Researching the "Other side of The Market" - Some Findings

Local restaurants, bars, cafes and mostly health shops fall in our "Other side" of the target market who's information we are going to use to serve our primary users who are searching for food/diet/nutritional information. So far we have managed to get 7 responses from various restaurant owners, chefs and personal. We wanted to find out whether such establishments in Dublin (to start with local area) actually have healthy food choices available, whether they are flexible to accommodate various customer dietary requests apart from the set menus and what are their attitudes towards consumer requests and choices. To add, we asked them about the current advertising and communication channels they use. This way we wanted to get an insight whether we as a third party could be considered as an option for driving more customers to them. So here are some of our findings:

Most of the restaurants have various food choices available. This means that if one of the restaurants does not offer gluten-free meals, then they may fall into a different category (e.g. vegetarian, offer low fat foods etc.).

 And most of the restaurants have the flexibility to accommodate various customer requests:

While we found out that most of the restaurants are quite flexible to offer meals according to customers' dietary requirements as well as information on it, their thoughts about customer needs actually vary. From their attitudes it actually became clear that they may not be aware of their customer attitudes and expectations (e.g. referring to one of our previous blog posts on Consumer Survey about Calorie Count) - that most of the customers are thinking about their food intake, but not always can stick to their plan. This can also be explained by the fact that restaurants still want to drive Sales and sometimes forget about customer experiences. So here are some opinions on some statements we asked our restaurant reps to validate:

As seen in the below table, restaurants do not have enough information whether customers would actually choose lower calorie content food or not. They just simply do not have this knowledge/information. However we can confirm this referring to the Consumer Research findings as well as from our interviews we conducted.

As mentioned already at the beginning of this post, we asked the restaurants to give us an insight on what advertising/marketing and communications channels they use to attract the customer:

Most of them are using some sort of channels, however having interviewed only a small number of restaurants it is not yet conclusive how big is the gap between "totally being absent" from online and search and using only WOM or offline channels (apart from the website just being there) and active marketing online. We will continue to research this. For example this gives us an idea - if restaurants use only WOM, we can bring them customers additionally through our product.

Post by: Laura