Application of Uberisation : analysis of the Hairdressing Sector in Belgium

Details

Supervisors

xavier desclée

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

The coronavirus (Covid-19) first appeared in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. As per the official report of July 6th, 2020 of the World Health Organization, America is currently the epicentre of the pandemic, with Europe having the second highest Covid-19 cases. In Europe, the highest number of cases are in Russia (687,862), followed by the United Kingdom (285,420), Spain (250,545), and Italy (241,611). However, with 857 corona related deaths, Belgium has the highest ratio of deaths per million inhabitants in Europe. (857). The containment and distancing measures that were and are still being applied all over the world caused businesses, schools, theatres, museums, etc., to cease operating in order to minimise the spread of Covid-19. However, such measures have pushed the global economy towards a possible recession. This pandemic has caused the Belgian economy to decline by 10% decrease as compared to its economic performance during the same time last year. Being a part-time hairdresser, I was interested in identifying solutions that could help the hair and beauty salon sector to get through the current crisis. Furthermore, the recent success of Uber-like hair salons such as Drybar, Glamsquad, etc., that leverages advances in IT and mobile technology to reduce fixed advertising and other management costs and to aggregate scattered demands and supplies, encouraged me to hypothesise that such business models could be the potential solution that will help the Belgian hair salon industry to survive this crisis. As a matter of fact, there are already recently established uberised businesses providing hair salon reservation in Belgium, like the Salonkee, Treatwell, Listminut, and So Smart. Therefore, the aim of my master thesis is to verify the above assumption by analysing the value proposition models of these businesses. This would also involve the analysis of their macroeconomic environment and their market attractiveness through the application of strategic models that I recently learned such as the PESTEL and Porter’s 5(+1) forces model. This investigation was based on secondary data which was collected on the Internet. Secondary data was used as these businesses were reluctant to disclose their actual economic conditions due to several reasons, such as fear of espionage or simply because they are very busy trying to devise solutions to further expand their businesses. Here is how this master thesis is organised. This document is divided into five chapters, including a literature review on the subject at hand, descriptions of categories, Belgian hair salons reservation platforms exemplified by Salonkee, Listminut, and So-smart, the analysis of their macroenvironment, the examination of their market’s attractiveness and a conclusion.