Company A is planning to hire marketing consultants to analyse its current situation and recommendations for a new strategy.

The company sells services to bike riders. The core business is the maintenance of bikes from customers paying a time-based fee (e.g. annual/semi-annual) to get an all-inclusive service. Such a service is part of an innovative business model where the riders pay to get their bikes fixed. The clause is that they have to buy by themselves the pieces to be replaced when it is needed, after a check run by the provider. It means that the revenues come in only by selling subscription plans to customers.

Each subscription covers a single bike. Each customer can subscribe more than once to register multiple cycles. Per each registration, the fee has to be paid depending on the length of the contract. When the customer registers a bike for the first time, the cycle is checked, and damages present at the moment of the registration will not be covered by the services provided in the future. This clause avoids the adverse selection of customers.

Such a business model is appealing, and in the UK, the players in the sector are 7. All of them use the same business model. Some of them are localised in certain cities only, and others are settled more homogenously in the national territory.

The companies' revenues over the last years are reported in Figure 1 and Table 1. At the same time, Table 2 and Table 3 report the subscriptions sold and the number of customers, respectively.

Table 4 contains the fixed costs of the company, and Table 5 reports the variable costs. The variable marketing costs presented in Table 6 are included in Table 5 already, but in Table 6 are further specified.

The company has launched a survey to analyse the customers' moods and assess the service's quality. A sample of the results is reported in Table 7.

With the COVID-19 restrictions in place and the COVID-19 impact on the mobility sector, the UK Cycling market is increasing drastically. Therefore, company A wants to develop marketing strategies to capture the full potential of the newly shaped market structure in 2021.

Questions from the Client

These are the questions asked by the Client to the Consultancy company:

1. How can Company A increase its market share in the following years? Which strategy can Company A put in place?

2. What marketing tools can Company A use to grow? Consider the fact that the usage of bikes has been increasing since the pandemic started.

Your objective - as a consultant - is not to respond to the questions; instead, you have to propose a consultancy plan to satisfy the Client's needs behind these questions. Namely, you need to propose a plan to step into the company and satisfy the Client.