Pillow Residential’s Business Strategy Case Study

Pillow Homes, Inc. operates as a hospitality company that provides short-term rental management services. It helps its clients in renting their apartments and houses for short-term when they go for a vacation or business trip. The company lists and manages clients’ properties on property rental sites; and handles guest booking, key exchange, cleaning, maintenance, and guest communication before, during, and after each reservation. It serves homeowners and property owners in the San Francisco Bay area.

Social impact:

Life changing: affiliation/belonging, self-actualization

Emotional: reduces anxiety, rewards me, attractiveness, design/aesthetics, provides access

Functional: avoids hassles, saves time, reduces effort, variety, simplifies, integrates, organizes

Access over ownership:

The accessibility over ownership model is a business concept that allows consumers to utilize a product without owning it. Everything serves a purpose. As a result, consumers all across the Western world are demanding more value from their goods and services, and they are rethinking their relationship with stuff.' Furthermore, with thriving online communities embracing the idea of access above ownership, the internet is developing as a robust platform for sharing models to expand and prosper.

Benchmarking services:

Benchmarking is a technique for evaluating performance and gaining insights via data analytics. It may be used to conduct internal research on your firm or compare it to other businesses to enhance business processes and performance indicators following best practices. Typically, three dimensions are measured: quality, time, and cost. In this manner, they may ascertain the targets' performance and, more significantly, the business processes that contribute to these companies' success. The digital transformation era has spawned a slew of data analysis-focused software businesses.

Best in class services:

When a firm brings a product to market, it must first create a compelling product and then field a workforce capable of manufacturing it at a competitive price. Neither task is simple to perform effectively; much managerial effort and scholarly study have been dedicated to these issues. Nevertheless, providing a service involves another aspect: managing clients, who are consumers of the service and may also contribute to its creation.

Blue ocean strategy:

The blue ocean approach is predicated on the premise that market limits and industry structure are not predetermined and may be reconfigured via the actions and attitudes of industry participants. This is referred to as the reconstructionist perspective by the writers. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist solely in managers' thoughts, practitioners who subscribe to this perspective avoid being constrained by actual market structures. To them, more demand exists, primarily untapped. The core of the issue is determining how to produce it.

Brokerage:

A brokerage firm's primary responsibility is to serve as a middleman, connecting buyers and sellers to complete transactions. Accordingly, brokerage firms are compensated through commission once a transaction is completed. For example, when a stock trade order is executed, a transaction fee is paid by an investor to repay the brokerage firm for its efforts in completing the transaction.

Collaborative consumption:

Collaborative Consumption (CC) may be described as a collection of resource circulation systems that allow consumers to both get and supply valued resources or services, either temporarily or permanently, via direct contact with other customers or through the use of a mediator.

Corporate renaissance:

Improving management and performance for companies of all sizes, industries, and globally via creative solutions. Alternate Capital Raising Platform is a novel method of obtaining money that connects the prospective buyer with available capital sources such as venture capital funds, angel investors, and others.

Customer relationship:

Due to the high cost of client acquisition, acquiring a sizable wallet share, economies of scale are crucial. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technique for dealing with a business's interactions with current and prospective customers that aims to analyze data about customers' interactions with a company to improve business relationships with customers, with a particular emphasis on retention, and ultimately to drive sales growth.

Channel aggregation:

Consolidating numerous distribution routes into one to achieve greater economic efficiency. A business model for internet commerce in which a company (that does not manufacture or warehouse any item) gathers (aggregates) information about products and services from many competing sources and displays it on its website. The firm's strength is in its power to create an 'environment' that attracts users to its website and develop a system that facilitates pricing and specification matching.

Channel per purpose:

Creating separate channels for selling and purchasing current goods and services. A marketing plan is a vendor's plan for distributing a product or service to the end consumer through the chain of commerce. Manufacturers and retailers have a plethora of channel choices. The simplest method is the direct channel, which involves the seller selling directly to the consumer. In addition, the vendor may use its own sales staff or offer its goods or services through an e-commerce website.

Digitization:

This pattern is based on the capacity to convert current goods or services into digital versions, which have several benefits over intangible products, including increased accessibility and speed of distribution. In an ideal world, the digitalization of a product or service would occur without compromising the consumer value proposition. In other words, efficiency and multiplication achieved via digitalization do not detract from the consumer's perceived value. Being digitally sustainable encompasses all aspects of sustaining the institutional framework for developing and maintaining digital objects and resources and ensuring their long-term survival.

Disruptive trends:

A disruptive technology supplants an existing technology and fundamentally alters an industry or a game-changing innovation that establishes an altogether new industry. Disruptive innovation is defined as an invention that shows a new market and value network and ultimately disrupts an established market and value network, replacing incumbent market-leading companies, products, and alliances.

Experience:

Disrupts by offering a better understanding that customers are willing to pay for. Experience companies that have progressed may begin charging for the value of the transformation that an experience provides. An experienced company charges for the feelings consumers get as a result of their interaction with it.

Lean Start-up:

The Lean Start-up methodology is a scientific approach to developing and managing businesses that focuses on getting the desired product into consumers' hands as quickly as possible. The Lean Startup method coaches you on how to guide a startup?when to turn, when to persevere?and how to build a company with maximum acceleration. It is a guiding philosophy for new product development.

Lease:

The item that's being sold is now available for rent on an hourly/daily/monthly/yearly basis. A lease is a contract that specifies the terms under which one can rent a property. It ensures the lessee, the tenant, access to an asset, and the lessor, the property owner or landlord, receives monthly payments from the lessee for a predetermined period of months or years. Both the lessee and the lessor risk penalties for breaching the contract's conditions.

On-demand economy:

The on-demand economy is described as economic activity generated by digital marketplaces that meet customer demand for products and services via quick access and accessible supply. The supply chain is managed via a highly efficient, intuitive digital mesh built on top of current infrastructure networks. The on-demand economy is transforming commercial behavior in cities worldwide. The number of businesses, the categories covered, and the industry's growth rate are all increasing. Businesses in this new economy are the culmination of years of technological progress and customer behavior change.

Online marketplace:

An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a kind of e-commerce website in which product or service information is supplied by various third parties or, in some instances, the brand itself, while the marketplace operator handles transactions. Additionally, this pattern encompasses peer-to-peer (P2P) e-commerce between businesses or people. By and large, since marketplaces aggregate goods from a diverse range of suppliers, the variety and availability are typically greater than in vendor-specific online retail shops. Additionally, pricing might be more competitive.

Peer to Peer (P2P):

A peer-to-peer, or P2P, service is a decentralized platform that enables two people to communicate directly, without the need for a third-party intermediary or the usage of a corporation providing a product or service. For example, the buyer and seller do business now via the P2P service. Certain peer-to-peer (P2P) services do not include economic transactions such as buying and selling but instead connect people to collaborate on projects, exchange information, and communicate without the need for an intermediary. The organizing business provides a point of contact for these people, often an online database and communication service. The renting of personal goods, the supply of particular products or services, or the exchange of knowledge and experiences are all examples of transactions.

Reverse engineering:

It is a legally sanctioned technique of duplicating a technology in which, rather than beginning from scratch, one starts with an existing product and works backward to determine how it works. Once the product's basic principle or core idea is established, the next stage is to replicate the same outcomes using other methods to prevent (legally prohibited) patent infringement. The cost of manufacturing is significantly lowered.

Shared rental:

In this model, businesses offer rental services while individuals rent items and pay appropriately. The procedure through which a current homeowner puts their home or an empty room available for short-term rental as an alternate type of housing. Peer-to-peer rental of property is a kind of peer-to-peer renting, which is a component of the sharing economy. The business strategy is almost identical to that of a conventional vacation rental. Through peer-to-peer property rental, participating homeowners may earn money by renting out their primary residence or an empty room they may have available.

Sharing economy:

The sharing economy eliminates the necessity for individual asset ownership. The phrase sharing economy is an umbrella word that encompasses various definitions and is often used to refer to economic and social activity that involves online transactions. Originally coined by the open-source community to refer to peer-to-peer sharing of access to goods and services, the term is now occasionally used more broadly to refer to any sales transaction conducted via online marketplaces, including those that are business to consumer (B2C) than peer-to-peer.

Solution provider:

A solution provider consolidates all goods and services in a particular domain into a single point of contact. As a result, the client is supplied with a unique know-how to improve efficiency and performance. As a Solution Provider, a business may avoid revenue loss by broadening the scope of the service it offers, which adds value to the product. Additionally, close client interaction enables a better understanding of the customer's habits and requirements, enhancing goods and services.

Take the wheel:

Historically, the fundamental principles for generating and extracting economic value were rigorous. Businesses attempted to implement the same business concepts more effectively than their rivals. New sources of sustained competitive advantage are often only accessible via business model reinvention driven by disruptive innovation rather than incremental change or continuous improvement.

Two-sided market:

Two-sided marketplaces, also called two-sided networks, are commercial platforms featuring two different user groups that mutually profit from the web. A multi-sided platform is an organization that generates value mainly via the facilitation of direct contacts between two (or more) distinct kinds of connected consumers (MSP). A two-sided market enables interactions between many interdependent consumer groups. The platform's value grows as more groups or individual members of each group use it. For example, eBay is a marketplace that links buyers and sellers. Google connects advertising and searchers. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are also bidirectional, linking consumers and marketers.

Rent instead of buy:

Services that do not need the product to be purchased but rather rent it for the economic benefit of requiring less money to access the commodity. When you rent, you assume less obligation since most of the burden is placed on the owner's shoulders. There is no debt; you are just responsible for the monthly rent. When renting, you have more flexibility by signing a six-month or one-year lease. This implies that you will be confined to that location for at least that period. When your lease term expires, you have the option of switching to another product or renewing your lease.

Uberization:

Uberization is a phrase that refers to a shift to an operational paradigm that allows economic actors to trade underused capacity of existing assets or human resources at near-zero transaction costs. The word Uberization is taken from the company's name. Thus, the model's operational expenses are distinct from those of an established company.