Uber-Marketing Plan

Project Requirements

Project Requirements With an interesting and well-defined plan identified, you will begin work on the group project. The core of your work consists of preparing, delivering and presenting a Marketing Plan which outlines your group’s solution to the Marketing problem you have identified. Your group is responsible for turning in both a written proposal report and a deck of PowerPoint presentation slides that will accompany the in-class presentation. Although you have some license to determine the content of your presentation slides, it is highly recommended that they follow a similar form as the written proposal report which MUST contain the following elements:

Introduction

• The introduction must include your specific objective from doing the project.

• Here, providing an overview of the company’s goods/services, location, and history would be a

good idea, as well.

4. SWOT Analysis:

• To be able to produce solutions for an organization’s problems you must first know the context

in which the organization is operating currently. The SWOT analysis is useful as it summarizes

the internal characteristics of the organization.

• Important: be thorough and explore all possibilities here. Try to incorporate as much data as

you can possibly find here (e.g. sales trends, industry reports, third-party surveys).

5. STP Analysis:

• After the SWOT analysis is complete, you will need to use the STP framework. Here you will

need to assess how the organization can most effectively segment their customers (i.e. the basis

for segmentation), identify and describe these segments, and ultimately determine how best to

position the organization’s offering so it provides value for the targeted customers.

• Important: again focus on the data here. You can collect either secondary (e.g. industry surveys)

or primary (e.g. focus groups, interviews, your own surveys) data to justify the identified

segments, why it is worthwhile to target them, and how to position the organization’s offering.

Draft

The marketing problem

Despite this big success, Uber is facing challenging times. First, according to Second measure, Uber has seen many competitors such as Lyft in the ridesharing business (with 32% market share) and DoorDash in food delivery (with 55% market share) (Yeo, 2021). Second, Uber had suffered regulatory issues worldwide, which led to the company being banned from airports and entire countries (Page, 2019, paras. 3). Third, according to the Washington Post, “a string of scandals including the collection of fares during a taxi strike and allegations that its culture promoted sexual harassment has tarnished the company’s reputation” (Siddiqui, 2019, paras. 1). And finally, its core rides business has slowed down significantly because of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, Uber reported a net operating loss of more than $8 billion in 2019 (Patil, 2020, paras. 7-9).

In an attempt to fix those problems, Uber launched a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign last year. It even hired a new chief marketing officer and rapidly added staff to launch a national campaign, including television commercials. Unfortunately, it did not work (Siddiqui, 2019, paras. 1)

 

 

The marketing opportunity

According to buildfire.com, only 6% of Uber's demographics fall into 55-64 years of age (Blaire, 2021). Yet, people over 55 years old make up 21% of the US population. This is a big market of almost 63 million people that Uber is unable to attract. Uber should focus on this niche to increase its revenue and profit.

Our proposal

We propose that Uber develops a new platform (or app) targeting the elderly (people over 55 years old). This app will be called Uber-E (E as an Elder). This platform will cover all their mobility and transportation needs such as taxis, doctor’s appointments, airport shuttle, package, and food delivery. Also, to make the service more profitable, we propose that customers be charged a monthly or annual fee instead of one-time bills. This strategy will increase Uber’s marginal profit as it did for Amazon Prime and Netflix.

Roadmap

In this project, we will discuss the SWOT analysis of the organization, the STP analysis of the market, and the Marketing Mix of the proposed service in order to help Uber increase its profit.