Brand in action: How Lendor pioneers collaborative consumption for SEA’s consumers and corporates

WARC speaks to Wei Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Lendor – a pioneer of the on-demand rental marketplace in Singapore and Thailand – about addressing Southeast Asia’s problem with e-waste, cultural attitudes towards rentals and how to grow the conscious consumerism market with a two-pronged value proposition strategy.

Key insights

• Lendor’s end goal is to reduce e-waste through collaborative consumption, which is a way of sharing and trading based on an interdependent peer-to-peer model.
• SEA’s middle class aspires to own rather than rent, unlike the UK or Europe’s more mature markets, so Lendor’s strategy and value proposition have to be very different.
• The purist approach to sustainability doesn’t work and it will be a bigger win if consumers use a service without knowing that they’re doing something green for the environment.
  
• From the B2B side, businesses in the region tend to be more pragmatic, and the messaging that works is not purely about ESG but how the model can help them find diversified revenue streams.

Key quote

“We find that what works is that the primary value of using the service is not purely about ESG and saving the earth” – Wei Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Lendor.