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Car Sharing is Caring: Uber and Lyft Prove Value to
Consumers
By ALEX YAMAMOTO, Marketing, Crimson Hexagon
Insights
• Majority of users (~60%) express positive sentiment toward Uber and Lyft. Conversation
surrounding the friendliness of Uber and Lyft drivers is the largest driver of positive sentiment (21% and 14%, respectively).
• People remain unsure how each service works. Questions about each service, such as where you can get picked up, made up 15% of Lyft conversation and 9% of Uber.
• For Lyft, negative sentiment focuses on overall poor quality of experience (5%) and safety concerns (5%).
• For Uber, driver quality goes both ways as 9% of consumers express sentiment around a poor driver experience and that the service being too expensive (6%).
Context
In the age of the collaborative community, car sharing apps and services have begun to gain momentum as a legitimate alternative to traditional taxi services. Uber, which first started as a premium priced, luxury black car service has steadily seen new competition enter since it first launched in San Francisco in 2010. One of its biggest competitors has been Lyft, a peer to peer car sharing service that allowed anyone with a car to apply to become a driver and offered a lower priced alternative to Uber and cabs. In response, Uber launched its UberX service, which is its lower priced service that has both commercially licensed drivers and non-licensed drivers who use their own personal car.
With both companies rapidly expanding into new markets and consumers increasingly becoming aware and accepting of these ride sharing services, we thought it would be helpful to analyze Uber and Lyft in-depth to see what consumers think about this new industry and where problems still exist.
Analyzing conversation surrounding the Uber and Lyft brand from June 1st 2013, we examined over 29,000 relevant Uber posts and 18,000 relevant Lyft posts to understand what the drivers of sentiment were for each brand.
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Analysis
First, from a share of voice perspective, the visual above shows how Uber generally has generated more consumer conversation, with 62% share of voice. However, a contributing factor to this is the spikes of conversation Uber sees on some days where its share of voice reaches even 100% around August 8th. We see that towards the end of September and October, Lyft has done a better job producing consumer conversations as they hold more consistently around the 50% mark, reflecting Lyft’s rapid expansion and popularity amongst consumers.
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Consumers point to Uber’s friendly drivers as its largest driver of positive sentiment (21%). The above tweets show how Uber drivers are the face of the brand and that the driver experience can make or break an experience for consumers. We can see this quite clearly from the negative side as well, where the largest identifiable driver of negative sentiment was poor driver experience (9%).
Thus, it is important for Uber and Lyft to interview drivers carefully in order to ensure quality customer service is exhibited consistently, as one bad experience can ruin the brand experience for a consumer. Uber’s other brand strengths that are reflected in the consumer conversation are that the service saves time (10%) and that people are addicted to the service (7%).
However, consumers express negative sentiment as well, as 6% complained the price is too high, which is
increasingly concerning given Lyft’s low priced brand image. While UberX is supposed to be the low priced alternative that price-conscious customers are searching for, they need to be made available for consumers or else, they will look for alternatives.
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Lyft conversation reflected much of the same sentiment that was seen in Uber, with friendly or interesting Lyft drivers being the largest topic of positive conversation (14%). However, unlike Uber, Lyft consumers seemed to have a stronger brand affinity as 8% of the conversation was specifically calling out Lyft as a better ride sharing service than Uber or other competitors, which is reflected in the topic wheel.
Due to its lower price, it was also more frequently compared to cabs/public transport than Uber as 11% of the
conversation expressed a preference for Lyft over these traditional forms of transportation whereas only 3% of conversation was seen in Uber. Thus, it seems as though consumers
have yet to shake the perception that Uber is a high-end service as they started as a luxury black car service before entering the lower priced market with UberX.
Negative conversation reveals an important new issue in the car sharing industry, which are safety concerns (5%). Since anyone with access to a car can apply to be
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a driver, it is important to alleviate consumer’s concerns about safety.The example tweet shows that even those who haven’t used Lyft can form negative perceptions of the brand due to the nature of the service. This is one of the challenges that Lyft must tackle in order to gain wider acceptance from consumers.
Using Forsight, we were able to analyze a new, emerging service within the travel and leisure industry and understand what excites and concerns consumers about car sharing. By uncovering some of the underlying strengths and weaknesses of Uber and Lyft, these companies can work to improve the overall customer experience and perception of this new industry.
