a company focussing on reducing consumer energy consumption, is acting in a competitive market. Big players like Eneco, Nuon and Essent are rapidly developing products with comparable functionalities and services and they have larger customer bases than Qurrent does. Focussing on their core values will enable Qurrent to gain competitive advantage over the large competitors and create their own market. However, they have difficulties telling their own story and being who they say they are. They have a nice vision but they have a hard time using this vision to create a strong brand and use this as a competitive advantage. In the mean time, with the rise of technological possibilities like traceability of goods and safe peer-to-peer payment systems, the middle man can be excluded enhancing collaboration amongst consumers. This leads to all sorts of collaborative enterprises. This trend reveals several opportunities which Qurrent can use in order to achieve their mission. This project explored these opportunities. Literature research was executed, as well as an extensive internal and external analysis. Additionally, many workshops and brainstorm sessions were organized to reveal underlying values and existing ideas. As a result, a process is set in motion in defining a brand promise, persona’s are created and the brand values are made explicit and tangible, all in order to help the brand come to live internally and inspire the employees to be and act on a Qurrent-way. Moreover, a customer journey is made to give an overview of and the relation between the existing touchpoints. Additionally, this report shows that within the age of collaboration lie opportunities to improve their story even more. It describes how Qurrent can increase their sales and strengthen their brand by making use of these opportunities which arise in the age of collaboration. A community currency is introduced, with modules which are reinforcing the customer journey as well as Qurrent’s brand identity, like a Q&A forum where consumers help each other. The results were analysed and internally as well as externally evaluated. The report ends with recommendations for further development. Many of the suggested improvements are already successfully implemented in the organization.

collaboration
brand identity
collaborative consumption

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:cba279f8-5082-444e-9715-e71573ea5f2f

2014-04-23

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Govers, F.S.