Customer loyalty in collaborative consumption : the ride-sharing case

Abstract

The sharing economy, also known as peer-to-peer economy, is a new reality that is changing the way people deal with goods. Instead of ownership, its practices promote temporary use of products and services. The peer-to-peer platforms of sharing economy have enabled individuals to collaboratively make use of under-utilized inventory via sharing. One of the sharing economy’s phenomena is the collaborative consumption, an exchange that occurs between a platform, a service provider and a customer. Until recently the literature focused its efforts on durable, property-based and tangible consumption. Now, there is a change in the economics processes and a necessity to rethink some classic marketing concepts under the light of the sharing economy phenomena. Customer loyalty, for example, is a construct that, according to literature evidence, seems to behave differently in a collaborative consumption context. Based on this, this study seeks to analyze how customer loyalty behaves in the context of ride-sharing applications. The context of ride-sharing applications was defined because it is an everyday service more than other collaborative consumption services. In addition, to measure loyalty to a particular company, it is important that it has competitors who can challenge its vulnerabilities. Initially, in an exploratory phase, we sought to understand how the consumer relates to the different ride-sharing applications, as well as their propensity to loyalty. Following, in a descriptive phase, an online survey was applied, including a loyalty and a trust scale – as this construct is an antecedent of loyalty according to the literature. The results indicated that the users tend to have more than one application downloaded on their cell phones. Because of that, it is almost effortless to the users to check more than one application during their decision-making process. This way they can choose for the cheapest or the fastest one – in terms of availability. In fact, there is even an application that performs this comparison. This scenario is quite challenging for the development of the advanced stages of loyalty. Also, the results pointed some differences between the behaviors of the three groups of the survey sample: 99POP, Cabify and Uber. It seems that 99POP group of users’ is price-oriented and, because of that, its loyalty is a little vulnerable. Cabify group of users seems to be a public more concerned with comfort and safety rather than the price. Because of that, its loyalty is stronger, although its public seems to be smaller. Lastly, Uber is the pioneer in Brazil and its brand is the most remembered. For some consumers, the brand name Uber became the service name. In terms of loyalty, it seems to have an intermediary positioning among the three. Because of its different categories it reaches different publics and necessities. This study becomes relevant not only because it adds to the scarce consumer behavior literature on collaborative consumption, but also because it contributes managerially by describing the ride-sharing application’s scenario in the chosen context. In this way, it can support some marketing strategies aiming specially to loyalty improving.