Neira Borbolla, Yu-Chen (Jane) Chen, Katherine Gaskill, Katy HickeyBy:

Table of Contents4

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8

Concept

Business Models

Challenges

Market Analysis

Target Consumer Profile

Competitor Analysis9

13 Brand Positioning

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17

20

22

23

Strategy15

Scope

Search Marketing

Promotional Plan

Budget

Website Mockup (Flow chart)

25 Appendix A

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Concept Our concept is a restaurant review search engine that also offers coupons to sponsored restaurants. The search

engine would allow users to enter in a location and restaurant preferences such as type of food and price. At any time,

the site would offer two coupons that met a user’s preferences. However, reviews of all restaurants would appear in the

results. When a user agrees to buy a coupon, it will be sent to their e-mail and then users would then be able to print off

the coupons and bring them to the restaurant.

Every week, the sponsored coupons would change. Restaurants would be required to pay a small subscription fee

to have their restaurant as part of the coupons cycling. Then when their coupons is featured, they will pay the company a

small percentage of the sales from the coupon. Restaurants will have the ability to set a limitation on the amount of

coupons sold each day and set an expiration date. Restaurants would not pay to have customer reviews on the site.

After a coupon is purchased, the site will send the user an e-mail about a week later asking if they used the

coupon and for their review of the restaurant. Users would not need to do anything but reply to the e-mail in order to

review the restaurant. Therefore, more users are likely to review the restaurants because they do not need to log back

on the site to write a review. Users would have the option directly on the site also to review restaurants though if they

wanted.

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Brokerage Model: The company would be a search agent for users based on restaurant preferences

and link together coupons for those restaurants.

Community Model: The company would use customer reviews and customer satisfaction as user

generated content for the site. This user generated content would compose the reviews.

Affiliate Model: This would be the primary revenue generation model. The site would charge

restaurants to be part of their coupon sponsoring and also engage in revenue sharing with the restaurants

when their coupons are featured.

Business Models

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2

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Challenges

The primary challenges in establishing this business would be the

initial participation by restaurants and users. Like with most web-based

start up companies, driving initial traffic to the site is always difficult.

We would need to get word of mouth spread about our site and peak

interest in the company. Once people initial gain interest in the site, we

believe they are likely to revisit it so maintaining traffic won’t be as

difficult as the initial traffic.

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Market AnalysisGeographic:United States (71.7% population Internet users), major cities like New York City.

Demographic:Females and Males age 18+ with a higher education backgroundHigher education

Money conscious

Generation Y also called Millennials (20% national use of internet)

Psychographic:Lifestyle: people who enjoy going out to dinner, enjoy social activities and like to be around friends

and have a busy life.

Fast followers (technology optimistic with low income)

Behavior:Benefits sought: “get best deals”, “variety of options”, “fast and easy transaction”,

Heavy Internet users with access at home, office and mobile devices.

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Target Consumer Profile

Our target consumers are people who enjoy going out to dinner to a variety of

restaurants but are looking for the best deals they can receive with their tastes in

mind. They enjoy going out and have large social networks. They are likely to share

their experiences with friends and will now be able to do so with others. Our

target consumers have busy lifestyles. They are active and on the go. Although

they like saving money, they do not have the time to search for the best deals or

coupons. They are young professionals working hard to advance their careers or

families trying to fit in all of the children’s activities. These individuals are savvy

in technology and is more than fluent on the Internet. They use the Internet as a

resource to make their life more convenient and stay connected.

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Competitor Analysis

GrouponGroupon is a site that works with businesses to offer great deals. Groupon is set up

based on location. Users enter their city and find deals for local businesses like

restaurants and salons. Each day there are a couple of deals. Users bid on the deals

and once there are enough bids the deal goes into effect. Deals may available for

different periods of time depending on what the business is willing to offer. There is a

write up on the featured business but no user reviews.

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Living Social Living Social is very similar to groupon except they only offer one deal a day. Once the day ends the

deal is no longer available. Some examples of deals are a coupon to an ice cream shop worth $10 that

only costs $5, or $30 at a sushi place for only $15. The living social pages offer a description of the

business and show it on a map. Only having the deal available for one day really encourages customer

action. If users are given more time they are more likely to put it off and think it over.

Competitor Analysis

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Urban SpoonUrban Spoon offers customer reviews of restaurants. Users choose the city they are located in and

then can browse restaurants in the area. Users can browse by type of food or other special features

like price and family friendly atmosphere. The Ithaca page, for example, offers top ten restaurants

in different categories like happy hour, fine dining, etc. Restaurant pages offer customer reviews,

links to the webpage, menus, location on a map, some even offer the most recent twitter update. The

many ways to search for a restaurant is great but there are not many written customer reviews.

Competitor Analysis

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Competitor Analysis

Yelp Yelp is also a customer review site that covers a wide range of areas including restaurants, real es-

tate, and beauty/spas. Yelp is a very popular site so there is a large number of customer reviews

but not as much actual information about the businesses that urban spoon offered. A strength and a

weakness of yelp is the wide range of services that it critiques. It is nice to be able to read reviews

about just about anything in an unfamiliar city. But on the negative side yelp is spreading them-

selves pretty thin. Since yelp depends on customer feed back it is hard to get quality comments on

so much content.

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Brand Positioning

We will be differentiating our business through product and service differentiation. Our product offering will have

several features and benefits including restaurant reviews and direct access to coupons for local restaurants. Unlike

Groupon or Livingsocial, our business will be able to customize their selection of coupons via the customer’s designated

cuisine. For example, a customer can search for Chinese food, and the first two results will be restaurants with reviews

and coupon available for their purchase. This then differentiates our business from Groupon or Livingsocial because we

are not offering daily deals, but really weekly deals, where the customer can choose which cuisine they want that night

and have access to available coupons. This is also a service differentiation, where we have personalized options for cus-

tomers to save on what they really want that night rather than having them tailor their night to whatever coupon is avail-

able.

We’ve ultimately used the Competitor positioning to ensure that we are differentiating ourselves from our competi-

tors Groupon, Livingsocial, Google Reviews and Yelp. We are doing this by relying on customer segments for restaurant

reviews, and word of mouth. In addition to User Category positioning we are also applying Integrator Positioning where

we intend to provide a one stop shop: where consumers can find everything they need for a night out. We hope that in-

stead of consumers going to Groupon, getting the daily deal, going to yelp to review the restaurant and then making the

decision whether to go out or not.

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Brand Positioning

Ultimately, we want all of those steps to become one step.

We want a consumer to be able to utilize our business as a tool to determine what they would like for din-

ner tonight (like Urbanspoon or Open Table), which restaurants they would want to dine at, what the cus-

tomers reviews are like, and hopefully there is a coupon available for that restaurant. Most importantly, we

aim to position this business as being a low-cost and low-risk factor for participating businesses. It’s not a

daily deal, so the businesses are not flooded with too much to handle. They have customers who are genu-

inely interested in the cuisine who are coming to their restaurants to use these coupons; therefore there is

a higher retention rate. And lastly, it doesn’t cost them very much as we only charge a percentage of the

coupon sale. Therefore, we hope to position this brand to be a one-stop-shop for consumers while busi-

nesses benefit even with such a low cost.

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StrategyOur main goal is to offer users an easy to use, one-stop site to search for restaurant coupons based on their cuisine

preference, price range or location in NYC. Also users will be able to write short (twitter-like) reviews or search for

user-driven content about the restaurants. Taste n’ Save site users will benefit from this integrated approach by finding

customized coupon offers along with user-generated reviews about restaurants all in one site. Customers will also have

the opportunity to provide their own comments and feedback.

On the business side, we offer restaurants the opportunity to advertise themselves by participating in Taste n’ Save,

which will help them increase their restaurant traffic and insight about customers experience in their restaurant.

With Taste n` Save, we seek to build traffic from users, position our site as a Yelp/Goupon integration and create a loyal

community of “restaurant lovers” willing to generate content for others to see. Also every time a user searches for

coupons and purchases it, we receive 20% from the coupon value. After the purchase, users will receive a Taste n’ Save

email asking for feedback about the restaurant and their experience. This interaction will generate a relationship betwen

the site and the customer which will help with creating a loyal database.By having users write a comment or review, it

will increase the available content for other users to look at in order to make informed decisions.

In order to ensure we have the participation from a variety of restaurants, we will offer users a broad selection of restau-

rants covering their preferences and reviews free of charge. To generate revenue, we will receive a fee from restaurants

willing to offer coupons to our users only. This way we will remain less biased in the reviewing/rating system and only

show preference to the coupon deals, not the actual restaurants. This will allow us to remain credible.

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ScopeSEARCH ENGINE

RESTAURANT DESCRIPTION

COUPONS

LATEST REVIEWS

UPLOAD IMAGES

MAP

ACCOUNT

CUSTOMER SERVICE

FOLLOW/ LIKE

Users are able to search available coupons by selecting type of cuisine, price range or location.

Users are able to find descriptions of restaurants like accepted credit cards, hours, type of food, etc.

Users are able to find the coupons of the week depending on their preference.

Users can write a review about their experience in a restaurant.Users can search the latest reviews about restaurants written by other users.

Users are able to post photos of the restaurants.

Users are able to see the search results in a interactive map.

Users opt-in to create a profile specifying their preferences and contact info.

Users are able to e-mail a service representative for any questions, suggestions or problems

Users are able to connect with our Facebook and Twitter pages just by clicking on their respective badges.

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Search MarketingPaid Ad Words Since this is a start up business and centered in the United States, using Google Ad Words would be the best decision for

paid search engine marketing.

The term “restaurant coupons” is highly competitive and with 246,000 monthly searches it is the highest searched term.

The term “restaurant coupon” also is a medium competition search term. However, the term “restaurant review” is also

searched 246,000 times monthly and the term “restaurant reviews” is searched 135,000 times monthly. Both these terms

are categorized as low competition. We believe that the best use of paid search is to focus on bidding on the search

words “restaurant review” and “restaurant reviews” most heavily. Since our business combines both coupons and re-

views, we are able to attract the same amount of traffic at a much lower price by using the word “review(s)” instead of

coupon. It is also not likely that having coupons, in addition to reviews, will turn users away from the site.

Since action will be difficult to measure on our site, a payment system of cost-per-click-through would be most effective.

Users may engage with our business without directly purchasing a coupon, so action doesn’t accurately measure success

of marketing. Initially people may engage with only the reviews. However, they are likely to revisit the site again since

there is no risk to the user. This will lead to increased purchasing action later. They will not disregard the site as only for

coupons since they may not be inclined to buy a coupon at the time.

Taste N’ SaveSearch for the best local food,receive reviews and coupons instantlywww.tastensave.com

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Search Marketing

*See Appendix A

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Search MarketingOrganic Search Engine Optimization

1Strategy Generate a good domain.

Our domain is short and

memorable and not

complicated. It uses

slang but doesn’t use a

misspelled version of the

word or symbols.

“Taste N’ Save- Restaurant Reviews & Restau-

rant Coupons Site”- 59 characters

This title tag incorporates our company name

which may be searched along with the busi-

ness concepts. The terms restaurant reviews

and restaurant coupons were the highest

searched terms related to our business so it is

important to put them in the title tag.

2Strategy

Descriptve URLsHome page: www.tastensave.com

2nd page: www.tastensave.com/search/(the city)

3rd page: www.tastensave.com/search/coupons/(the city)

4th page: www.tastensave.com/restaurantreviews/(thecity)

5th page: www.tastensave.com/writearestaurantreview

Business pages: www.tastensave.com/(the city)/(the restaurant)

3Strategy Strategy Mega Tags

Restaurant reviews, restaurant coupons, local food, local restaurant reviews, write food review, find local restaurant, restaurant search engine, food coupons, best restaurants, restaurant prices, restaurant menus, restaurant deals

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Promotional PlanAffiliate ProgramsTo encourage restaurants to participate on our website we will offer them incentives. When restaurants offer coupons

they will receive free ads on our site for the first day of their promotion. Additionally, restaurants that provide a link to

tastensave.com from their website will receive 20% off advertisements on our site.

Customers who frequently review restaurants will earn the privilege to get access to exclusive coupons. An example

would be that they receive a 50% off coupon while regular users only get 25%. Checking in with Foursquare and posting

about Taste N’ Save on Facebook will also earn customers this privilege.

AdvertisingTo start Taste N’ save will only advertise on Facebook targeting customers in the geographic regions we are looking to

develop. For the first 6 months after our site launches we will spend $25 a day on Facebook advertisements. After 6

months the geographic regions will be tailored and will spend gradually spend less on Facebook ads.

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Social MediaFacebook- Taste N’ Save will have a Facebook page. The Facebook page will explain what Taste N’ Save

is, how it works, and provide links to our site. On the Facebook page users can interact with each other

and talk about the great deals they have received. Users can use their Facebook accounts to access and

login to Taste N’ Save instead of creating a whole new account. Also through our site users can update

their profile with a status showing their friends the great deal they received on Taste N’ Save.

Foursquare- Users can check in using Foursquare when they are at the restaurant using their coupon.

Restaurants can use Foursquare to allow customers to earn better coupons.

MobileA specially formatted mobile version of TasteNSave.com will be available to allow users to access

restaurant reviews and coupons wherever they are.

Promotional Plan

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Budget

*

*Estimated budget of 6-month

Promotional Offers$2,500

Facebook Ads$4,500

Ad Words$9,000

Start-Up Costs$2,500

Total: $23,500

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Website Mock-up

1 2Home Page City Page

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Website Flow Chart

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Appendix A