Threats Faced by Lyft in the Transportation Industry

Lyft, a transportation company, is facing several external threats in the industry. The increasing competition, changing regulations, and liability issues are some of the major challenges faced by the company. This report discusses the threats faced by Lyft and suggests ways to overcome them.

Running head: MARKETING STRATEGY AND PLAN
Marketing Strategy and Plan
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1MARKETING STRATEGY AND PLAN
Threats
Lyft is a transportation company, which is based in San Francisco, California. The
company markets, operates and develops the Lyft car transportation through a mobile
application. The company has launched in the year 2012 and operates at approximately 300
cities of United States. However, with the ever increasing competition in this industry, the
company is facing huge external threats, which may have a severe impact over the company’s
future attempts. There are several threats for the company, which are being discussed in this
part of the report (Lyft.com, 2018). Firstly, the cities are making different rules and
regulations in order to bring these ride services under control.
The cab service companies are facing several issues due to this. The cities are trying
to control their services by implying different laws and regulations, in which the companies
operate. Moreover, these regulations are being implied upon, in order to protect the public
transportation systems and taxi services. Secondly, the ever increasing competition is posing
a great threat for the Lyft Company. The increasing competitive environment in the formation
of new companies is surfacing up, with the existing companies like Uber, Curb, Didi
Chuxing, Grab and others. Moreover, this concept of mobile application cab services can be
copied very easily (Lee et al., 2015).
Thirdly, the drivers also keep on switching to other companies like Uber, due to some
reasons such as better income, growing opportunities, working environment or others. This
also leads to the decrease in the number of rides that are available for their target customers.
The company should be able to operate as per the demands and the needs of the employees.
Moreover, their changing preferences should also be taken into consideration. The employees
should be provided with ample amount of growth opportunities, so that they do not switch to
other companies (Lawless, 2015).

2MARKETING STRATEGY AND PLAN
The competition from companies like Uber and other startups is hampering the
business. Moreover, Lyft should establish itself as profitable and reliable in the market as
large as possible before the competitors encroach. In addition to this, there are liability issues
as well, along with other potentially destructive press with a wide array of situational
demands, which can arise in this model. These factors can leave danger marks for the future
growth or progress of the Lyft Company itself (Jacquet, 2018). The company can however,
generate consistent revenue by engaging the users into the services.
Moreover, there are liability issues as well, which the target customers may face.
Thus, the company needs to check the background of the drivers to avoid rider injuries, safety
and reliability issues as well as payment issues. In addition to this, the network essentially
turns the drivers into some gypsy cabs. This can malign the image or reputation of the
company as well and therefore, prove to be a threat for the cab services. Last but not the least;
there have been several legal issues of the company regarding ride sharing services. A similar
company named Rideorama, which offers similar services as well, was being shut down on
the grounds of legal issues as it kept on charging high prices for shared cab services
(Lawless, 2015).

3MARKETING STRATEGY AND PLAN
References
Lyft.com. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.lyft.com/
Lawless, J. (2015). Investing for Good in a Shared Economy.
Jacquet, A. (2018). A power struggle in the taxi industry: a challenge for Uber and Lyft
regarding their Service clauses.
Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015, April). Working with machines:
The impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on human workers.
In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (pp. 1603-1612). ACM.