We have started to see some confusion as to what makes a business model fall into the Ownership 2.0 category, so the distinction may be worth clarifying more directly. Specifically, some trade-in services for electronics like Gazelle, ReCellular and FlipSwap are being referred to in the media as Ownership 2.0 companies.
These services are quintessentially not Ownership 2.0 companies because they follow a “linear” ownership pattern rather than a “cyclical” one.
Ownership 1.0 models are parts of a disjointed linear ownership process, in which decisions are made at each of three steps:
1) Buy (Where?)
2) Own (Forever?)
3) Dispose (Throw away, sell, recycle, store, auction, or trade-in?)
Ownership 2.0 models are distinguished by providing cyclical total ownership solutions that allow a customer to decide all parts of the buy/own/dispose process at the point-of-purchase. Increasingly customers know that they don’t want to own an item forever, and Ownership 2.0 models help these customers acquire items in a manner that simultaneously helps them dispose of them later.
For instance, services like Netflix, Gamefly, or Bag Borrow or Steal proactively provide solutions for the return of the items as part of the service, which makes them very different than business models that rely on customers to reactively find them as the last step of a linear ownership process (like trade-in services).
The distinction is important because these new Ownership 2.0 models, by providing ongoing total ownership solutions, rather than a piece of a disjointed linear ownership process, are much more powerful and convenient method of ownership for customers.
