Market/Customer analysis

Market/Customer analysis

            The relevant market for the company is digital restaurant industry for small and medium restaurant, dining halls and hotels

In terms of market opportunity, the restaurant owners did not realize the importance of using the IT management system to handle their employee issues until the end of 1990s. There are few companies existing in the market and promoting different systems to different target restaurant groups. However they focus on is to provide the restaurant owners the ability to manage the employee within the operation scope but we designed a well-integrated system that will enable the communication between employees and employers, the potential labor market and recruiters, the restaurant business and other industries. And all these functions are realized through using the network technology. Therefore, we can conclude that most of the management systems in the current market are local software but what we designed is an integrated system with interface to talk to other social media and local communities.

The market is still young with enough space and huge potential for us to develop and educate. On the other hand, there are many different companies in the market to sell staff scheduling system including some big ones such as IBM, SAP and Microsoft. But these companies’ products are very generic which mainly focus on the huge corporations and organizations. Their enterprise resource planning systems provide the function of managing employees and contractors within the business scope. However, these systems are not specifically designed for restaurant business, which requires highly customized systems and the medium and small restaurants cannot afford the extreme high prices of these ES systems. Compare to the staff scheduling market in general, the media restaurant market is fairly small but new. Base on the analysis. We can clearly see that there does exist many opportunities that allow us to enter the restaurant scheduling system market as a social media company.       

            We have two direct customer groups and one indirect customer group. By saying direct customer, we mean those customers who will pay for the service and usage of our system. They are the potential employees in the job market and owners of the restaurants. The direct customers are currently less educated with this new concept and therefore we estimate a large growth in the market after we promote our system. The secondary which is the indirect customers are the people who are looking for restaurants to have dinner. Since we want to create a digital restaurant on line community, these group of people are vital important to be host on our database to attract the restaurant to buy our product to get access to these potential customers. We will not charge them money because they can get less direct benefit from us too. And we also benefit from the participation of these people and therefore we define them as our indirect customers.

            The majority of the profit will come from the owners of the restaurant since they are the potential buyer for the premium package. These people are mainly mid-age generation and have less education on internet, cell phone and new technology. It will be hard at the beginning to peruse them to buy our service but once there are some restaurants benefit from us, the rest will start considering acquire our system and our sales will enjoy a boom after a certain time of “preparation” period. After reaching the peak of the sale, we should consider to charge premium to the customers to keep our memberships in a certain amount of number. We should not accept all applications from one area because the existing customers will not think they get advantages on others and therefore refuse to keep doing business with us. Therefore we need to increase price and keep the initial members with their original price and only charge them reasonable upgrade fees.

            There are many factors may affect our market share such as:

1.      Government policy

2.      Competitor’s innovation

3.      Restaurant reformation

4.      Employment rate

All these factors may increase or reduce the market share of our system but the majority influence as I mentioned before is the impact from competitors. Since the technology and idea of the system is so easy to be reengineered, we can hardly prevent people copying our idea and come up new ideas to take up the market. The entry barrier of the market is not high enough to keep our position safe. And the only way to keep the business survival is to encourage innovations and seek opportunities to enter related markets.

            To evaluate the digital restaurant market, we can draw a conclusion that the initial marketing procedures will be smooth. We can take the majority of the market share until the competitor’s lunch their new system. Take timing into consideration that the average time that needs to develop a new system is 1 to 3 years, we have a reasonable period of time to take the market share and build up our reputation with our customers. And then, we will mainly focus on two things.   First, develop new update to compete with the competitors’ innovation. Second, take advantage of our existing expertise, experience and networking to seek and develop new market in related field. But overall, there is substantial opportunity and environment for us to enter this market.