GetTaxi mulls rebrand to ‘Gett’ as it eyes service expansion

Taxi booking app GetTaxi is considering a rebrand to “Gett” in the UK, opening up the option for it to expand its service to more than just booking transportation around the capital.

In the US the brand is already called “Gett”, a word leveraged in an April marketing campaign where the company offered users the opportunity to “Gett Anything” on their next ride – such as a haircut, tarot card reading or a tattoo.

Richard Pleeth, GetTaxi’s vice president of global marketing, told Marketing Week the idea of “getting anything” could be expanded alongside a UK rebrand, with the company exploring other on-demand services it can offer using its network of cars and the data it has on live traffic and popular journeys.

GetTaxi is already performing well as a standalone on-demand cab service, having achieved a growth rate of more than 400 per cent year on year in terms of completed journeys and reaching more than 10.2 million users across the 24 cities the app operates in.

It is expected to generate $500m in revenue by 2015, second only to Uber globally, and forecasts it will turn a profit by the end of this year. The company says none of its other competitors are expected to be profitable in the near future.

GetTaxi and the on-demand transport industry as a whole has benefited from the recent press surrounding rival Uber. Both positive, in Uber’s reported $18bn valuation, and negative, such as the taxi driver protest against the app that brought London’s roads to a standstill last month. Uber claimed new registrations were up 850 per cent as the protest after it generated thousands of column inches on the sector.

In the UK, Pleeth says GetTaxi has seen a “surge” of downloads following the launch of its “Roy the Dino” campaign, which launched in April. The activity saw the creation of a brand ambassador dinosaur who was advertised in the classified sections of several national newspapers and online properties as “missing”, before a wider digital and outdoor campaign rolled out last month.

Next month GetTaxi’s brand ambassador is releasing a single on iTunes and the company is looking at booking a larger out of home media push in the autumn. Pleeth says the company is even considering running Roy for London Mayor, such was the positive consumer sentiment around the character in the first iteration of the campaign.

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Tom Fishburne

Tom Fishburne is founder of Marketoon Studios. Follow his work at marketoonist.com or on Twitter @tomfishburne See more of the Marketoonist here.