Production: Production in marketing is the production of a product or service with an aim to sell. In the given case of Addison lee, production will include the new GPS system which is designed to track vehicles, the new mobile App, which was launched with an aim of moving the business model to B2C. As these two have brought about a surge in sales and hence are a part of the company’s production.
Product: The primary product of Addison Lee is the hire services provided to travellers. These services are provided in the means of cabs, taxi bikes, jets, coaches etc. to people in London.
Selling: Selling is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Once the product is launched, it is imperative to sell it to the right customers. Addison Lee sales happen through the website (25%) & via mobile application (50%). The company has been receiving a good amount of traffic on both its website as well as the application, the number of downloads on Google’s play store has increased manifolds since first launch, which is a clear evidence that the business is growing well and the sales strategy used is impactful.
Marketing Orientation: This is the company’s philosophy which is focussed upon discovering and fulfilling the needs as well as desires of its target customers through its product mix. The company has launched a mobile app, introduced the ETA model, driver tipping service, sending personalized email to the customers offering valuable deals and changed the logo to give a premium look.
The orientation which is adopted by Addison lee is aimed towards revamping the marketing and branding strategy of the firm. The company has been on a mission to garner traffic from new target customers. They have introduced a new logo for the brand which is bold & has a premium look. This is done in order to gain market attention. At the same time, the company is investing heavily on enhancing the overall customer experience. To achieve that, Adison Lee has been effectively working on data sciences and have started providing ETA, GPS services, etc. Also, the company is providing customized offers and value deals to its customers by sending those deals via e-mails. The company has also focussed on off peak weekend fares, tipping the drivers and is also introducing new fleets in order to accommodate the increasing demand.
Marketing environment simply can be understood as the means of external factors that impact the company’s ability to develop and maintain successful transactions and relationship with its customers. This environment comprises of internal and external factors that can influence the performance of the business (Armstrong, Kotler, Harker & Brennan, 2015) it is crucial for Addison lee to perform a PESTLE and a SWOT analysis. They must also work on the finding both macro and micro environmental forces for developing its marketing strategy. Lack of knowledge of the business environment increase the chances of business strategy to fail exponentially (Dawson, 2014). PESTLE of a company provides an overview of Political, economic, social, technological, legal & environmental factors impacting the business environment, this will help Addison lee their environment better. SWOT analysis, on the other hand, helps the firm in understating its strength and weakness, which is internal to the organization and at the same time it helps in identifying external opportunities and threats to the existing business. Therefore, thought leaders and management experts have stressed over and over again, to do a market environment analysis before formulating a marketing strategy (Qureshi, 2016)
Economic factors: These factors can be understood as the financial indicators in GDP, inflation rate, purchasing power etc. These factors have a great impact on marketing decisions of every business entity. The business of Adison Lee is operated out of London, and London is one of the richest cities of the UK, with great purchasing power, efficiency in adoption of technologies and almost 80 % population being urban. Overall proves to be a good market for taxi hiring companies (Blanco & Cohen, 2017)
Sociocultural factors: This aspect focuses on the forces within the society including family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and the media are the social factors. These factors impact attitudes, opinions and interests of the customers. London has a massive urban population and people are akin to growing usage of technology as well as reduction in traffic and pollution. This effectively makes London commuter’s customers for taxi hiring services. Additionally, with the advent of digital marketing, more people are getting used to the benefits of carpooling services, and with the kind of deals being offered to the user, everyone has a positive word of mouth to spread. Hence, a perfect scenario for Addison Lee (Edwards & Seda, 2016)
Both the economic and social factors create a perfect marketing opportunity for Addison Lee.
London is a huge market for taxi hiring services and the major competitors of Adison Lee are Hail and Uber. Both the companies have web and app based business models and both of them are doing fairly well in the market.
Hail is considered as the nearest competitor for Addison lee, owing to the great discounts and free rides it offers to its customers. It can prove to be a threat for Addison lee and force the brand to up its game of offering discount and free coupons.
Uber: Addison lee has been operating on predominantly the same business model like Uber. Uber did a fantastic business in London and other states. In fact Uber was a buzzword for taxi hiring in London and people have been using it interchangeably. For example, instead of ‘going home’, people would say they are ‘ubering home’. In the current scenario, Uber’s license has been cancelled and this is a sigh of relief for the brand Addison lee. Uber was the huge threat for the company due to its excellent penetration strategy and popularity among the masses and classes.
SWOT provides an analysis of internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats (Dan, 2014). Strengths and weaknesses of Addison lee can be:
Diversifying the customer base from B2B to B2C: This is a major strategic change that the company has made and this has helped the brand in gaining many million customers. Thus, the brand has become largely popular amongst the London population. The company realized quickly that B2B model can only yield some part of revenue for it, and in order to have a higher business it has to move to B2C as well (Hollensen, 2015)
Mobile application: When the entire world is going mobile and everyone has access to their smart phones at all time, it was only imperative that the company launches a mobile app. The firm in 2009 came up with its mobile application to book rides which was a huge step contemporary to what some of its competitors were doing.
Carpooling services: The Company has established itself in hiring services, but it is still way behind its competitors when it comes to carpooling services. This is one of the weaknesses of the firm especially seeing the increase in car pooling services (Yuan, 2013)
Customer feedback: The Company has maintained its reputation in delivering excellent service quality. However, the company is not entirely proactive is receiving customer feedback and responding to it. This can be achieved via social listening and active participation on social media.
Objective: Grow Addison Lee car service business by 3%, by targeting younger demographic of 16-25 year old
Market segmentation is the process of dividing the entire market into various segments based on demography, race, income, purchasing power or age group. This is done to make it easier for the company to target the right audience. Basically it involves dividing the whole market set into several smaller subsets which comprise of consumers with similar tastes, demands, choices and preferences. The participants in a market segment respond similarly to changing market conditions. Planning a marketing strategy on basis of market segmentation is important in order to set the right targeting and understand the customer base (Wilkinson, 2013).
Therefore, for the stated objective of Addison lee, the segmentation approaches as mentioned above will help the brand in achieving the same.
Product: This involves design, technology, usefulness, value, quality, packaging etc. of the product offering of the company (Hamzah & Sutanto, 2016)
Price: Different pricing strategies like skimming, penetration, and cost based, and value based the company adopts while selling its products or services (Mintz & Currim, 2013)
Place: The place where the company sells its products or the channel it adopts to sell.
Promotion: This has to do with the marketing efforts in advertisement, special offers, free gifts coupons etc. the company gives away to promote its services (Qiu, 2014)
People: It consist of the employees, management, culture and the customer service (Khan, 2014)
Process: The process adopted by the companies to execute its services or products.
Physical environment: Relates to the tangibility offered by product or services (Baker & Saren, 2016)
|
Product |
A mix of taxi hiring and courier services in London. |
|
Price |
Price skimming – Penetrating the market by keeping its prices low and thus skimming the market. Premium options are also available. |
|
Place |
The company is present in almost 350 cities since its inception in the year 1975. |
|
Promotion |
The company is offering huge discounts by customized deals to its customers, offering loyalty rides to its most loyal customers, offering huge discount on the rides and free coupon on the social media. |
|
Physical evidence |
The company has revealed a new logo for itself, bold new premium look. It has Toyota cars, jets etc. for its customers, which bring class to the brand. |
|
Process |
The company uses its website and mobile application for its business. ETA is calculated through GPS services. |
|
People |
The management has good experience, the drivers are taught about the values of the company and also made accustom to the new technology getting used in the cabs. People are one of the strong facets of Addison lee. |
Product: The Company could focus on pushing its application to every smart phone user present in the cities it is operating in. The application has to be pushed in order to get it installed and put to use. The company should go completely on app based model and stop spending money on the website. It should also venture into carpooling services to expand its customer base. In order to make people install the app, the company should lure them into free rides and once they install the app, the company can retain them by providing quality services.
Price: One of the most important aspect of marketing mix, Addison lee should focus on cost based pricing, infused with occasional discount and coupons to its new customers and reward points for its loyal customers. The company has to work on a retention strategy and treat all three of its customer base: Loyal, new & existing differently and adopt a completely different customized strategy for each of them.
Promotion: The Company is promoting its service on social media heavily, unveiled a new logo recently to match up to its new target audience. The only point the company has to do more in order to be more effective in promotion is, post the reviews and ratings on the social media and also push newsletters of its service quality feedback given by customers to its mass audience. This will create euphoria among the people and they would see Addison lee as the brand they can trust and rely upon.
References:
Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction. Pearson Education.
Baker, M.J. and Saren, M. eds., 2016. Marketing theory: a student text. Sage.
Blanco, J.M. and Cohen, J., 2017. Macro-environmental Factors Driving Organised Crime. In Using Open Data to Detect Organized Crime Threats (pp. 137-166). Springer International Publishing.
Dan, N.I.E., 2014. A SWOT analysis of Beijing Marathon game operation. Journal of Physical Education, 6, p.005.
Dawson, J.A., 2014. The Marketing Environment (RLE Marketing)(Vol. 1). Routledge
Edwards, G. and Seda, P., 2016. Empowering midwives in the United Arab Emirates. MIDIRS Midwifery Digest, 26(3), p.387.
Hamzah, S.B. and Sutanto, J.E., 2016. The Role of Marketing Mix (7P) for Consumer Buying Decision Pastry Cake in Malang City.
Hollensen, S., 2015. Marketing management: A relationship approach. Pearson Education.
Khan, M.T., 2014. The concept of’marketing mix’and its elements (a conceptual review paper). International journal of information, business and management, 6(2), p.95.
Kiel, I.H., 2014. Entrepreneurial marketing.
Mintz, O. and Currim, I.S., 2013. What drives managerial use of marketing and financial metrics and does metric use affect performance of marketing-mix activities?. Journal of Marketing, 77(2), pp.17-40.
Oh, Y. and Oh, J., 2017. A critical incident approach to consumer response in the smartphone market: product, service and contents. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 15(3), pp.577-597.
Qiu, L., 2014, June. The Perception of Marketing Mix of TICA by Convention Providers in Bangkok. In 3rd International Conference on Science and Social Research (ICSSR 2014). Atlantis Press.
Qureshi, I.H., 2016. MARKETING ASSETS: LINKING RESOURCE-BASED VIEW AND MARKETING ENVIRONMENT. MARKETING, 3(1).
Wilkinson, F. ed., 2013. The dynamics of labour market segmentation. Elsevier.
Yuan, H., 2013. A SWOT analysis of successful construction waste management. Journal of Cleaner Production, 39, pp.1-8.
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