Evaluating Restaurants’ Profitability of a Daily Deal Promotion

Although group buying daily deal sites are widely popular among consumers, it is unclear if deal promotions are profitable for merchants, especially for restaurants. The goal of this study is: (1) to investigate if restaurants make profit from a group buying deal, break even or make significant investment and (2) to find out what factors affect deal profitability. A model for calculating the short-term profitability of restaurant\u27s deal promotions is developed, and ten variables are identified and tested using linear regression analysis to find the once affecting deal profitability measured by return on investment. The research was conducted on the case of Grouper.mk, the leading deal platform in Macedonia. Findings show that deal promotions are profitable and effective tool for restaurants. Deal promotions that provide takeout are less profitable for restaurants, while those that offer additional discount on extra purchases are more profitable for restaurants. Employees effort to upsell have positive impact on deal profitability. However, profitability varies across restaurants category, from least profitable for fast food restaurants to most profitable for fine dining restaurants. Based on the findings of this research, recommendations for maximizing the deal profitability are provided

A Strategic Analysis of an Online Coupon Firm

GoodNews Media Inc. (GoodNews) provides an online coupon platform linking consumers and merchants in four local markets in Canada. This platform offers daily deals to consumers of 50 to 90% off a participating merchant’s services so long as a minimum number of them pre-pay for the merchant’s services. The purpose of this strategic analysis is to determine the best way for GoodNews to meet its owner’s profit and non-profit goals given the most likely future of the industry. GoodNews is in a weak position in the industry and this is unlikely to change because the firm has no key success factors, no sources of sustainable competitive advantage, and no clear way to gain either of these. This paper recommends that the best way to meet the owner’s goals is to exit the market by voluntarily bringing the business to an end and seeking a buyer for its key assets

A business plan for a new mobile application to the consumer foodservice industry

The Portuguese consumer foodservice industry is experiencing a boost in technology adoption, driven by significant changes in consumer behavior and business dynamics, due to mobile increasing penetration. Accordingly, the present work project consists on developing a business plan for meeting an identified opportunity in the technological foodservice landscape. Therefore, this report is divided into three sections, each of which addressing different objectives: (A) External Environment, providing key external insights that support the opportunity; (B) Strategy Formulation, establishing a strategic direction; and (C) Action Plan, determining an implementation plan for starting the busines

Assessing the effect of mobile word-of-mouth on consumers : the physical, psychological and social influences

Mobile technologies enable users to discover and research products anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices allow consumers to create and share content based on physical location, facilitate seamless interactions, and provide context-relevant information that can better satisfy users’ needs and enhance their shopping experience. As consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices to search information and purchase products, they need immediate, updated, informative and credible opinions in concise forms. Meanwhile, marketers face unprecedented opportunities for mobile marketing, making ever important for them to understand the mobile word-of-mouth and its effect on the purchase behaviors of consumers on the mobile platform vs. those on other devices. Drawing from the media richness theory and the principle of compensatory adaptation, study one performs sentiment analysis of online product reviews from both mobile and desktop devices by analyzing over one million customer reviews from Dianping.com. We find that mobile reviews are naturally shorter, contain more adverbs and adjectives, and have smaller readership and less votes of helpfulness. The product ratings from mobile reviews are more polarized yet the average valence of mobile reviews is higher. By comparison, desktop reviews contain more pictures and are rated more helpful. Lastly, pricy products receive more desktop reviews than mobile ones. Study two draws from the construal level theory and posit that WOM from mobile devices reflects closer psychological distances (temporal and social), thus constitutes a lower construal level than that from desktop computers. Using a dataset of over one million product reviews from Dianping.com, we assess the value of online product reviews from mobile devices in comparison with those from the desktop computers. Our findings show that WOM is more helpful when it is socially and temporally closer to the users and this effect is amplified when using mobile devices, which bring the mental construal to a low level and make others’ opinions more relevant. Further, we show that product type moderates the effect of online reviews in that m-WOM is more influential for hedonic products and its value for the utilitarian consumption is the lowest. Study three deploys the observational learning theory to examine the effect of WOM across the mobile and desktop devices on the purchase behavior of online promotional offers. The findings suggest that the effect of WOM on the purchase of promotion offers varies significantly across the platforms, product categories, and discount rates. These findings help better understand the strengths, limitations and the effect of m-WOM as marketers attempt to offer consumers context-sensitive and time-critical promotions through mobile devices and make a significant contribution to the literature on interactive marketing. These studies render meaningful implications for theory development about the role of mobile technologies in marketing and can assist practitioners formulating effective promotional strategies through the electronic channels via mobile and desktop devices

International Fairs as a Tool of Economic Diplomacy

The increased capacity to process and transmit information, and the associated tradability of services, has led to the globalization of production in both goods and services. Companies are now able to locate the production of individual components and business services in geographically separated locations and to assembly a product in different places, thus taking the leverage of the location advantages each place has to offer, and creating the new borderless market. This article analyzes the new role of the governments and diplomacy provoked by the globalisation impact on all economy sectors, especially on service and market communications industry, and emphasise the power of the international fairs as an instrument of economic and foreign policy