executive impact

Friend-based app helps shops create online member programs

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By Julian Ryall for BCCJ ACUMEN

Advertising is helpful and promotions have their uses, but entrepreneurs Christian Schmitz and Loren Fykes are firm believers in the overwhelming power of word of mouth.

The new Quchy (pronounced koo-chee) mobile application, which went live in early May, takes its name from the Japanese term for word of mouth (kuchikomi) and lets users keep track of visited places, organising that collection of locations as recommendations for friends.

Quchy differs from other applications because it is friend-based, Fykes told BCCJ ACUMEN. Users cannot follow unknown account holders.

“This is really important because you are able to see the places friends have been to and you’ll be far more trusting of their opinions precisely because they are friends”, said Fykes, founder and chief executive officer of the firm behind the service, Endymion Inc, and the brains behind the application.

“With other sites, anyone can make up any sort of false review—basically an advert — so you never know whether a restaurant is any good until you go there yourself”, he added.

Taking a pack of cards as a template, a Quchy user can find a favorite restaurant and add that business card to his or her collection — much like restaurants have business cards alongside the cash register. These digital cards, which can hold a host of information — including opening times, reviews, address and pictures — are visible to friends who might want to visit. The more users share and recommend places, the more points they earn.

Shops see who is talking about them the most and may thank with rewards those customers who opt-in.

Users can add any card from any city in the world. If it’s not there, e-mail them, and it will be added to the database for you. Search for The World’s End, for example, and the user is directed to the popular pub in Camden Town, London.

Cards can also be organized in decks for easy reference, such as the best places in Tokyo for business dinners, and a user can browse friends’ decks.

An added element is the Connoisseurs page, where people who are knowledgeable about a certain cuisine provide details of the best restaurants.

Quchy traces its genesis to the Kudos Member Benefits Program, the web-based service that provides members who sign up with significant savings on everything from meals to hotel stays and test drives of top-of-the-range cars.

Schmitz, originally from Germany, took the largely inactive business over in May 2011 and set about transforming it into the meeting place for businesses with products and services that match the needs of a high-end a clientele.

Today Kudos has more than 10,000 members and some 400 partner vendors, Schmitz said, with the typical member a high-earning, internationally minded person.

Quchy will bring the service to mobile with an increased level of user interaction.

“Many stores think that loyalty is about point cards, how much a customer spends, how many times they visit the store—but these are all traditional and out-dated concepts”, Fykes said.

“That’s not real loyalty; true loyalty is a conversation you have with a friend in which you talk honestly about a place and tell them how much you like it”, he explained.

“Conversations are viral, but a lot of service providers do not know how to capture that conversation and make that into a quantitative and measurable way to generate traffic for their business”, he said.

The firm is working with an engineering team that includes the former head of the genome-mapping project at Stanford University to devise ways to track conversations as they spread and use that data to identify the best way to get conversations started.

Creating the application presented some technical obstacles, Fykes admitted. But the system’s potential was recognized by an angel investor, and additional funds were forthcoming from Samurai Incubate Inc, Japan’s hottest investor in up-and-coming concepts.

Endymion is the first foreign-owned firm to secure funding from the start-up accelerator.

With funding in place and the system operational—and new additions to Quchy’s capabilities anticipated soon — Fykes and Schmitz know they have a lot on their hands.

“It is perfect for users, but our focus is supporting shops and small businesses with their social media strategies”, Fykes said. “We are effectively creating social membership programs for them and creating a network of great benefits for users.

“We’re helping shops to have conversations with their most loyal customers”.

More information: Quchy: http://quchy.com/ Kudos: http://firstbenefit.jp/about-kudos

© Japan Today

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2 Comments
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sounds nice, downloading now.

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Reinventing the wheel. Japanese shops and businesses are only really just beginning to use Facebook to connect to their customer base. Expecting them to adopt a new service like this which is WAY down on the Alexa ranking list is a pipe dream.

“Many stores think that loyalty is about point cards, how much a customer spends, how many times they visit the store—but these are all traditional and out-dated concepts”, Fykes said.

LOLWHAT? Yeah, Fykes, how much a customer spends and how many times they visit the store is not important at all, is it. Hahahahaha.

I am sorry to say, but this reeks of someone hypnotising themselves with their own product and dreaming that the world will adapt to it, rather than the other way round. The Alexa rating is pretty much all you need to know about how successful this is...

http://quchy.com/ is 35,725th in Japan, with a MASSIVE 3.2 page views per day, while they managed to get between 500 and 1000 people to install the app since July 9th.

If it works out for them, that is great, but I honestly think that it won't. I am also wondering how they are going to make any proper money from this; I assume they have a subscription fee for businesses who wish to appear on the app, and users get to use it for free. They are going to need a hell of a lot of restaurants signing up before they can start pulling in anything near what looks like a wage from this...

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