In this case study scenario, Cyclistic is a fictional bike share company, however I accessed and used Bikeshare/Divvy Bikes' publicly available data for the analysis.

In this scenario, Cyclistic has a network of bicycles across Chicago that can be unlocked from one station and returned to any other station in the system anytime. Previous marketing strategies have focused on building general awareness and appealing to broad consumer segments. However, Cyclistic’s finance analysts have found that users who purchase annual memberships are much more profitable than casual riders who purchase single ride or full day passes. As an initial step in developing new marketing strategies to convert casual riders to annual members, I investigated how casual riders and members use Cyclistic bikes differently.

Given the large dataset, I chose to conduct my analysis using R/R Studio. The R notebook below documents details of data preparation, cleaning, analysis, and conclusions. The Google Slides deck briefly presents visualizations, key findings, and recommendations.

Key Findings

• Casual riders took longer trips overall and more trips on weekends. Their use dropped substantially after summer months and plummeted in winter.

• Members took more frequent, shorter trips and more trips overall than casual members across seasons, with differences in use between the groups greatest outside of summer months.

• Casual riders’ greater use on weekends and longer trips, particularly in summer months, suggest that they are more likely to use Cyclistic bikes for leisure activities while members’ more frequent, shorter trips across seasons suggests that they are more likely to use Cyclistic for transportation.

Recommendations

• Build marketing campaign around the benefits of using Cyclistic as transportation for launch in summer or fall to convert casual riders before seasonal declines in use.

• Obtain data that can identify casual users with multiple single pass purchases and/or addresses located near the top start locations for member users to focus target audiences.

• Survey users to identify most compelling benefits of using Cyclistic bikes as transportation and any perceived barriers.