UBER Cab service in Australia
The hospitality and tourism industry is one of the booming industries currently in Australia with innovations and improvisations taking place regularly. It is estimated that the spending in the industry would reach the approximately 170 million dollars by the end of the year 2025, which is very significant in terms of the development of the industry(Leung, Law, Van Hoof, and Buhalis, 2013). The business chosen to study is the travel business which is experiencing greater heights on regular basis. The company in focus is the UBER cabs service which is one the top service provider in the market. It operates from an application launched on different platforms and commuters can book a cab with exciting offers and a wide variety of sections of cars to select from. It follows digital marketing as the major marketing scheme to promote its business.
current business operation
product
UBER provides a wider variety of services in and around Australia. The major service or the product for UBER is its cab facility which is very popular not in Australia but also around the world. The other service provided by UBER is UBEREATS by which it has started delivering the food items from the various joints and outlets listed on its application. These all services are provided by the mobile application and the website.
location and distribution
UBER has its services in almost 35 countries of the world. The cab service is almost carrying its operations in all the regions of Australia such as New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland etc. but it does provide its service in northern territory which can be seen from the chart in appendix which shows the inception of its operations(Rayle, Shaheen, Chan, Dai, and Cervero, 2014).
pricing models
There is the wide variety of services provided by the UBER cab services. It has UBERX, UBERPLUS, and UBER BLACK as its services which have fare ranging from the affordable to the luxurious. Also from the graph, we can see that the fare prices of the services also range according to the time period and it’s mostly when it is the peak hour and more traffic on the roads.
customer segments
Customers of UBER include all the types of the people ranging in all the age groups. As it can been seen that the major users of the UBER are people aged between 25 years to 33 years which can be attributed to young generation using cab service to college or offices, while the second most age group using UBER is lies between 34years to 49 years and hence it can be seen that it is very popular among the working professionals.
UBER cab services and its products
branding and positioning
UBER from its inception is on a surge in terms of its branding and value and this can be supported by the graph which shows that UBER became the top most valuable brand in the recent startups that were launched with evaluation of 1.6 billion dollars. Also, the market capitalization of UBER which stands at 50 billion dollars is the most among the next five cab services combined together. So, this clearly tells the positioning of UBER that is number one.
current promotion and marketing materials
Social media is the biggest platform which is used by UBER for the marketing and promotion of its business. Social media gives them a wider range of population to reach to in an easy and cheapest way possible with maximum effect. Also provides a lot of discounts to promote and increase its business during any festival or some special days which gives them a competitive edge.
UBER can be more innovative and can increase its business by starting services other than the application based. It can start a service like other state taxi service which can attract the crowd which is not able to use smartphones and need taxi immediately.
This can be made applicable by UBER placing its own taxi stands and making the cabs available at the service as same as it does through the online application. It can ask the driver to generate a slip for the customer of the destination source and by this, the machine could evaluate the fare for the trip and hence by the online generation the company can easily track the records of that particular taxi or cab.
future integrated marketing plan
PLAN OVERVIEW
All the elements of the promotional mix that are also known as 4 P’s work in relation to each other. Every promotional and marketing strategy involves selling and advertising of the product and services involve door to door selling, advertising through social media and various other forms(Singh, 2013). Hence incorporating all the elements together form a strong promotional strategic plan.
New strategies could be that with social media promotions the company could target the people who could not use the mobile application or do not know how to use by organizing events where they can promote their cabs service and can launch the new innovative idea as described earlier and can also teach people how to use the application. Having consistent monitoring of the strategies would be important as it could be decisive which strategies are working best for the company. They should also have the methodology which they want to incorporate.
Customer Segments of UBER cab services
target market
Since by the statistics it is very clear that that the people between age group 25 to 34 years uses the cab service the most so in my opinion I would like to target the 35 to 49 years and 50+ years population age group by providing special discounts to the senior citizens and offers to the clients going to office like early bird offer which would target these people.
Promotional Mix
personal selling
It is referred to as the two communication where the product is advertised or sold by giving small demo or presentation of the product (Erevelles, and Fukawa, 2013). It is a costly process.
public relations
It is a form of promotion which is a non paid and is done by the public connections such as news channels, broadcasters rather than the expert individuals (Grunig, 2017). Publicity is a part of the public relation.
advertising
Advertising is the promotion of the product by a non-personal presentation which aims at attracting or targeting the mass communication(Labeeb, Mehta, Matveev, Miryala, Mustafa, Gogoi, Godbole, Larin, Humpleman, Bentolila, and Zhou, 2013). This promotion is a one-way communication method.
sales promotion
It differs from the advertising or the publicity as this is the activity that is carried out as a spontaneous activity which is done as incentives to the dealers or the buyers(Veit, and Walle, 2013).
direct and digital marketing
This type of marketing uses the technology of any type such as any social platform or applications which helps in reaching out to mass population in less time and easy manner(Stone, and Woodcock, 2014).
References
Erevelles, S. and Fukawa, N., 2013. The role of effect in personal selling and sales management. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 33(1), pp.7-24.
Grunig, J.E., 2017. Symmetrical presuppositions as a framework for public relations theory. In Public relations theory(pp. 17-44). Routledge.
Labeeb, I.K., Mehta, M., Matveev, V., Miryala, S., Mustafa, Y., Gogoi, A., Godbole, S., Larin, O., Humpleman, R., Bentolila, A. and Zhou, Y., 2013. Method and apparatus for delivery of television programs and targeted de-coupled advertising. U.S. Patent 8,495,679.
Leung, D., Law, R., Van Hoof, H. and Buhalis, D., 2013. Social media in tourism and hospitality: A literature review. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30(1-2), pp.3-22.
Rayle, L., Shaheen, S., Chan, N., Dai, D. and Cervero, R., 2014. App-based, on-demand ride services: Comparing taxi and resourcing trips and user characteristics in San Francisco University of California transportation centre (UTC). University of California, Berkeley, United States Rogers, B.(2015) The social costs of Uber. James E. Beasley School of Law, Temple University, Philadelphia, United States.
Singh, D., 2013. The brand personality component of brand goodwill: some antecedents and consequences. Brand equity & advertising: Advertising’s role in building strong brands, pp.83-96.
Stone, M.D. and Woodcock, N.D., 2014. Interactive, direct and digital marketing: A future that depends on the better use of business intelligence. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(1), pp.4-17.
Veit, T. and Walle, A., SAP SE, 2013. System and method for defining a sales promotion. U.S. Patent 8,478,632.