It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone when Uber sold their small slice of the Southeast Asian ride-hailing market to Grab this past March. Before the acquisition, Grab boasted of a network that served 95% of SE Asia, with over 3.5 million daily rides. The move made sense for both companies, as Grab secured the majority of the market that they hadn’t penetrated, while Uber drove away with a 27.5% stake in Grab’s future revenues.
Despite their overwhelming majority stake in the marketplace in Singapore, where ride-hailing apps are more popular than popcorn at a movie theatre, Grab still faces a bit of an uphill battle in their moves to transform Uber brand advocates into loyal Grab customers. If Grab is to successfully win over consumers who have ignored them in the past, they’ll need to get to the bottom of the affinities, content, and messaging that resonates most with ex-Uber riders. We used our audience insights tool and social monitoring platform to uncover the personas of typical riders and the results were quite unexpected. It turns out that the passengers who regularly summon cars from each service have wildly disparate demographics and interests.
While Grab attracts a predominantly female user base (53%) in comparison to Uber (38%), both services cater to similar demographic profiles in Singapore. Both companies attract young (25-34), educated, married couples with children. But the similarities end there.
Synthesio’s audience insights tool revealed that Uber riders from Singapore have an intense affinity for sports on wheels, with wide swaths of their audience passionate about auto racing and cycling. On the other hand, Grab riders from Singapore are more fanatical about association football and martial arts. While Uber customers enjoy electronic music and nightclubs, Grab customers prefer R&B and music festivals. Gambling and action movies engage Uber riders, while Grab advocates spend their leisure time watching musicals and playing Pokemon Go.
What can brands like Grab do to win over customers in the wake of a recent acquisition? They need to dig deeper into the levers that motivate consumers to undertake a relationship with a new partner. This can be accomplished with persona analyses processed by Synthesio’s audience insights tool, Profiler. Profiler analyzes social media audiences based on their interests to produce a data library of relevant affinities for the brand’s target user base. These 10,000+ data points run the gamut from granular demographics to vertical-based brand loyalties. Check out the infographic below for even more information about the riders who hail Ubers & GrabTaxi’s on a daily basis.
Want to learn more about the Synthesio Social Intelligence Suite and our audience insights tool, Profiler? Schedule a demo today with one of our social listening experts and they’ll walk you through our platform capabilities – and show you how you can learn more about the customer’s you’re looking to turn into lifelong brand advocates.
