The “Ask” Phase
The first phase of this analysis is to simply make sure we understand the question that we are being asked to answer, and to define a clear goal for the analysis. The company we work for in this scenario, Cyclistic, has had a marketing campaign that has been focused purely on making people aware of the services offered by the company. Cyclistic offers bike-share rental services with flexible price plans. These services are offered in the form of single-ride and all-day passes for “casual” riders, and an annual membership that is deemed more profitable for the company.
The director of marketing thinks that Cyclistic has reached a wide enough customer base to start shifting the focus of the marketing department. She wants marketing to come up with a strategy to get more of the casual riders to sign up for an annual membership. There are 3 questions that need to be answered before a new strategy can be determined:
- How do annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently?
- Why would casual riders buy Cyclistic annual memberships?
- How can Cyclistic use digital media to influence casual riders to buy memberships?
Our job is to answer the first question: how do annual members and casual members use Cyclistic bikes differently?
Our analysis and report needs to find an answer to this question, and our recommendations should be based on our findings. It would be good to keep in mind the other questions when making our recommendations. However, the overall goal of our analysis is to determine the differences between the causal riders’ and the annual members’ use of Cyclistic bicycles.