THE RISE OF SERVICES MARKETPLACES

As technology evolves, and people become more comfortable with digital media, the next frontier will be the rise of Marketplaces for Services businesses. Traditionally thought to be high touch workflows, technology is allowing for significant disruption in the way TRUST, TRANSPARENCY and RELIABILITY is being created in high value transactions.

A Marketplace for marketing services Grocurv helps young companies find and work with the right marketing agencies. On one side of this Marketplace are SMEs, Start Ups and young brands and on the other side are small and medium sized marketing agencies.

The friction in this market place is due to the fact that young brands, SMEs and startups do not have the marketing capabilities and skills to find and engage with the right agencies. Right for their industry, service requirement , budget and geography. They rely on informal networks to find partners, often leading to suboptimal outcomes. Which then causes distrust in any future marketing engagement.

On the other side of the marketplace are young agencies that often find business through referrals and typically within a very small geographical area. They often do not have budget to spend on new customer acquisition. And payment collections tends to be a very big concern with any new client they engage with.

Lots of marketing requirement are therefore left un-served or sub-optimal in many cases.

Hence GroCurv.com. A managed marketplace that allows young brands to find and engage with the right agencies selected via an intelligent algorithm. The entire engagement facilitated via calls and monitoring mechanisms established in the GroCurv platform.

But as we develop this marketplace ,one question that we were asked recently is whether marketing agencies really want to get organised. There are tens of thousands of young agencies in various fields of marketing like market research, branding, PR social media. Is it at all in their interest to organise or to find a marketplace to organise their industry?

Our view is as follows:

· Amazon is a Marketplace for goods.

· Uber for taxis.

· Yatra for travel.

· BookMyShow for movies, zomato for restaurants.

In all these marketplaces it’s the small player that benefits the most the small restaurant owner who cannot spend on acquisition of new customers. The small bus operator who cannot spend on acquisition of Riders. The small shopkeeper who cannot spend on customer acquisition or wants more customers we are outside of a Geography that comes to Amazon. So in an industry with massive dispersion of market share it’s the largest players that don’t use the marketplace; the largest players who have economies of scale ,who have marketing spend budgets ,who have logistics. These guys are happy to be outside of a marketplace where they compete with many more players meeting new customers.

Small players are ok with the trade off between increased competition in a marketplace versus the opportunity to be in front of more customer.

The large players with the ability to build new customer pipelines don’t take that trade off.

On Grocurv.com we think we are offering the best of both worlds. Like Amazon it is a marketplace but unlike Amazon, a seller here, on any one project is only competing with a handful of other agencies which are the best fit for the client. Maybe 4 or 5 competitors. This allows for or more meaningful interactions between client and agency and gives the agency confidence that its competition is with a very like minded set- thereby not exposed to price discounting or capability mismatch with the competition. The project briefs are FREE and if a proposal is won, the platform takes the guarantee of payments.

To respond to that question about the marketing agencies not wanting a marketplace, the evidence we have is to the contrary. And its highlighted by. the number of agencies that onboard on the platform everyday, the business we are able to generate for the agencies and the loyalty that is developing between client platform and agency.

Go ahead, if you are a young brand or agency, try the GroCurv way. Visit us on www.GroCurv.com