Millennials on the Move: top 10 insights about millennials driving behaviour based on 1M trips
In September 2018 we supported our first big hackathon by providing participants with anonymized historical driving data about 1,000 millennials from 6 countries so that participants could discover valuable insights from the data and share them as well as transforming them into products or services for the challenge, which was organized by Zurich Insurance and Esri. The Zurich Insurance & Esri competition was called “Millennials on the Move”. The hackathon was the first for the Bright Box. And it was amazing. This stage of company’s history you can read follow the article “Hackathon #HackZurich: what useful solution can you code for drivers in 40 hours?“ A total of 8 entire teams chose to participate in our challenge, and we realized that the millennial theme is interesting and that it is worthwhile to continue to study this generation of drivers.
Automakers love millennials, and this is not a surprising fact since they work and are able to pay for their products. Auto market is looking for innovative ways to reach this group, and it is not easy. In our report, we have tried to combine the results of our large analytical study of the data of 1M real Millennial trips and recommendations concerning marketing campaigns. They use our Connected Car solution, which indicates that they are drivers who are open to using technology. We have analyzed their behavior in order to help marketers at automakers and dealerships understand how to work with this audience, what to rely on when developing a marketing strategy, where to advertise and what to do in order to gain a repeat customer.
We did not put forward any hypotheses, but we simply asked questions whose answers would allow us to make proposals about how automakers and dealers should conduct their marketing activities. We formulated our proposals concerning measures to promote dealers and automakers on the basis of the results obtained.
I am happy to share with you the top 10 insights that we have found by studying the driving behavior of Millennials.
- Trips that are completed at an average speed of over 100 kph are mostly recorded in Spain (3%), compared to Germany and France (about 1.5%), and the UK and Italy (less than 1%). If you have information about the speed that your customers are traveling in your toolbox, you will have a more complete profile of your customer. I will keep the intrigue and offer you to download our full report to find out who are the most likely to have lead feet in Europe.
- Next, we decided to look at the peaks of millennial activity during the day. We made the charts demonstrating the number of trips that are taken at different times of the day by country. Do you know who those early raisers are on the roads? In France, drivers wake up early and are already on the road at 6 am. This time represents the first peak. The next activity stream is observed at 8:30 am. Peaks of driver activity allow us to contact our customers in time, offer them a particular advertisement in time, as well as to properly set up service notifications as well as any other types of advertising.
- Some automakers and dealers have noticed that millennials have a decreased desire to drive a car. We decided to see how millennials used the car during the day, and then we tried to see if there were any patterns in how they used the car during the week, month, and year. Here I can say that on average, millennial drivers drive more between Thursday and Saturday than on other days of the week. They drive much more on Friday than on the other days of the week.
- In talking about the average amount of time that millennial drivers spend behind the wheel by season, we concluded that Millennials prefer not to travel by private car in the summer.
- Together with activity peaks that vary depending on the season, we decided to investigate whether millennial drivers go through periods when they do not use their cars. And it turned out that millennials, on the whole, do not tend to take long breaks from using a car.
- Our report is primarily focused on players in the automotive market, so that is why we decided to help dealerships by providing them with information about car dealership visitation by millennials. As a result, we found out that, on average, millennials go to the dealer once every 3 months. A total of 25% go to the dealer once a month. And 10% visit once a year or less. Also, we analyzed the correlation between trips to the car dealer on holidays and weekends, and we have broken down the statistics by country to obtain a more meaningful result.
- We also found it interesting to understand do millennials prefer big city parking lots or on-site parking at their buildings? It seems to us that information about parking could be useful to those who wish to place offline ads. Millennials mostly park spontaneously, i.e., we have learned that they spend quite a lot of money on city parking.
- When formulating questions based on the data, we understood that marketers not only at automakers and dealers, but also every company that does business with the millennial generation could draw the greatest insights from precisely this part of the study. So we decided to research what destinations do millennials visit most frequently. Based on the information obtained, it can be concluded that millennials use their cars most of all to visit places associated with food. They drive their cars to restaurants and bars.
- We also decided to assess how aggressive millennial drivers are. To do this, we used Remoto Scoring AI, which assesses the aggressiveness of drivers based on the telematics data that is collected from their trips. So according to the scoring results the average millennial is a more aggressive driver than the typical older driver.
