Meeting 3.0: 06.05.2015
During the class of last Monday, we presented the entire output of the previous week. We received positive feedback regarding the content developed, in addition the professor asked us to prepare the same materials (empathy map, consumer persona, day in a life) for two more individuals, one per target segment.
Further on during the class, we covered four new topics: Value Proposition, Marketing & Sales Channels, Customer Relationships and Revenue Streams.
Considering the first topic of a value proposition, we created a Value Curve during class and compared the service of PickUsUp to the service of our main competitor, taxis. In a first step, each one of the group members thought individually about important attributes of our service before we considered everybody’s opinion and agreed on eight defining attributes. We then rated the PickUsUp service as well as a taxi service on these attributes to see where we could outperform the competitor and for which attributes we might encounter challenges. Thereby, the Value Curve as a tool allows us to easily visualize the perception of our own performance compared to our competitors. The team members agreed on the majority of the chosen attributes. However, in order to validate our more or less very narrow perspective, we decided to conduct an online survey to confirm the chosen attributes. Eventually, six out of the eight chosen attributes were validated by survey participants and we added two other attributes that were considered important by the respondents.
Apart from the Value Proposition, we worked on the topic of how to reach our customers. This involved suitable Marketing Channels –paid ones as well as unpaid ones-, the Sales Channel used by our service and how we would establish (get) our customer relationships, strengthen them (keep) as well as turn them into promoters and regular users (grow). After specifying the variety of marketing channels that we want to use and determining specific examples, we tried to align the option with the different steps of the marketing channel that enables us to get, keep and grow customers. Additionally, we used the previously established “day in a life maps” of our customer segments to determine touch points with our customers and where we might most easily be able to raise awareness for our service.
In order to generate revenues from our idea, we had to think more deeply about the Revenue Sources. Initially, PickUsUp will generate revenues only by offering the service to interested customers. The two most important topics here are the willingness to pay and the type of pricing applied. Willingness to pay determines the price that will eventually be established for our service and we are trying to determine the exact values by using a technique outlined in our interview scripts. In order to decide between two possible pricing models, a zone model or a distance & time model, we created small explanatory images and shared them on Facebook with our audience to get feedback. This also proved to be an interesting and creative way of validating responses. So far, Facebook users prefer a distance & time approach to calculate the price. However, it was not easy to initially come up with the two proposed models. It involved a lot of internal discussion, explaining different perspectives and assumptions and the analysis of pros and cons for all the different ideas. Eventually, we agreed on the two approaches mentioned above and one of our group members elaborated further on the models, while a second group member would provide him with feedback. In general, we assume this approach of discussion in the group, assigning one group member to work on the execution with continuous feedback from another group member a very helpful one.
As mentioned above, interviews were conducted throughout this week with both target segments. We have received interesting feedback so far and will continue on gathering even more input by conducting further interviews. For example, one interviewee indicated that he would be willing to pay a significantly higher amount than for a taxi ride if encountering the advantage of having his car at home. In addition to the interviews, on of our group members conducted a focus group with several friends to get additional feedback for the concept of PickUsUp. It is these open conversations that often prove to be most helpful and rewarding since he could gather interesting input about aspects that we had not considered before. Read more about this focus group here.
Since it will be our utmost goal to enhance the user experience, we are already now working on the improvement of the exchange of information with our target segments. Therefore, we created a promotional video on the online platform GoAnimate. It will explain our service very easily and to the point. Two of our group members were working on this project since we assumed it important to give feedback on the various ideas early on. Eventually, the set-up of our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter) also falls in the category of enhancing the user-experience. Until now, we could already gather 250 likes on facebook and some of our posts have reached more than a 1000 individuals. Due to the strong usage of social media, we assume Facebook to be a very helpful tool in the process of raising the awareness for our service.
