vendredi 17 avril 2009

Easy Group

The Easy Empire was founded by Stelios Haji-Ioannu in 1995 when he founded the budget airline company EasyJet.

Positioning: “Easy is a functional brand; it's about value for the many, not the few” (Stelios Haji-Ioannu)
Corporate baseline: more value for less
Philosophy: apply the principles of yield management and no-frills service that have worked for his airline to almost any business. (Stelios Haji-Ioannu defines himself as a serial entrepreneur.)
The group’s aim is to keep its products and services simple and affordable to anyone.
Easy consider they are user friendly and consumer oriented.

The problem that Easy solves for customers is the access to certain services related to the price. For the owner of the business or the partners it is the lack of sufficient booking and the places that could stay unoccupied and generate louses.

Products and services: Easy movie rentals, Easy Internet cafes, Easy pizzas, Easy hotel, EasyCinema.com-online DVD rentals, EasyCar.com, EasyPizza, Easy's mobile-phone venture, EasyCruise, EasyMoney-car insurance, credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, bank accounts, EasyValue-comparisons for online shoping, EasyBus, EasyVan, EasyJobs, EasyMusic, EasyWatch, EasyOffice – renting of office space, an Easy shaving cream, aftershave balm, hair and body Wash…

Limits of the model: there's a thin line between cheap and tacky. Some products are not interesting in cheap variant.

The yield management is very important to the Easy Group’s business model.
It books 95 percent of its tickets over the Web.

Some sources of economies and advantages: EasyJet never issues paper tickets, and runs an almost paperless office to boot. They don’t serve any free meal to the customers on the plane and which is one reason its jet turnaround times average about 30 minutes, among the best in the business.
Every easy branded business is online. And most receive their sales activity through this channel.
As they say in the EasyGroup brend manual, the design of the web pages is crucial. ‘The layout has to deliver information in a clear, consistent and concise way. This structure has to encourage purchase. So, one of the sources of their success is in the on-line strategy: translating the principle of the simplicity on the webdesign level and mage web services easy to use. As they say in the Brend Manual, any communication related to the brand must lead with a motivating customer benefit. The benefit should focus on the experiences that the easy branded business can bring.
The group introduced recently some retail presentation, in the easy.com centres, sited within the easyInternetcafé properties. There is a video wall and a free standing interactive portal that provide more detailed information about Easys’ products and services.

Marketing is considered as core competence at the EasyGroup and within the marketing mix the public relations has always be used extensively by the easyGroup companies. The group prefer PR than advertising because it is free!

Easy has not the ambition to compete big companies.
But EasyGroup challenges every historical leader in every domain which is concerned by its activity.
In travelling, players as Virgin fill themselves as being in competition with EasyJet. Richard Brenson said that Virgin is the opposite of EasyJet to illustrate the positioning of his brand.
Barclays Bank, for example is could be sensible on the EasyMoney’s concurrence, because easy’s credit cards are much less expensive and could attract some Barclays’ clients. On the other hand, the two groups aim different segments of customers.
Some Easys’ concurrents appeared after the Easys success, using the same model.
Easy business can and do compete but have to derive 75% or more of their core (non-competitive) business.


Easy Money.com

EasyMoney is defined by the group as an online personal finance service.
It makes banking really very easy. While traditional banks seems heavy and complicated, asking the customer to fill a lot of forms and to provide some documents to have access to banking services, here we have just some clear and concise information.
For example, when you look for a car insurance, you are given the information about the circumstances where the company can’t allow you to have one.(like having a non EU driving licence)
For the other services, Credit Cars, Personal Loans, Mortgages and Bank accounts Easy works with partners. In this case Easy offers sophisticated search machines providing different possibilities to more personalised search.
They offer a users’s guides for bank-customers.
Easy money is a variant of EasyValue, offering a comparison of partners’ offers.
To have a mortgage, prospects are quoted as in any e-business bank web-site.
On a difference from traditional web-sites instead of complicated legacy mentions, we find informations like: “Missing payments will have severe consequences and may make obtaining credit more difficult in the future”. So, nothing revolutionary in that web site, apart the accessible communication.