All posts by 360727mv

You do the chic, we do the geek





Based on the production price, Zazzy charges a 60% fee. However, the production itself has been outsourced to, “The World’s Leading 3D Printing Service & Marketplace” (Dutch company). In this way they do not own materials and a 3d-printer, they only use “manpower”.



Zazzy charges the normal 60% production fee within this new business model and a 25% platform fee based on the product-margin, which the creator determined himself. So, Zazzy was already based on co-creation by selling customizable products. However, with the marketing is transferred to the customers as well.

Already 60,000 users designed a product on I’m very curious about the outcome of Customizable/personal products are trendy in a lot of different branches, so why not in jewellery? However, Zazzy is not that groundbreaking because you have to fit your design in specific templates. When browsing through the platform ( it all looks the same to me. So, one cannot really differentiate. For personal use, changing text, figures and icons is maybe enough to make it special and personal to oneself. But for brands these options are far from enough to differentiate in the jewellery market: There are so many brands out there….

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Be famous and (dramatically) increase your number of followers!

Only then you are credible…

I almost wanted to start with: “You cannot trust product tweets of celebrities…” But if that would be a surprise to you, I have some other shocking news to you: Santa doesn’t exist. However, if everyone knows the tweets are set up by the brands themselves, and the celebrities are paid for such tweets, why would brands still spent million dollars to celebrity social media product endorsement?

Opendorse did research to those product endorsement tweets: a tweet from Cristiano Ronaldo is valued $304.000(!) (See source beneath for more numbers). Note that this is the actual value of the tweet for the brand itself, so it does not say celebrities are really paid that amount.

As we know that those tweets are valuable and that it does not matter that we, actually, all know that those tweets are not “real”, what makes the “fake opinion/tweet credible to us, the consumer. That is what Jin and Phua investigated in 2014: “ Explicate the conditions under which celebrities can be leveraged as effective catalysts for brand-related E-WoM on Twitter.” They created semi-fictious celebrity twitter pages, where after they let students (east coast of US) fill in a questionnaire based on these profiles (which off course included a product endorsement tweet).

Jin and Phau found that high numbers of followers results in higher credibility of the celebrity (more physical attractive, trustworthy and competent). On top of that, positive brand tweets of a celebrity with a high number of followers results in higher product involvement/buying intention. This effect is strengthened in case of a prosocial celebrity. In contrast, a celebrity with a low number of followers does not effect product involvement.

(In order to differentiate between types of celebrity (prosocial/antisocial), participants read an article of the celebrity either engaged in charity work or involved in drug abuse and/or adultery scandal.)

On top of that, it is interesting that “we” are more willing to share a tweet if it is coming from a celebrity with a low number of users and if it is negative about a specific brand/product. Probably because we think that a tweet from someone with a high number of followers will be not new to our own followers.

Concluding, celebrities are more credible than ordinary users towards twitter users. If a brand wants to start with twitter celebrity marketing, they need to focus on the number of followers (not only because of the reach, but also because of the credibility) and the behavior of the celebrity. Maybe it would be even better to contact a not that well-know celebrity and let him upload a negative tweet about a competitor. It will be shared more often by other twitter-users, and then it will maybe get more attention.

However, we must not forget that a celebrity, who will promote a lot of products using twitter, will be less credible in the end. Besides, I doubt if everyone knows how much followers his or her followers have.

Then I got one last question to you: if you had to set up one celebrity tweet for Microsoft surface tablet, who would tweet what text, and tell me why? Besides, tell me why this tweet didn’t worked out well:


In turn I got one tip for Santa to be credible for old and young again: Open a twitter account and dramatically increase your number of followers… You are already famous!

Note: If you didn’t see Oprah’s mistake, take a look with what device she uploaded the tweet.

Seung-A Annie Jin & Joe Phua (2014) Following Celebrities’ Tweets About Brands: The Impact of Twitter- Based Electronic Word-of-Mouth on Consumers’ Source Credibility Perception, Buying Intention, and Social Identification With Celebrities, Journal of Advertising, 43:2, 181-195.

Find information through people

Nowadays, a lot of start-up pitches start with: “We are the Google of “fill in…”. did not, is saying they will do/are doing (a bit) the same as Google, only better. That sounds not realistic, but is it though? is competing with algorithms by using us, using our knowledge. The core-thought of is, that people are able to come up with better suggestions than Google’s algorithm does, everyone for a specific topic/subject within his or her knowledge domain. So, they, the founders of, asked themselves: why aren’t people with specific knowledge of topics doing the searching and filtering (Zeef = sieve) for us with regard to web-search: “It is time for human knowledge to advance where algorithms have reached their limitations.” (Klaas Joosten – founder, 2015)

How it works? Everyone can set up a page about a specific topic. Within this topic page you can create different lists for subtopics; for example a HTML list (subtopic) within the topic web-development (example). Within this list you are able to rank different web pages based on content of HTML. Finally, if someone is searching for programming information on, it proposes a specific page about programming based on views, rating, etc. all in order to let him/her find the information.

So, why do they think someone will create a page? integrates affiliate marketing within the pages; you can earn money by creating pages without using banners and other adds. If someone will buy something or clicks on specific content redirected by your Zeef page, both you and will get a fee (if the specific webshop is using affiliate marketing).

In first instance it sounds a bit like to me, doesn’t it? The concept is the same, definitely. However, within you cannot compete within topics. This competition needs to increase the quality of the pages. Besides, you can embed a Zeef-list into your own (blog) website, totally adjusted to your design (example). wants to concur with google Adsense in this way (frido van Driem – co-founder, 2015).


We are better than google Adsense (Rick Boerebach – co-founder, 2015)

Does it have a chance to survive? They attracted over 8000 curators/list makers within one year, besides they raised an investment of 1,2 million euro, end of 2014 in order to “take over” the US market. On top of that the adjusted lists are a lot more inviting than AdSense banners, resulting in a 15x higher click-through rate (CTR) than those AdSense banners. However, there is a huge critical mass within this market, you definitely need to collect a lot of curators in order to be the standard for someone within web searching. Besides, there is a chance that people only create pages that results in earning money for themselves, instead of sharing the “right” content of their topic (Abuse their knowledge).

All in all, I like the idea and the opportunism of I often think myself, wouldn’t it be great if someone who knows everything within this subject could help me out. However, maybe I am skeptical because I really like start-ups that want to beat the big boys by focusing on quality… Do you think I am?

Van Driem, F. Co-founder Zeef (2015), Zeef – Waar hebben wij het over?, In:, By: Van Breda, N.

Boerebach, R. Co-founder Zeef (2015), “Zeef”, in:, By: Blom & Stekelenburg

Joosten, K. Founder Zeef (2015) “Zeef: About”, in: