Question

Please help in essay format minimum of 350 words

Marketing: Customer Value, Chapter 10

One company that has had it far share of ups and downs is Uber, particularly after the creation of competitor Lyft. How has Uber’s strategy been different from other competitors’ strategies? What is Uber doing to stay ahead of competition? Most firms cannot bring value to customers by themselves. How does Uber bring value to its customers?

Answer 1

Sometimes it safer or more convenient to leave the driving and traffic headaches to someone else. This thought is what grew into Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., the two quintessential transportation-service companies. In a race to the finish line, both companies filed documentation for initial public offering (IPO) on the same day. These two taxi alternative services may seem interchangeable, but there are differences between the two largest transportation network services in the United States.

Lyft operates in the United States and Canada. They set specific requirements on the vehicles used by drivers and have several different categories or levels of service. The Lyft app and dashboard Amp notify passengers of the driver's arrival and give the passenger an estimated cost in advance.

Uber and Lyft, A short analysis ?

Uber serves not only the United States and Canada but provides service in many cities worldwide including those in the European Union, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. Uber also sets vehicle requirements and lists several different categories of service. The Uber app helps passenger and driver find one another and estimates the cost of the ride in advance.Lyft

Lyft Inc. (LYFT) was launched as a service in 2012. It was spawned from Zimride, a company founded by Logan Green and John Zimmer. Zimride, a peer-to-peer rideshare matchmaker for people looking to carpool long distances securely, was sold so that the duo could focus on Lyft. Green is currently chief executive, and Zimmer is the company's president.

Going Public and Market Share

On Dec. 6, 2018, Lyft announced that the company had officially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to go public in March 2019 where it will trade on the Nasdaq.

Uber's smaller rival said in a filing that it expected to raise US$2 billion in its IPO and would offer 30.8 million shares at $62-$68 per share. The company priced its shares at $72, and they traded up before falling back and closing at just over $78.

The company was valued at $15 billion in 2018, when it raised $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company.

UberUber was founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp as UberCab. After Kalanick's resignation as CEO in 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi took his place. Ronald Sugar was named chairman in August 2018. Kalanick remains on the firm's board of directors.

Uber is a much larger company than Lyft and has received negative press for everything from sexual harassment lawsuits to its use of software to track Lyft drivers. As reported by National Public Radio, Uber settled a class-action suit brought forward by former and current employees of color and female workers. The claim cited events of discrimination and harassment. The $10 million settlement came after the firm fired 20 employees for harassment in 2017.

Also in 2017, the FBI opened a probe into Uber's use of software to track Lyft's drivers. An April 2017 article by The Wall Street Journal reported on USA Today states that investigators were looking into the use of software by Uber to get information on drivers who work for both companies and discover information about Lyft's charges for service.

In contrast, Uber Technologies Inc. was built on competitor obsession. The startup created tools to scrape data from other ride-hailing companies; Uber employees went slogging to recruit away drivers; when Uber weighed which laws to bypass, it looked to which ones competitors were breaking. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former chief executive officer, has exhibited deep paranoia—even his closest advisers have acknowledged as much privately. This is a man who is said to have believed that Uber’s India competitor, Ola, might have framed an Uber driver for rape, a crime for which the driver was convicted.

Kalanick admired Jeff Bezos and even crafted a list of corporate culture values for Uber in the model of Amazon.com Inc. But Kalanick had a slightly different order of priorities. He put “champion’s mindset” higher on the list than “obsession with the customer.”

While Kalanick’s competitive streak got out of control, it wasn’t totally misplaced. Uber had to tear down taxi cartels. It had to break through regulators. Taxi drivers staged violent protests against Uber drivers. The US startup had to compete against foreign companies in Asia that could play by a different set of rules. It’s illegal for Uber to pay bribes no matter what the local custom is. Of course, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen: Uber is facing a federal criminal probe over potential Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations.

In order to respond to perceived competitive threats, Uber built up its own intelligence agency in the ilk of the FSB. That effort was called the Strategic Services Group, or SSG. I’m told the group surveilled competitors and employees. There’s a lot I still don’t know about what it did. (DM me if you know more.)

Meanwhile, Kalanick and the operations team held regular meetings, called the North American Championship Series, which were mainly focused on finding ways to crush Lyft. Attendees examined data that showed how the business was doing in each market relative to its main competitor. Those regular meetings, where the guest list was heavily restricted, helped center top operations’ officials thinking around competitors. Rachel Holt, the head of the U.S. and Canada, often led the discussions, according to people familiar with the events.

Over the years, Uber’s lawyers tried to limit the extent to which employees communicated in a way that belied their obsession with competitors. The company needed to avoid the perception that it was trying to run anyone out of business—a potentially illegal, monopolistic action. But, even as the company learned to change its vocabulary, its mentality has been relatively fixed.

Many of Uber’s mounting legal troubles—which I documented in a story this week that you should definitely read, if I may say so—stemmed from this competitive obsession. Uber bought a startup called Otto despite knowledge of allegations that co-founder Anthony Levandowski had taken proprietary information from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo. The deal was driven, in part, by fear of the threat from Alphabet’s self-driving cars. Two pieces of software, Hell and Greyball, which are each the subject of federal criminal probes, were born out of competitor obsession. Both were used against Lyft. And I found in the course of my reporting that Uber had a similar program to Hell in Southeast Asia called Surfcam to monitor the rival there, Grab.

In retrospect, I bet Kalanick probably realizes he should have hued more closely to Bezos’s customer-centric maxim. But Uber was a company born to fight—first, with regulators and taxis, and later, with a new breed of well-funded competitors. Kalanick has long preached "principled confrontation." He once said—in reference to regulators, though the quote really seems to be a summation of his philosophy — "You can either do what they say, or you can fight for what you believe."

In case of Uber and there marketing strategy would effectively affected in the part of metropolitan region,Uber ride,Uber Eats these are played a vital role in marketing segment especially in India.