The Gas Station is My Office- Regus PLC’s Innovative New Plan
While reading the Economist online I stumbled upon Gulliver’s Business Travel Blog and found an interesting post titled Business lounges in service stations: Petrol, chocolate and a sales meeting. It explores the business idea of multinational company Regus PLC (which provides serviced meetings areas/conference rooms/office space to business travellers worldwide) to set up business lounges in gas stations throughout the U.K. and France. While this is certainly an innovative idea for the company Gulliver questions the practicality of these “third place working environments”.
As a student yet to enter the workforce it is hard for me to give an educated opinion on this topic, but based on what I have observed in the business world I feel that these lounges would be a good idea. Given the high percentage of business people who commute in these cities everyday for work purposes I believe Regus has simply found a better way to zero in on their target market through strategies suc ha psychographic segmentation. Given the lack of external competition and the high demand for work space from consumers I believe that this will be a successful endeavour for Regus PLC.