Free Autonomous Car Rides Are Going To Quickly Become A New Marketing Platform
Autonomous vehicle technology will transform our lives in amazing ways that most fans of the technology are familiar with by now.
They will radically alter our urban infrastructure. They’ll change the nature of the car industry, as far fewer people will choose to own cars. They could cause serious social strife for the millions of people who drive for a living.
Even health care itself will be changed, since with humans behind the wheel, over a million people die in car accidents around the world every year, and tens of millions more suffer from a range of injuries that need treatment.
And that’s not even counting the probably unquantifiable effect on our health that comes from the always-on anxiety and intermittent shocks experienced by drivers, passengers, bicyclists, and pedestrians under the status quo.
But there’s another industry that is going to be dramatically impacted by autonomous driving that you don’t hear about very often: marketing.
Once autonomous rides are cheap enough — or even if they stay relatively expensive — companies are going to start offering free rides to their locations. This offers many opportunities to get into customers’ pockets and otherwise have a calculated — and testable — impact on their behaviour.
Offering free rides to customers is an obvious fit for some industries. For example, imagine you used an app to book a table at a restaurant, and it automatically booked a free ride for you. The ride service could just pick you up wherever you happen to be, the right amount of time in advance of the reservation, by calculating how long it will take to get you to the restaurant based on your location. This could happen even if you booked a table weeks in advance, and had no idea where you would be, when you would need to be picked up.
As an added bonus for restauranteurs themselves, far fewer people would ever be late for their reservations, and even if they were going to be late, the app could let the restaurant know, all automatically.
Substantially, it might also be a lot easier to get customers to buy those expensive high-margin drinks they would otherwise forego, if you weren’t offering them a ride home. That alone might pay the restauranteur back for the rides they’ve provided.
Once someone is in a self-driving car, there are numerous ways to capture their attention, including with conventional advertisements, of course. This already happens in taxis. But there are a lot of other things companies could do when they’ve got a customer captured in their autonomous vehicle.
If the car is taking them to a concert, you could try selling them similar music or introducing them to new performers. A company could have merch or other products for sale right there in the car.
One marketing technique may involve “multiplying destinations,” where someone gets in the car to do one thing, but by the time it drops them off back home, they’ve been encouraged successfully to go to other places and do other things.
People could be persuaded to visit companies that have established a partnership with each other, or more simply, companies could pay for the very best kind of customer lead: physically dropping someone off at your place of business.
Imagine the car knows a customer is going to a store to buy something, and there is a sale on related products at another store on their way back home. The car could offer to take the customer to the new destination, so they can buy a product they didn’t set out to buy.
The practice of “multiplying passengers” might also be adopted, where marketers try to get customers to pick up their friends and go do things they weren’t initially planning to do. For example, if you’re on your way to the store to try on some shoes, an app could tell you that one of your friends is nearby, and offer you a discount at a local restaurant if you pick up your friend and head on over there, after you buy your new shoes.
Probably the strongest driver of the adoption of providing free rides to customers will be the simple fact that once your competitor has adopted it, you will be forced to do so yourself. Offering someone a free, easy ride to your business will be a differentiation no-brainer from the customer’s perspective, when they’re deciding where to go.
If any of this seems far-fetched, note that Walmart is already partnering with Waymo.
Of course, autonomous vehicles (many of which won’t resemble cars at all) will be used for delivering items, too; but when a physical presence is part of what the customer is looking for in an experience, the customer will be the cargo.
