SNA and automotive industry challenges

Sebastián Moreira

SNA research topic

Background

According to recent studies made by the consultant firm Roland Berger (Automotive landscape 2025), the connectivity in the automotive industry and user’s interaction with different services at many different levels will be a key factor (emergency, assistance, information, etc…). The manufactures will be forced to adopt new business models and change completely the way they do business; as interaction in social networks will simplifies the access to services like car pooling or car sharing (BMW Car Sharing Service).

Connectivity, efficiency (in term of fuel expenses) and time saving are becoming more important versus owning a very luxury car and according to Roland Berger, the new generations lean towards compact size cars and fuel efficient transportation. Can connectivity and the accessibility to smart technology change the automobile industry behaviors and preferences? 

The scope of this SNA is to understand whether the social networks accessibility has a close correlation with the change in the costumer preferences in the automotive industry.

Question

The access to social networks may change the consumer behavior in the automobile industry?

Hypothesis

The new generations are more concern about connectivity and they are willing to “sacrifice” the commodities of having their own car if instead they find services to fulfill their needs. The SNA will determine whether the accesses to different social networks change the transportation habits of costumers or if it may change it in the future. 

Important attributes to be define

• Age.
• Gender
• Member of a social network?
• Which social networks?
• Member of automobile related social networks?
• Have ever use the car sharing service?
• If no, will use it if simple?
• Have ever use the car-pooling services?
• If no, will you use it?
• What’s the density of car sharing users? Are they using social networks to find this kind of services? The same questions for car sharing. 

Difficulties/Doubts

Where to get the data?

In order to make the SNA, the best sources to get the data from are the vehicle related social network as well as the most common social networks. That will give us at least, a specific group of costumers from a city, a country, etc…

The data that is going to be hard to get, is the one related to costumer’s preferences (survey) regarding the car sharing and pooling services since not everybody is interested in filling a 10 questions survey.

Forecast Future changes

Future SN and technology advances quite difficult to predict for a time period longer than 15 years. The result of this SNA; will give us an output that may help us to analyze the behavior in the future 10 years but not longer than that.