Business Models, Cheating, and Retail.

Taxonomy of Web Business Models: What I like about the wheel below is that someone thought it would be neat to lay it out in a non-tabular format. Having created a standard table, this new view gives us clearer view on what the popular models are. Imagine if you cross tabulated with actual "likelihood of success" measures available elsewhere.

Incentives To Cheat: scale, probability of detection, group membership, and importantly (for me) signaling to ones sense of self, and sense of group. If everyone in group keeps the rules, I won't break them: the further we move from the object itself (i.e. money) and more towards its abstract (derivatives), the more likely we are to cheat, or perhaps act irresponsibly. I like how these ideas could also be related to how we agree to actions, and future actions, in terms of paying bills, keeping appointments, and other social routines.

Retail Therapy: Reinvention. The SAS blog has an interesting piece on large scale retailing and how the downturn is affecting it. Yes there is a need to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, with fewer available resources and with no capital expenditure, but there is also a need to realise that the actual consumer is changing from a badge wearing object seeker, to a "social customer" that will need to be engaged through social networks, and perhaps with definitions of product/ service that may be significantly different than those we employ today.

Concluding Thought: Wouldn't it be great to see how new web2.0 business models might be applied to "traditional retail" organisations, and informed by areas such as social psychology & behavioural economics?