Groupe Chronos

Sharing is a dirty word. "Do we call hotels 'bed sharing'? That's way too intimate. Do we call bowling 'shoe sharing'? Who would want to bowl?" The semantics of the word proved to be a major obstacle for Robin Chase when launching Zipcar. After conducting a sociological study, Chase learned that 40% of the people she talked to had an extremely negative reaction to... sharing. "The word makes people nervous."

With Chase's first lot of Zipcars, she wanted to make her users feel they were in the know; that they were the ones who had figured it out. Sharing was cool and owning a car was "stupid." Mark Levine from the New York Times described this transformational sociological shift where, "Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern; owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward."

Companies outside the mobility sector are marketing closed-loop products, such as Tandus, who has found a way to use old carpets to make new ones. Sharing? Maybe not exactly, but the fact that company's interests are now more closely aligned with the consumer's means: better quality, cooperation, providing services consumers want, and revenues which allow for company success.

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