Order Description
Case study
A car club is an organization which provides its members with access to a fleet of shared cars periodically, normally for short, local trips. Founding partners of e-carclub are the National Energy Foundation and Sustainable Venture, the Europcar group then acquired a majority share in 2015.
The vehicles that can be rented from e-carclub are all electric cars and vans, for examples including Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf (cars), Renault Kangoo (van) and recently a BMW electric model. One of the key strategies of e-carclub is to partner with community hubs when opening a branch to secure parking spaces for electric vehicles (EVs) where
charging stations are installed. Typically, users of e-carclub are enrolled as members by paying an annual fee of £50 approximately and book EVs before collecting them from parking spaces using membership card and password. Use
of EVs is charged to users by e-carclub at about £6 per hour. In other words, what is on offer is a “pay as you go” system, where consumers can book a vehicle for the time required and pay accordingly.
Recruitment of new members by e-carclub has been problematic in the last five years, with lower than expected numbers. In addition, retention is not good, as members frequently do not renew their memberships. Another worrying aspect is that many of the members are dormant. This means that although they are on the database as members, they are not active drivers, which means that they do not contribute to e-car club’s income. Finally, the bulk of active members only rents cars occasionally, which means that the average contribution per member is low. The nature of the research problem the company faces therefore is to investigate why the service fails to recruit sufficient new customers, why customers are not retained and why they book little or no driving slots.
TASKS:
1. Explore the possible theoretical approaches that could be used to investigate e-car club’s problems.
a. Describe the theories that could be adopted to inform the research (10 marks)
b. What are the main strengths of each of the theories?
c. What is the nature of the data each theory would require and how would that data be processed and interpreted?
d. What are the limitations of each theory?
2. Select a theory of your choice
a. Critically evaluate the theory, with attention to the richness or otherwise of the data gathered. What type of information would the theory yield?
b. Write a justification for the selection of the theory: why is this theory more suited to the research than other theories?