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What is the business case or business problem I am being asked to analyze or help to solve?

Case study parameters.

The parameters provided for this case study are as follows:

• I serve as a data analyst on the marketing team at the company Cyclistic, a bike share company in Chicago.
• The director of marketing believes the company's future success depends on maximizing the number of annual memberships.
• The data analytics team wants to analyze the data set to understand the differences between casual riders, defined as riders not participating in the subscription service and the subscribers, defined as members with an annual subscription.
• Understanding how to convert casual riders to subscribers is a key business goal for this project.
• Providing data driven insights that tell a compelling story on accomplishing the business goal is a top priority.
• Cyclistic operates more than 5800 bicycles and 600 docking stations.
• The company also differentiates from competitors by offering reclining bikes, hand tricycles and cargo bikes, to provide a more inclusive experience for customers.
• The majority of riders utilize traditional bicycles and about 8% of riders use the assistive options.
• Most rides are leisure rides, while about 30% of rides are for commutes to work each day.
• Marketing Director is Lily Moreno.
• Lily is my manager and is responsible for developing campaigns and initiatives promoting the bike-share program, which may include email, social media and other channels.
• Cyclistic executive team is detail oriented and will be the final approval on any recommendations from the data analysis for this case study.

About Cyclistic:

In 2016, Cyclistic launched a successful bike-share offering. Since then, the program has grown to a fleet of 5,824 bicycles that are geotracked and locked into a network of 692 stations across Chicago. The bikes can be unlocked from one station and returned to any other station in the system anytime. Until now, Cyclistic’s marketing strategy relied on building general awareness and appealing to broad consumer segments. One approach that helped make these things possible was the flexibility of its pricing plans: single-ride passes, full-day passes, and annual memberships. Customers who purchase single-ride or full-day passes are referred to as casual riders. Customers who purchase annual memberships are Cyclistic members. Cyclistic’s finance analysts have concluded that annual members are much more profitable than casual riders. Although the pricing flexibility helps Cyclistic attract more customers, Moreno believes that maximizing the number of annual members will be key to future growth. Rather than creating a marketing campaign that targets all-new customers, Moreno believes there is a solid opportunity to convert casual riders into members. She notes that casual riders are already aware of the Cyclistic program and have chosen Cyclistic for their mobility needs. Moreno has set a clear goal: Design marketing strategies aimed at converting casual riders into annual members. In order to do that, however, the team needs to better understand how annual members and casual riders differ, why casual riders would buy a membership, and how digital media could affect their marketing tactics. Moreno and her team are interested in analyzing the Cyclistic historical bike trip data to identify trends.

Initial questions

1. How do annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently?
2. Why would casual riders buy Cyclistic annual membership?
3. How can Cyclistic use digital media to influence casual riders to become members?

My overall task

As part of a larger marketing data analytics team Lily Moreno has assigned the first question "How do annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently?" for me to draw conclusions from a given data set the company has gathered from casual and subscriber bike share rides and provide recommendations based on those conclusions.

Business Task or problem

The question "How do annual members and casual riders use Cyclistic bikes differently?" encompasses the business task or problem very well, but we can break this down further:

1. Why do some riders purchase annual subscriptions and others do not?
2. What characteristics of bike rides can we gather from the provided data sets that correlate strongly with annual subscribers?
3. If we do find any strong correlations between subscribers and patterns in the data set, how can we use those insights to create marketing campaigns and initiatives to convert casual riders to subscribers?

Key stakeholders

1. Lily Moreno - Marketing Director
2. Cyclistic Executive Team
3. Marketing Data Analytics Team
4. All Cyclistic employees
   • Everyone at the company has a stake in the success of the marketing data analytics' team's data analysis, to continue to grow the company and provide greater success for every employee.

Data source description

I have been provided two CSV files for Q1 rides in 2019 and Q1 rides in 2020 for the Divvy AWS S3 repository as part of the case study materials provided from the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate program on Coursera. I will be using Q1 data from years 2019 and 2020 provided by the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate course on Coursera. The provided data is publicly available and provided by Motivate International Inc. under this license. The data sets will need to be compared, cleaned, and joined together for analysis.

Next Step is the Preparation Phase of Data Analytics.