In terms of the ultimate service received, a taxi ride from a taxi firm and from an Uber driver is pretty much the same, but the perception of both from users is very different.  That’s the finding of a new study from Ohio State University, which suggests that we view the gig workers as an independent worker, who we’re therefore more inclined to help than we are a more traditional firm, for whom we believe we’re simply purchasing a service.

“Previous work has shown that consumers view employees as being an extension of the company they work for,” the researchers say.  “But we found that consumers see providers for these peer-to-peer companies as separate from the company – as people just like themselves.”

Marketing success

The researchers believe their findings have clear implications for how peer-to-peer platforms, such as Uber, market themselves to consumers, with the results suggesting that they have more success when they focus their campaigns on the actual people delivering the service rather than the core brand or the technology behind it.

“When peer-to-peer companies focus their marketing on the people who provide their services, we found it made consumers think about how their purchases benefit the individual providers,” the researchers say.  “But when peer-to-peer firms focused on their apps instead, it makes people think that they’re just purchasing from a company rather than thinking about how their purchase helps an individual.”

The Petri dish used by the researchers was a sharing economy platform that allowed college students to buy or rent textbooks from one another.  The service was promoted for several days on campus, with half of the promotional period featuring content around the app itself, and the other half featuring content about the people who you could get the books from.

The results from this experiment suggest that significantly more actions were taken when the focus was on the student providers than on the app itself.  This was followed by a second experiment involving a couple of fictitious companies, one of which was a regular taxi firm and the other a ride sharing firm.

This second experiment revealed that people were more likely to choose the ridesharing firm when the ad featured the drivers themselves, whereas in the ads for the taxi firm, the different ads made no difference.  Respondents said this was because they felt their actions were more likely to benefit the driver of the ridesharing firm.

“When people are buying from an employee, like those who work for a taxi company, they don’t really think of themselves as helping these workers. They’re just making a transaction,” the researchers explain.

All of which might influence the way gig economy platforms market themselves, but it might also have implications for how consumers treat gig economy providers.  After all, there are ongoing debates about whether gig workers qualify as employees or not.  It seems, from this study at least, that consumers don’t regard them as such, which in turn influences how we respond to gig workers.

“This perception of consumers that they’re helping simply through their purchases may have negative consequences for providers,” the researchers conclude.  “Their beliefs may not match the economic reality of what it is like to be a provider for a peer-to-peer firm.”