Biz Buzz Review

Yesterday there was an inter college business case competition organized by the folks from Singapore in Stanford. My previous post gives you information about the competition itself. Our team from Sweden won a prize in this competition.

The challenge

Zazzle as a company although was making revenue wanted to tap into the student market more effectively as they knew that it was the youngsters who loved to express their emotions and be as creative as they wish to be. However, Zazzle neither spent time, resource or money in focusing on the student market and knew that a normal “advertisement” campaign or a facebook application might not fetch the actual numbers that they wanted. It was clear that the market existed amongst students as students in the US alone represented a spending power of close to 180B USD and as mentioned before, these youngsters are never afraid to express themselves through bold / funny statements. So the case wanted the teams to come up with solutions that could help market Zazzle amongst the students, promote Zazzle as a cool & creative hang out spot on the internet & thereby generate a better brand awareness.

Our idea

Bizbuzz – case study evaluation

Bizbuzz is a competition organized by the students from National University of Singapore (NUS) in Silicon Valley, Bio Valley, Shanghai & Stockholm. It is a case study based competition where each team is given a case study which needs to be analyzed and presented to the jury in Stanford. The rules are pretty simple & each team needs to have atleast a local student (from KTH, Stanford, Wharton & Fudan) along with the folks from Singapore.

Myself, Bernice & Serdar Temiz are pairing up to form a team. The competition is on this Saturday and the case study is already out. It is a very interesting case on a Web 2.0 based e-Commerce company in Palo Alto called Zazzle. They allow users to choose / design their merchandise which will be shipped within a day. As you might have guessed, it is pretty much only in the US and so I have never tried it before. But in general, I think I need to choose / try my dress before I buy and hence I am not a great fan of e-commerce clothing. At the same time, I think there are millions if not billions who love this & are hooked onto such stuff. Zazzle is not just a user generated e-commerce store but also allows one to make money by putting up designs in their market place – something like on demand merchandising combined with selling.

I have just read some articles about their revenue sharing agreement with MySpace & Facebook but not actually managed to find what is the question / issue to be addressed. Hopefully I get this done by tomorrow in time for Saturday’s presentation.