Market.Be picks the North West of Britain as its Launchpad
Date: 16/06/2018
Author: Jason McPherson
A small Mancunian company is poised to go global with a revolutionary service that transforms market trading into a 21st century experience. Market.Be is a suite of tools and mobile apps to help market traders find the best markets and customers the best bargains. It uses advanced artificial intelligence and statistical techniques to pinpoint the best places to find and sell crafts, food, pastries or anything else.
“Markets have largely been the same for thousands of years” explains Market.Be’s founder, Ethar Alali “It isn’t helped by what are often quite bureaucratic local councils who still process most trader applications on paper. Despite the resurgence of market trading has seen in recent years.
“What we set out to do, was make the registration process easier for everyone. But the deeper we went, the more we found endless opportunities to make the entire experience better and a lot smoother!”
Market.Be has been designed from the ground up, to perfect the market experience. The company works with market traders and has access to hundreds of customers and managers who all input into its development.
“We are very aware it’s important to get early user feedback on both the concept and design. One of the things we didn’t want to do was create a platform that didn’t suit the people who would use it. Our traders help us with that in return for support in kind.”
Yet, Market.Be’s innovation doesn’t stop there. As well as their own money, the directors are using a crowdfunding campaign to build the mobile apps and platform.
“We have our new Crowdfunding campaign launching soon and intend to offer some of our backers the opportunity to submit the features they would like to see in the app. Smaller backers can vote on the options and the option with the greatest pledge total gets built first.”
Market.Be also encourages traders to come together and pledge in syndicates, nurturing collaboration and is a natural networking exercise that offers traders peer support and is better all round.
“As with most businesses, we found one of the biggest problems traders face is brand awareness and retaining pubic trust. They also can’t get access to the latest technology to help them. This can make it difficult for crafters and makers to commercialise their passions. This is the main reason why we use some of our own advertising to showcase traders themselves.”
Market.Be uses an extremely innovative model to crowdfund. An offering that hopes to bring people into the experience who otherwise never would have tried it. Ethar calls it “Democratising Development” and it works by allowing users to pledge small amounts of money, as little as £3, to choose the features they want to see in the product.
“Bigger investors get to suggest features” explains Ethar “smaller investments are pledged against the desired features as a form of ‘vote’.”
Uniquely, Marktet.Be encourages mass collaboration. Allowing smaller investors to come together with other small investors to pool their money and submit features they really would like to see.
“We want Market.Be to be a platform people actually want to use. That means everyone! We don’t want cost to be a prohibitive barrier to engagement, but we need to fund the build. That is why we made the deliberate choice to crowdfund as a main source of investment. By networking and coming together in syndicates, pledging perhaps £3 — £5 each across 3 or 4 features, instead of £15 to £20 on one feature, smaller investors are more likely to see one of their desired features picked for development. Reducing the risks of larger investments and bringing together the application the collective actually wants to use. Also, we hope that also gets pledgers thinking about collaborating with others on projects outside Market.Be.”
This unique “productive”, supportive marketing is a market engagement model Market.Be are extremely proud of. They have shunned most of the classic marketing merchandise in favour of using their money to help traders in return for help raising awareness of the Market.Be brand through co-branded material and traders’ own digital presence.
“More widely, we see a big gap between marketing and service delivery in this space. A lot of sales and marketing material and merchandise doesn’t serve a purpose. It’s paper that clutters up bins and other containers, never to be used again. With only around 0.2% of that spend resulting in any interest, it means the vast majority of that marketing spent traditional organisations never see a return on, nor get anything back.
“To make people aware of us and traders, we re-examined the relationship people have with marketing content. Given the reality that most of the money spent on marketing is waste, we decided to spend that money supporting market traders directly instead. Usually through co-branded content, badges packaging and stickers. We’re even up for paying the pitch fee or any idea, as long as we see value in it for us, the markets, the traders and indeed, the community. We invite any market trader to follow along and give us any suggestion.”
Market.Be have helped traders with co-branded packaging, websites, video production, logo design and much more. All their efforts are published through their social media and YouTube channels. By all accounts, the response to their innovative service has been overwhelmingly positive.
“We don’t believe that we have to sacrifice local experiences to go big and go global. We see this as having appeal well outside the UK. Especially where barter economies are more the norm, but each areas isn’t homogenous. We don’t expect what works well in Manchester, will work well in Cairo, though we intend to use that cultural awareness to grow this well outside Britain. In other receptive markets like EMEA, South America and Canada.
“By lowing the barrier to entry, we’re hoping to help people create spaces of their own, or combine them with events or simply between communities. Encouraging more trade where otherwise they may have struggled or creating novel market activity nobody ever thought of.”
With thousands of markets UK wide, with many more car boot and garage sales, Market.BE has a very ambitious plan for world domination and with it, a very bright future. We wish them the best of luck!
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Market.Be are a Manchester based technology service company that specialise in using innovation to support traditional market trading.
For more information, you can find them on www.marketbe.co.uk or following them on twitter (@RealMarketBe), Instagram (@RealMarketBe) and Facebook (fb.com/RealMarketBe)
This article first appeared in the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce.
