Bicycle Sharing Systems Case Study

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Launch strategy[pic 10][pic 11][pic 12]

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Stimulate consumption

Figure 3 Interaction between target consumer and entity

Chapter 2 Survey design and summary

1. Data collection approach

This questionnaire was designed with 10 questions, 2 demographic questions, 6 structured questions and 2 open ended question.

Demographic question can help researcher to know the background of the respondents,for example,age,gender, race, nationality, education background , income level, etc. All of these will related to their perspective of certain product or service, and will influence their purchasing behaviour.

The Structured questions

‘Have you ever used Ofo?’ , can help us to know about Ofo’s service condition in campus.

‘How did you know about Ofo?’ is a question that designed to study the current publicity of Ofo.

Question No. 5, Do you think the number and launch place of Ofo is reasonable in your campus? This is a question can get feedback of bikes distribution. Compare with the manger of Ofo, students know more layout details and traffic of their campus. Their suggestions will be very reliable and helpful.

Question 6 and 7, can collect information of university student’s using statements of Ofo, the purpose and time. Depends on the analysis of these two questions, the company can make some improvement with their bikes. For example, produce one lighter bicycle, easy to ride.

Are you also using other bicycle sharing APPs? This question designed to study Ofo’s competitors. The competition of bike sharing application market in China is so intense, understand competitors better will be very helpful.

The last two question are open ended questions, one is the reason of customer choose Ofo, another one is suggestions to improve. In other words, these two questions shows us the advantages and disadvantages of Ofo bicycle sharing system.

Chapter 3 Findings and Recommendations

- Data analysis - structured question

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Figure 4 Pie chart of gender distribution

From the pie chart above, we can easily find out the respondent’s gender distribution. 58%of them are male and rest of them are female.

The table below shows the different grade of respondents. 88% of respondents are under graduate, which includes 20% freshman, sophomore takes 14% ot total, 26% are juniors and 28 percent juniors. And 12% of them are graduate students.

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Figure 5 Pie chart for grade distribution

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Figure 6 Bar chart of sources respondents know about Ofo

From the bar chart above, we could say the good product is best advertisement itself. More than half (16+13=29, 29/50=58%) of respondents know about Ofo bicycle sharing system through saw the bikes. 10 students by friend’s introduction, and 7 students of them notice some advertisement.

Very few, always cannot find bikes

7

Reasonable number, evenly distributed

11

Reasonable number, but distributed unevenly

18

The number is huge, abuse

14

Table 3 respondent’s view through bikes distribution

In last chapter, we discuss the Interaction between target consumer and entity. Large number of students in one university will attract the entity to promote their products in the campus, otherwise, only few products will enter a small scale university. That’s why some students think the distribution is very few, cannot find in campus (7 out of 50); but 14 students think the number is huge, the bicycles is flooding.

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Figure 7 Pie chart for respondent’s riding time

This pie chart shows us, 62% of respondents ride Ofo sharing bikes less than 4 hours in one week, 32% students ride 4 to 12 hours per week, only 6% respondents ride more than 12 hours during one week.

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Figure 8 Ofo riding Circumstances

Among these 50 students, 16 of them riding Ofo bikes as an exercise, 11 respondents choose Ofo bikes when he/she go out with friends; 9 respondents combine sharing bikes with other transportation like bus, taxi to reach their final destination. Rest of them for some other reasons.

- Data analysis - open ended question

Although the question ‘ why choose Ofo’ almost everyone’s answer is different, but we can discover that those answers can be divide into some main types. The first type of reason is Ofo has a lower price than other brands. Second reason is large scale distribution. Thirdly, is Ofo’s sprier configuration, the colour and the weight of those new bikes. The fourth reason is a healthy, green, low carbon lifestyle brought out by sharing bikes. And all of these actually is talking about Ofo’s advantages.

The last question ‘improvement Ofo bicycle sharing system needs’ is actually talks about ofo’s disadvantages. There are several main points as below:

- lack of some components like basket, backseat; and some parts are not so perfect, such as uncomfortable mat and a bell not louder. As the Ofo are focus on producing lighter bikes than others, there must have somethings they need to give up;

- Messy parking issue, bikes parked everywhere instead of in the parking spot. Since the sharing bikes run rampant in China, many places full of colourful sharing bikes, these makes the street looks untidy.

- Management issue for damaged bikes and broken bikes. The damaged bicycles should be recycle in a short time.

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