new Jiva blog post about White…
new Jiva blog post about White Label productshttp://jivatechnology.com/blog/2009/04/481/
White label thinking..
For reasons that will soon become apparent to anyone who take even the most passing of interests in what gos on here at Jiva I have been thinking alot about the concept of white label products lately.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pray/337725635/
Now being a child of the DJ era my definition of white label (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_label) required a bit of tweaking so I’ve been doing a bit of reading and researching and here are a few notes on what I have come up with.
The Wikipedia definition of a whitelabel product is “A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it.”
Now thats fine but not exactly inspiring – the rest of the article gives a few useful examples and draws the comparison to the white label records of my youth but its generally a weak entry.
A recent(ish) post from ReadWriteWeb about Netvibes gave some insight into their whitelabeling strategy (http://business.netvibes.com/premium-universe.php) and how they had shifted focus to that from an initial focus on the early adopter, consumer market;
[Netvibes] CEO Freddy Mini explained that the start page paradigm hasn’t really taken off beyond the early adopter set but remains useful as a driver for sales of the company’s new enterprise and “branded portal” offerings
The company also cut its burn rate (expenses) by 50% during the same period.
Since starting to offer enterprise and branded products, though, Mini says that Netvibes increased its revenue 4X in the last 3 quarters of 2008.
LOVEFiLM is another example of a company embracing whitelabeling alongside its main offering. The UK Netflix clone/competitor has whitelabeled dvd rental websites built on its infrastructure and using its distribution for companies like Tesco, Odeon Cinemas and WH Smith (it alway bought the Amazon DVD rental business in the UK). It used these sites not only to bring in much needed revenue but also to increase brand awareness due to prominent ‘powered by LOVEFiLM’ buttons on all the sites.
A different take on the whitelabel business model is White Label Dating – a business that gives itself over totally to whitelabeling its comprehensive dating site technology while sharing revenue with these ‘partners’ who essentially concentrate on audience building and sales and outsource the technical matters to WLD.