Aplauz
Aplauz is prepaid digital credit that empowers people to make conscious spending. Aplauz vouchers can be bought online and at convenience stores. The vouchers are used to make online payments without any of the traditional online payment methods, or even using a bank account. It is ideal for those who don’t own a credit card or don’t want to disclose financial details to securely buy online while staying in control of their spending.
Understand the Aplauz target audience
Raise awareness about conscious spending
Identify growth potential in Europe
Challenge and solutions
What was your initial goal regarding the ‘conscious spending’ research project? How did Glocalities contribute to this?
Our objective with the research was to understand consumers’ perceptions and attitudes toward prepaid payments and to help Aplauz raise awareness about the phenomena of conscious spending in the marketplace. In order to do that, Glocalities has developed a thought leadership report based on an in-depth analysis of a representative consumer survey interviewing consumers above 18 years old in 5 key European markets.
How did researching consumers' online spending habits help you understand and expand the conscious spending concept?
The research has helped us quantify the main arguments and emotions that are fuelling the trend of conscious spending and how prepaid can be a way to help these customers to spend in a conscious way online. The research has given us psychographic profiles of different conscious spenders’ concerns including:
1.Budget / spending consciousness (or subscription fatigue)
2.Privacy consciousness
3.Conscious parental control – focusing on parents with children still at home.
Which actions do you take to raise societal / market awareness regarding conscious spending?
Aplauz’s vision is to support online merchants offer a way for their customers to spend money online in a conscious way. It is particularly relevant for online gaming companies targeting younger customers. The survey shows that a very large share of parents of children who are gaming wish they could give their children pocket money to spend online. When presented Aplauz and the possibility to use Aplauz to enable their children to spend online in a safe and controlled way, 66% of the parents say they would be likely to use it.
What is the brand promise of Aplauz? How do you deliver the promise to your customers?
Aplauz brand promise is to enable conscious commerce. Offering Aplauz as a payment option is a way for online merchants to demonstrate their commitment to empower their customers with a responsible way to spend online. Aplauz has a completely new approach to prepaid payments. We have started with a simple voucher-based product as other market players, but we are now launching an app with functionalities that will deliver further on our promise such as a Parent-Child functionality to provide parents with peace of mind allowing their children to spend money online in a protected way. Further functionalities will be developed to manage subscriptions in a conscious way, and much more.
Which actions did you take after the research was concluded? What are the main learnings that you gained from it?
The insights of the Glocalities research have helped us understand further the concerns of parents. 71% of parents would like to educate their children to spend in a safe way. 71% would like their children’s spending to be private and their personal data to be protected, 58% would like more control on their spending online, and 57% prefer prepaid ways of allowing them to spend online as it means more control on how much they spend. These insights have given us the inspiration to create our Parent-Child app functionality.
