By Peter Coleman
Director at Aegis Interaktif Asia Pte Ltd
This post is not about the benefits or not of Uber and other "sharing economy" services such as AirBnB. This is a post about how the taxi business, particularly one operator in Jakarta, handled the advent of new technology and competition badly, thus affecting their employees and paying customers.
Back on Tuesday 22nd March, 2019, tens of thousands of taxi drivers in Jakarta caused wide-spread chaos across an already chaotic Jakarta by blockading many of the main thoroughfares of Jakarta. If you don't know how bad the traffic is without such vigilante tactics understand that an average car commute to an office is 2 hours or more, on a good day. On that Tuesday it was actually impossible to do anything that was even close to normal and most of us stopped wherever we were, got coffee, got updates from the police on social media, gave up and went home again. A day totally wasted.
Of course the drivers have the right to demonstrate, they had a permit from the police allowing them to do this. Indonesia is a democracy and so they exercised their democratic right to withdraw their labor and make their point, whatever that was, to the rest of us in the most inconvenient way. That is what a strike is all about. There were some very unattractive incidents during the day involving rock throwing, broken windows, beatings and other acts of random violence against passengers, drivers and taxi drivers. Not unexpected.
The reference to the Luddites in the banner is well intended of course. Those in the incumbent industries are always frightened of new technologies. They are Luddites of the 21st century just as much as those of the 19th. Sharing economy models are here to stay one way or the other. You can fight them but you cannot win if they make things more efficient, and lets face it, cheaper. The catchphrase is "Adapt or Die".
However it is what the taxi company did on the next day that was a gift to Uber. The main company, BlueBird, gave free taxi rides to everyone for a full 24 hours. Sounds like a fantastic PR master stroke. Sorry you couldn't get a taxi yesterday and we caused you inconvenience. So here, have as much taxi as you want for free. Sounds good? Sounds stupid. It was IMPOSSIBLE to book a cab using phone or mobile app all day. Why? Well people who never take a taxi were out in the street going all over the city for free. Fantastic for them. Simply impossible for any of those people, like me, who rely on a safe and reliable taxi service to take us to meetings and the airport.
Who came to the rescue? Uber. A service I have never used before was now the only service I could use to get me to the airport.
So I want to say thank you to Bluebird for forcing me to use Uber. Your PR exercise did nothing to improve your image to the public you should care about the most, those of us who use you every day and pay for the privilege. It almost makes one think that your PR team were paid by Uber to come up with this masterpiece of idiotic customer service. If I was Uber I would be sending flowers and chocolates to the Bluebird PR team, they have won you more new customers, who will probably stay loyal now, than if you had thought this strategy up yourself.
The point of this post? If you give something of value away for nothing and the wrong people take advantage of it you have done nothing but damage your brand. It's the law of unintended consequences that could have been so much better with a bit more thinking.
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