Nowadays, anybody is a potential food critic, only requiring a smartphone to write an opinion and evaluate a restaurant through a digital app. As people trust other people's opinions - even strangers - more than the service provider's own marketing strategies, restaurant recommendation apps are great tools to analyze and improve performance. This keeps up with a recent consumer behaviour: gathering opinions that have impact on both ends of the consumer-organization relationship. This research aims to identify the relevant factors when classifying a restaurant and understand if Zomato app influences a restaurant choice, by identifying the features that lead a consumer to choose restaurant X over Y, whether it's a workday lunch, family lunches, dinners with friends or a romantic dinner. The chapter analyzes Zomato's case study: competition along catering industry dimension and the competitive position. Results point to how consumers perceive restaurant experience and how they influence others' decisions with online evaluating.
Top1. Introduction
The advance of the digital world has changed how the individual participates in the production, communication and choice of a product or service, going from a mere spectator to an active participant (Duarte & Dias, 2021). On the internet, companies have relinquished control over information that is shared and have become dependent on others’ opinions. With this transformation, the individual has become a producer of content of topics that are of interest to them, namely brands, services, or institutions (Phillips & Young, 2009). This means that existing content is no longer entirely of the brand’s responsibility (Li, Larimo & Leonidou, 2021) and individual behaviour has also changed. Individuals presently wish to feel satisfaction when sharing experiences of all kinds on social networks (Fabretti, 2012). Any experience, positive or negative, becomes content.
As technology evolves to keep up with recent consumer behaviour, digital spaces that gather opinions and are specialised in different business areas have been created.These spaces have an impact on both ends of the consumer-organization relationship.For the consumers, these digital platforms are a source of shared disseminated information that help them during a decision-making process prior to a purchase, whilst for companies they are a way to analyse how a product or service is received by the public (Parikh et al., 2014). Consequently, the consumer research influences and is influenced during the purchasing process, with there being an increase of reviews websites and mobile applications, where they may share and evaluate their experience related to the quality of a product/service, namely in the catering sector, which is heavily influenced by Word-Of-Mouth. Nowadays, to be a food critic, only requires a smartphone to write an opinion and evaluate a restaurant through a digital application (Hopper, 2013). It is also known that people trust other people’s opinions, even those of strangers (Siegrist, 2021), more than the service provider’s own marketing strategies (Chen & Xie, 2008), making restaurant recommendation applications great tools for analysing and improving performance.
This study aims to understand whether the Zomato application has an influence on an individual’s decision when choosing a restaurant, as well as to identify the attributes offered in the application that matter the most to users, in various situations: individual lunch on weekdays, family lunch, dinner with friends and romantic dinner. It also aims to understand what are the most important dimensions that make up a user’s satisfaction when evaluating a restaurant after a consumption experience. Additionally, a characterization of the Zomato user profile was carried out.
The present chapter is organized in four sections. Firstly, to deepen understand how social media has led to users becoming active participants in the decisions of another when choosing a restaurant, a narrative literature review was carried out, with special focus on the Word-Of-Mouth Influence; the factors that influence a restaurant selection; those who influence the consumer satisfaction in restaurants; and finally, the online platforms and their importance and reviews in the culinary sector.
Secondly, the Zomato case study was analyzed, following four steps: First, a competitive dimension with applications description that are focused on the category industry; Second, an investigation of the competitive position using a benchmark study of the competition (Stapenhurst, 2009). Third, a SWOT analysis to outwit the competitors’ pros, cons, opportunities, and treats, and, at least, a quantitative method allowing the researchers to obtain information to correlate the variables present and determine behavioural patterns, using dependent or independent variables (Moreira et al., 2009) among hypotheses (H1-H4f). The quantitative method chosen was a questionnaire, the data was collected between 28/October and 28/November of 2020 using Google Forms, and the 320 valid answers were analyzed afterwards in SPSS.
Thirdly, the results were presented, and a discussion was carried out. A multiple logistic regresa specific variablec variable to study the sociodemographic variables that influence of being a Zomato user were used. The research questions were: