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Sephora and Birchbox.
In 2010, when Birchbox came along, it disrupted Sephora using a “subscription box” model.
get to
in the convenience of their own homes.
Birchbox was a godsend.
sample-sized products
the full-sized version of the product
Birchbox had come to pose a major threat because it interfered with just one part of the consumer’s activities: testing.
pay-to-play model
the customer’s value chain, or CVC.*2 A CVC is composed of the discrete steps a typical customer follows in order to select, buy, and consume a product or service.
Traditionally, consumers completed all these activities with the same company in a joint or coupled manner.
What I realized, as I thought about these examples, was that disruptors had posed a threat by breaking the links between some of the stages of the CVC and then “stealing” one or a few stages for themselves to fulfill.
In effect, upstarts were culling just a portion of the CVC that had traditionally been provided by an incumbent, and they were building entire businesses around it. Disruptors were decoupling discrete activities that customers performed.
different weapons
Yet disruption in each of these industries ultimately amounted to the same process: decoupling.
Rather, they were, possibly, a general phenomenon.
TiVo
In effect, TiVo decoupled viewing TV programs from watching ads.
Aereo
Decoupling has also riven the automobile industry.
Split
Zipcar
Zipcar is a membership service that provides access to company-owned cars placed at multiple locations around a city.
Zipcar breaks the links between purchasing and driving a car, as well as between driving and maintaining a car.
Whether you prefer to drive or be driven, a decoupler exists that caters to your desire to avoid buying and maintaining an automobile.
With their online apps, Uber and its look-alikes eliminate this element of uncertainty.
Motif,
TransferWise
The company’s solution is to play with the service fee.
By 2015, 43 percent of men engaged in home chores such as food preparation or cleaning up, compared with 70 percent of women.
Blue Apron, Chef’d, HelloFresh, and hundreds of copycat businesses.
Hire-A-Chef
Michelin-starred restaurants
Hire-A-Chief and other copycats decouple three key stages of the customer’s value chain—recipe creation, ingredient shopping, and cooking—from a fourth stage, the actual consumption of a meal cooked at home. Last but not least, the chefs clean up the kitchen!
back-end solution.
Traditionally, incumbents provide value across the multiple stages of the customer’s value chain. However, value is never equally distributed throughout the stages of the CVC.
But here’s the crucial part: with decoupling, they gain the ability to claim value without the parts of the chain that don’t create value, such as peeling the onions, watching ads, buying a game, or maintaining the car.
see everything in terms of just one phenomenon: decoupling.
From another perspective, however, these sites have simply decoupled the links between evaluating and choosing. They allow users to search for and evaluate restaurants and travel services, respectively, while doing the actual booking on another website.*3
they tend to treat all businesses identically,
webrooming.
Warby Parker
Bo...
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when fit is critical, as in the case of eyewear.
Rent the Runway
This is yet another example of decoupling, a separation of the activities of using (the value-creating portion) from owning (the non-value-creating portion).
Business models based on the renting and sharing economies represent huge new opportunities for consumers to reduce their ownership burden—thanks to decoupling.
software-as-a-service (SaaS) models and freemium. Under the SaaS model,
as a perpetual license
We can regard SaaS as a special case of decoupling usage from ownership.
Dropbox,
