Digital Transformation Project – BimBimBikes

13

October

2016

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BimBimBikes is an online bike rental platform. In other words, the company collaborates with local bike rental shops all over the world and serves as a platform for the bookings. It has an outreach of 178,000 bikes in 66 countries. It occupies 6 people including the CEO of the company and operates on a commission based profit accumulation scheme. The prices of the bikes are set by the local rental shops and they include the commission of BimBimBikes. The cost structure of the company is separated between marketing, platform maintenance and salaries in a descending order.

The current strategic focus of the business is concerned with four pillars according to the target client groups. These are: City trippers, people who are older than 60 years of age, passion cyclists and group outings. The company has a different marketing strategy and approach for each and every category of the above. What they all have in common though is the digital approach that is implemented in all of them based on thorough data analysis.

As the SWOT analysis has demonstrated clearly the biggest strength is the company’s outreach. The highest rated opportunity that it can exploit is the partnership that it has established with KLM about customer insight exchange. Its biggest weakness lies with the fact that a bike can only be rented 24 hours in advance and finally the most significant threat is the development of public bike sharing facilities by local governments.

All of the above persuaded us that BimBimBikes is in the best position to utilize a new and disruptive way of doing business. We are proposing the development of a mobile application that will be connected to a smart lock with GPS capabilities installed on the bike. Via this combination the users will be able to locate and unlock the closest bike to their location and instead of having to return it to a rental shop simply lock it anywhere they want. Additionally, since the application will be able to track the bike’s movements it will be able to calculate the cost and charge the client accordingly. Another core feature will be the ability to do all the financial transactions through the application. The benefits for the client will be the ease of use as well as time and cost savings. From the company’s viewpoint, this technology will increase the customer satisfaction and therefore profits in addition to the fact that it will make invaluable data available for further analysis and financial gains.

Our recommendation is that, since the project is perfectly aligned with the current business strategy and expected to be profitable as well, the company should proceed with the investment. The associated risks can be mitigated by following an iterative approach on the development phase and embodying data security measures within the code along with the constant monitoring of financial and marketing target achievements in order for further adjustments of the strategy to be allowed.

 

https://vimeo.com/185691775

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Neuromarketing; another violation of our privacy or the future of consumerism?

30

September

2016

4.5/5 (2)

Traditional marketing is not only threatened by digital marketing, but also from the rapidly emerging field of neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is a field that was created by merging marketing, neuroscience and IT techniques. The purpose of this new discipline is to understand consumer behavior in the best possible way so as to offer new insights to businesses in order to create more appealing products and services. What is neuromarketing though?

When marketeers understood that 90% of our everyday decisions are made non-consciously they realized that the traditional methods of focus groups and surveys that were utilized in the past were simply not good enough anymore. Based on this notion, this new era of marketing emerged. Neuromarketing is using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) as well measurements of the respiratory rate, galvanic skin response and facial coding in order to decipher the consumer’s response to marketing stimuli. To put it in simpler terms our most primitive and physiological responses are analyzed in order to estimate our preferences in the most accurate way. In essence, these techniques measure our brain activity and every other physiological reaction while being stimulated by marketing material and they create maps of the regions that are stimulated in our brains in response to the specific stimuli. Then by analyzing this data with the latest available technologies, along with insights coming from neuroscience, the neuromarketeer can evaluate the market success of the product based on all of its attributes and characteristics.

The benefit of these technologies for the consumers is the higher quality of products and services. Businesses though can create more efficient marketing campaigns, optimize their pricing strategies, create new product lines and much more. On the other hand, these new methods have triggered a vibrant discussion in the scientific and business community regarding the ethical aspect of theirs. The major argument of this side is that these technologies exploit part of our brains that we are not in direct control of. Therefore, this line of reasoning concludes, it is unethical to pursue further research on this direction because it violates our privacy rights.

IT  has countless applications and different forms nowadays. The latest techniques of data analysis can lead businesses to create new markets and therefore value from unexplored areas by providing accurate, fast and relevant market insights.  Is there a limit to what we are willing to do in order to achieve greater profit margins though? In the information age the information we can gather about consumer’s behavior is becoming gradually unlimited. It becomes obvious then that the final decision of whether to pursue this direction or not lies on ethics. Since we are all stakeholders in this process we should all form our own unbiased opinions on such matters. Should we devote more time, money and effort towards perfecting these technologies or not?

What do you think?

 

References

Agarwal, S. & Dutta, T. Decision (2015) 42: 457. doi:10.1007/s40622-015-0113-1

The Contributions of Neuromarketing in Marketing Research. (2016). Journal of Management Research, vol 5(4)

Morin, C. Soc (2011) 48: 131. doi:10.1007/s12115-010-9408-1

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Self-driving vehicles; An extremely promising effort towards reducing road death toll.

12

September

2016

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The number of drivers in the world is growing fast along with the number of cars sold every year. Driving is perceived to be an act of freedom. Our car is considered an extension of our personality. Are we trained well enough to drive though?

The statistics point to the opposite direction. I will use the US (among the biggest car markets in the world) and Greece (my home country) as examples to indicate that. Over 1 million US citizens lost their lives in the period 1995-2014 in car accidents  (http://www.statista.com/statistics/191530/fatal-passenger-car-crashes-in-the-us/). Approximately 800 people lose their lives in fatal car crashes every year in Greece of 11 million people approximately (http://www.astynomia.gr/images/stories//2015/statistics15/troxaia2015_2.png). This is only the death toll though. If we add the number of severely injured people we are approaching a figure of more than 3 million people per annum in the US and over 14.000 in Greece and the vast majority of these accidents are attributed to human error (https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/). Is there a possible solution to alleviate this phenomenon in the foreseeable future?

The technology of self-driving vehicles is the most promising innovation that could solve this problem in the most efficient and long-term way in my opinion. What is this type of vehicle then? Self-driving vehicles use cameras, sensors and radars as well as special automotive Wi-Fi standards to communicate with the other vehicles and the infrastructure. This leads to limited control of the driver on the movements of the vehicle on the road. Apart from the obvious advantage of the much better safety on the roads, since, for instance, the reaction times of the vehicles in auto pilot mode are extremely faster than those of humans in the presence of an imminent danger, this technology can also offer us the following:

  • Enabling the visually impaired or disabled people to move independently.
  • Fuel efficiency.
  • Better environmental performance.
  • More efficient transportation of goods.

A lot of players from the auto-manufacturing industry are involved in this race of evolving these new innovative ways of commuting and transporting goods. Just to name a few, Mercedes Benz-Daimler https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/next/connectivity/the-digital-future-of-the-truck/, BMW http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive/2013/active_assist/index.html, Audi, GM, Tesla and more. Additionally, there is a very keen interest in this field from technology firms as well. The most prominent examples are those of Google and Apple which are producing their own prototype models. Some of these companies have very ambitious plans for the commercial readiness of these models and some other follow a more conservative path. In any case though the undeniable truth is that this technology is present and it will shake the industry once and for all in the near future. No party involved would deny though, that this way of driving needs a lot more testing in order to reach the market as the following example showcases.

In May 7 in Williston, FL there was the first fatal car accident in a self-driving vehicle. According to the New York times the car manufacturer claimed that because of the brightly lit sky the auto pilot was not able to detect the coming vehicle in order to apply the brakes. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/business/self-driving-tesla-fatal-crash-investigation.html?_r=0

There is definitely a lot of progress that has to be made until this new technology could provide a reliable every-day commuting solution for the general public but my personal opinion is that the benefits of it exceed the drawbacks by a great percentage so I firmly believe that heavy capital investments should be made in research and testing in order to facilitate the development of this technology as soon as possible. What do you think?

by Ioannis Grigoriadis

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