Company profile

London zoo was launched in 1828 in L0ndon making it one of the oldest scientific zoos around the world and was managed by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) for education, scientific and conservational activities. The Zoo Society of London was set up in 1826 (ZSL, 2018). The operations of the ZSL are international. ZSL is however mainly focused on the education on animals and the environment and conservation of animals that face extinction and maintain ace of the animals’ natural habitat. The ZSL has employed scientists to work in labs and others on the ground working with the animals. ZSL also has veterinarians who contribute to research and active conservation of the animals and their habitats.

ZSL vision is based on the coexistence of humans and the environment. Achieving coexistence between humans and the environment faces numerous problems especially when planning on the future of zoos and wildlife (Robbins, 2012). ZSL however aims to tackle these problems that are the basis of conservation challenges. To counter these challenges ZSL plans to adopt three strategies to help secure the future (ZSL, 2018). The strategies include:

• Inspiring future generations by allowing them to participate actively in conservation efforts and changing their perceptions on wildlife through the offering of a lifelong collection of animals at the zoo.
• Educating the masses on the dangers that wild animals are currently facing and how these problems can be resolved using experience, scientific research, and expertise.
• Empowerment of the people living in the vicinity of the zoos. Empowering people living around the zoos to allow them to acquire skills, tools, methods, and evidence to help facilitate the coexistence of people and wild animals in the same habitat.

The company also has visions it wishes to achieve in its conservation efforts (ZSL, 2018). These visions can only be achieved by addressing three conservational challenges. These challenges include:

• Ensuring that the relationship between wildlife and people is sustainable
• Ensuring that standards in the health of the animals are very high.
• Taking care of endangered species to prevent their extinction.

Market analysis

The figure below shows the number of visits to every zoo in London. The number of visits also indicates the popularity of the zoo and its subsequently larger market share. ZSL has the second and fourth most popular location for wildlife. The first ZSL zoo with the highest number of visits is ZSL London zoo while the second one which is also fourth on the list is ZSL Whipsnade.

Figure 1 Market share of ZSL’s competitors

Continued deforestation and rapid increase in the population of human beings has led to many challenges that ZSL had predicted they would face. The growth of human population implies that more land will be required for settlement (Robbins, 2012). People encroach these places where wild animals live.

Zoos face a threat from the already established national park. There is a feeling among environmental enthusiasts who claim that animals in zoos are just pets. They claim despite the conservation efforts on the animals, the limited movement in the zoos implies that the animals are not really in their natural habitat. However this changes when the people visit game parks where animals roam freely. The threat not only comes from the local game parks but also international ones such as those in Africa. Such game parks offer better services and sometimes the fees to access these wildlife encroached areas are very low considered to the zoos. Zoos are expensive because the animals have to be treated carefully. Food, water, medicine, and protection have to be provided to wildlife. These requirements raise highly affect the variations in the amount of money to run the zoos and thus prices are generally high.

Zoos are basically entertainment or leisure spots. People visit them for fun. In the community, there exist other activities that are considered more fun that visits game Parks. These activities include parties and traveling to other places.

However to mitigate the impact of the larger game parks on the smaller ones it is important to ensure that people understand the difference between the two (Conover, 2001). Zoos are meant to conserve the wild animals which are in high levels of danger while in-game parks on danger are being posed on the animals. It would also be better to increase the number of wild animals at the zoos to increase variety for the customers.

Figure 2 below shows the trend for visits per month to the zoo

Figure 2 Trend for the number of visitors per month.

The increase in the number of visits to ZSL zoos is the main objective of the company. As seen in figure 1 above ZSL does not serve the largest market share. The largest market share is owned by Chester Zoo. The combination of both zoos under ZSL does not increase its market share to above that of Chester. This implies that the ZSL visits are relatively low (ZSL, 2018). The lower the visits the lower the sustainability of the zoo. ZSL, therefore, aims to increase the number of visits to the zoos. In order to increase the number of visits to zoos, a lot of factors are analyzed. The age bracket of the visitors and their preferences should be analyzed to increase the visits. Prices during various seasons in the tourism industry are also analyzed to measure the impact of the prices on the number of visits.

ZSL has faced a sticky issue in the market recently. This has been due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. ZSL earns its money through donations and entry fees from members. However, money generated in this manner had become scarce since people are only buying essential goods. ZSL, therefore, faces a challenge in raising money for the upkeep of the animals. Despite ZSL being a non-profit organization, funds require to be generated in order to facilitate the day to day running of the conservation efforts e.g., payment of wardens and guides in the zoos.

ZSL Business/ Marketing strategy

From the annual report by ZSL in the 2017-2018 period, the number of visitors is on the decline. There is an overall need to increase the number of visitors to the park in order to generate more revenue. Strategies for improvement are therefore required. Through the analysis of preference for 30 products among 30 customers will be used to develop a new package for the visitors. Through the implementation of the big data strategy by ZSL, it will be possible to review different characteristics of visitors and their preferences.  A big data strategy will help ZSL edge its competitors in the market (Kallinikos & Constantious, 2015). Reviewing these features will enable ZSL to develop a policy which it will adopt and subsequent measures to increase the number of visits? Identification of potential future visitors will also be possible. In the past two years i.e., 2017 and 2018 there has been a decrease in the number of visitors to ZSL. ZSL aims to analyze the demographics of the visitors to gauge their preferences when developing a new package for visitors.

Business Strategy: To deliver a package that will directly lead to the general increase in the number of visits ZSL receives

Business/ Marketing initiatives

The key initiatives of ZSL need to be listed in order to support the business strategy. The initiatives include:

• Increase the number of visitors to the park.
• Subsequently, create enough funds to facilitate efforts of ZSL

Outcomes and success factors

For a business initiative to be considered successful, there ought to be a basis from which the performance of the initiative is determined. This basis is measured in factors such as the increase or decrease of visits and revenues to the park. These factors can evaluate the general performance of a business initiative.

Desired outcomes

–To develop a package that will increase the number of visits to the parks.

– Determining the best promotional and advertisement mode available.

–To determine different views of people concerning wildlife and the environment in general.

Critical success factors

• Be able to collect information on the number of visits and the visitors’ demographics data.
• The promotion techniques used also need to be gauged in order to determine the most effective one.
• Data on results from adopting an animal campaign needs to be collected and analyzed.
• Various campaigns and reviews from different social media tools such as twitter need to be gauged to determine peoples’ views on the wildlife and environment in general.
• Professions of the visitors also need to be collected.
• Understand the preferences of people visiting the zoos.

Tasks

In order to implement the big data strategy the following activities need to be carried out.

• Determine the product preferences of the selected customers
• Determine the best sensitization and advertisement media.

Data sources

• Previously collected data on customers.
• Data from social media feed.

Identification of supporting big data requirements

The data collected for this report is large enough for analysis of the whole population and develop a visualization report. From the report it is possible to gauge why sales are declining and what policy to adopt in order to change. This makes the data collected over time by ZSL valuable and relevant in gauging the distribution of visits and development of the new package.

To support the requirements of the business strategy (Dillard, 2010) outlines five steps that can be followed. The steps are:

1. Define Business Question

Business questions are developed from analyzing the area causing the problem which is indicated by ZSL’s decrease in the number of visitors.  Business questions included: What product at the zoos is most preferred? How can preferences be used to increase the visits to the zoos?

2. Performance Measures

The first activity in this step is the identification of variables that are to be measured in the data.  The variable should be in such a way that It represents the preferences that may help develop a better package to increase visitors to the zoos. The indicators of performance will be measured through overall visits, demographic data, and conversion rates from advertisements. An increase or decrease in the number of visits will help identify if the objectives have been reached.

3. Business Decisions from data

For this step, the identification was identified in order to:

• Determine the correlation between the number of visits and other characteristics of each instance of a visit. These characteristics include membership, the number of years the person has been visiting, the total spending per year, the purpose of the visit, the number of family members, and salary.
• To analyze data from the analysis of preferences by selected persons.

The first decision is developed in order to determine the interaction between the different characteristics and the number of times a person visits the zoos. The interactions help determine factors that affect the number of times that the person visits the zoo. The second decision is on the analysis of the preferences of the people. 30 candidates are selected and asked to order the products offered by the ZLS according to their preferences. The results from this analysis of the difference in preference of these products indicate which product is preferred more.

4. Analysis and Model building

Different techniques can be applied to describe the data and come up with solutions guided by data. To determine the projection of sales into the year 2019 and further into 2020, a linear regression model can be performed on the number of visits per month. These models will determine it the number of visitors will increase or continue decreasing.

ANOVA analysis will also be applied to help test for differences in the preferences of the products. ANOVA analysis indicates whether any difference exists between the mean ratings of the products. However the ANOVA does not indicate which product is more preferred than the other. TO support evidence provided by the ANOVA, descriptive statistics will be analyzed to identify the most preferred product.

5. Supporting data sources

Determination of the supporting data sources is the last step. The data used in this report was collected over time by ZSL. The data by ZSL consists of data collected on visitors over the period between 2010 and 2018. The data consists of a survey conducted by ZSL on the preferences of different customers on different products. The pricing strategy used by ZSL is also included in the data.

Data Analysis

Descriptive statistics.

Through summary descriptive statistics it is possible to determine the properties displayed by the data. The table below shows the summary descriptive statistics for the data.

The mean age of the visitors who give their preferences is 35.1 while the median is 39. This implies that the ages are evenly distributed and may possess no outliers. The average number of children that the visitors carry with them is 3 children. The average number of visits per person in a year is three times while the median is 3.15. The average duration that the visitors have been visiting is 6 times as indicated by the median.

The table below shows the bra chart for the number of visits according to the profession of each individual.

The highest number of people who visited the zoos were students who all visited between 4 and 5 visits.

The table below shows the descriptive statistics according to the purpose of the visit to the zoos.

As stated earlier, the highest profession to visit the zoo is educators whose main purpose of visiting the zoo is to access library services. 100% of the educators were at the zoo to access the library. Among the local family day-trippers 43% were at the zoo for the experience while the remaining 57% were there for exhibition purposes. A majority of the overseas visitors which is represented by 67% are at the zoo for the experience while 33% are there for exhibitions. 100% of the students visit the zoo in order to access the library. Different categories of people based on their profession visit the zoo for varying purposes.

Analysis of the preferences of products by customers according to data on the development of a new visit package.

The table below shows the descriptive statistics for the preferences of different products.

The most highly rated product is preference 29 which has a mean value of 27.00. The worst-rated service is preference 1 which has a mean of 8.33. However overviewing this means does not imply that the difference between the mean reviews of the products is significant. The other products which received significantly high reviews are pref21, pref22, pref23, pref24, pref25, pref26, and pref27 having means of 26.03, 25.37, 24.70, 24.53, 24.63, 24.77, 25.83 and 26.50 respectively. The reviews are on different products. Observing the variances between different preferences such as pref1, pref2, and pref3 show relatively high variances. Relatively high variances indicate a high possibility that there exist outliers in the data. Outliers in this data may indicate that the preference serves customers who have a certain characteristic.

The table below shows descriptive statistics based on membership.

The mean number of people who visit the zoos and are not members post a mean of 2.07 visits per year while that of the members is 3.96. The median for the non-members’ visits is 1.30 while the median for the members is 4. In the non-members there are outliers present i.e., people who have many visits but are non-members.

Correlation analysis

Correlation can be used to gauge the effectiveness of promotional activities. The correlation for this instance would be the number of accesses to the advertisement medium and the resulting number of visits.

The table below shows correlations among the different promotion media.

A significant relationship exists between the number of visitors and PR exposure. There also exists a significant relationship between the number of visitors and the number of unique web hits. The number of visits can be predicted by the number of unique visits to ZSL’s website with an accuracy of about 23%. PR exposure can be used to predict the number of visits with an accuracy of 33.5%.  Correlation between the budget for adverts and the number of visits stands at 0.129. This implies that there are a number of factors that determine the number of visitors apart from advertising. Advertising costs can be used to predict the number of visits with an accuracy of about 12.9%.

Regression analysis

The package being analyzed is being developed for the purpose of increasing the number of visits. To predict the number of visits in the year 2019 and 2020 in order to justify the development of this package, we develop a linear regression model.

The table below shows the regression model for predicting the number of sales in 2019 and 2020.

The p-value of the model is 0.358 which is above the 0.05 alpha level of confidence. This reasserts that the number of visits highly interacts with the year and varies depending on it. The r squared of the linear regression model has a value of 35.9%. This implies that the model will predict the likely number of visits in 2019 and 2020 with an accuracy of 35.9%.

The model has the equation:

Recommendation

The first recommendation is based on the regression analysis. Regression analysis of the number of visitors produces a model that can predict future sales. From the equation, visits are predicted to be 1236.383 in 2019 and 1252.616 in 2020. These numbers are lower than the count of visitors in the years 2013-2016. It is therefore recommended that ZSL strive to increase the number of visits to the zoos. This is also the basis for the formulation of a new visit package which is meant to increase the number of visits.

The second recommendation is based on the analysis of the purpose of the visit to the zoos. It has been found out from the data people visit zoos for different purposes. The profession is one of the main factors that has influenced this. Students and educators who visit the zoo do so with the aim of accessing the library. Foreigners and local people mainly visit the zoo for exhibitions and zoo experience. Educating the local people on different products offered at the zoos is also highly recommended. The local people should appreciate the zoo and not visit it occasionally when there are exhibitions. Students also need to learn the importance of the zoo. Education on these products creates diversity such that the students do not visit the zoo only when they want to access the library.

The third recommendation is based on the analysis of preferences. Products in preference 29 yield the highest means. This implies that this is the best package to implement. Other subsequently good preferences are preference 21 to preference 26. Generally these preference products cater to a majority of the population while products in preference below 7 cater for the majority. Adopting a package with preference with the high means is highly recommended and will likely lead to an increase in the number of people visiting the zoos. However the elimination of all other preferences, after selecting the best may lead to people with certain characteristics feeling left out.

The expansion of the members club at ZSL is also highly recommended. From analysis members tend to visit the zoos more than the non-members. An alternative criterion for offering membership needs to be developed. These criteria should automatically give nonmembers who have a certain number of visits automatic membership. The advantages of being members should also increase so that people are motivated to visit more and become members.

From correlation analysis, it is observed that the higher the amount paid in adverts by ZSL does not translate to an increase in the number of people by relatively high margins. It is therefore important to select the mode of advertising that ZSL will use in order to be the most effective. The mode of advertising that is most recommended is the use of public relations and website advertisements. Public relations is how the company interacts with the customers on a day to day basis. Improvement of these relations is rated as the best mode of advertisement. The use of Public relations is also relatively cheaper compared to other methods. A good relationship is therefore the best method of advertisement ZSL should use. However in order to continue reaching other markets in order to attract new visitors, the company should intensify the use of websites in advertisements. After public relationships, advertisements are the next best method of advertising.

References

Retrieved from https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/media/2018-11/ZSL200_FullStrategyDoc_Final_SinglePages.pdf

Constantiou, I. D., & Kallinikos, J. (2015). New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 44-57.

Robbins, C. (2012). Wildlife feeding and nutrition. Elsevier.

Conover, M. R. (2001). Resolving human-wildlife conflicts: the science of wildlife damage management. CRC press.