MS-Digital Innovation in Marketing

Wow! Thanks for the insight. I honestly didn’t even think about how the mobile apps like Uber Eats and Doordash were hurting our local restaurants and businesses. Although, at the end of the day it seems that mobile technology does help customers by making it easy to shop and discover. Also now realizing why all those Doordash Ads are on Tik Tok promoting potentially making $20/hr to drivers… It all makes sense now.

But this is unacceptable the fees they are charging these businesses. I think these delivery services need to come up with a more sustainable and ethical business model that doesn’t put all the fees onto the business. But as consumer, I don’t want them on myself either. It just seems like being a partner of these delivery services doesn’t yield as much benefit as it should. Sure, access to a larger market of consumers, but for the price? Not for 46 meals with only $380 of profit. (from article).

Great post, Katherine.

There are many sayings regarding how there is opportunity in disruption. Prior to the pandemic, many of these services agreed, but struggled to gain customers both due to a lack of purpose (few barriers to going out to eat or pick up take out) as well as the fees required.

I wonder if services like Doordash would have even survived outside of the densest urban environments if not for the pandemic. Of course, that’s not what happened and the pandemic “solved” both problems for these companies: people suddenly had a major barrier to leaving their home AND were willing to do whatever it took to preserve whatever comforts they could.

As we discussed in class, when people feel isolated, unprepared or scared, they often look for the simplest solution independent of any additional context.

As we are hopefully turning the corner on the pandemic, do these services have have the same outlook? Will Uber shift away from repurposing their “workforce” (absolutely not employees) back to chauffeuring?

To your comment Philip, their services are almost certainly “sustainable” from a profit standpoint. From an ethical perspective, there is a fair amount of competition in this space as well as the ability (i.e. Dominos) to make your own solution. Why is it that so many restaurants “willingly” signed up for these platforms?

Unfortunately, tech companies “providing” a platform to help local businesses scale, specifically small restaurants, have a history of taking advantage of their network effects to extract as much as they can from the relationship.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut

Going back to our lecture, these services certainly allow us to order more often. They also can accelerate and simplify the process. Both seem like benefits for their customers (i.e. you). For argument’s sake, if they “require” these margins to remain competitive, is the value to their customers more important than the cost to their “partners”? Should these platforms change or should restaurants increase their prices to better reflect the cost required to be on these platforms (if they are in fact necessary for restaurants to succeed)?

This is a great recent example of mobile disruption. On the flip side of this problem, I , like many others have found out about new restaurants through these apps and have continued to support them in person (like you also mentioned). While the apps are hiking up prices, I also saw a boom in the number of instacart (where does this fall?) employees at the grocery during the pandemic and I’m sure the number of delivery app workers increased as well. While I completely understand your frustration with these apps, I also think they gave a lot of people a chance to work during those times who may not have had the opportunity to otherwise – and through tipping I’m sure they were able to do pretty well.

Great post Kathy. I loved these food delivery apps as well until I saw how much they affected my bank account. I agree with Erin where I thought I was helpful these smaller restaurants by buying their food. Then, like you said, I saw how little they pay the restaurants and I felt guilty. But, if I live far from them, how else would I support these places?

In relation to your question, I unironically hate social media. Yes, it is helping connect people. But, it’s separating them too. I can’t stand it when people constantly look at their phones when we’re having a conversation. I feel like we can’t have real conversations because they want to know what’s happening on social media.

Great topic. The problem I see with a lot of these mom and pop shops and private owned restaurants is they simply don’t have the economics of scale to afford these middlemen to skim large percentages of the profit. The business owner will have to make an informed decision based on math and data. If you have 30% or lower margins on each food sale, then you’re not going to grow your business based on profit since most commissions on these apps are 30% or higher. The other factor you have to consider is how much awareness can your restaurant garner by using the app and will it transfer to leads to get people to visit your restaurant physically.

Wow, thanks for sharing this Kathy! I always questioned why there were such high fees, but at the end of the day still had to pay them. It’s like agreeing to terms and conditions. You question what you’re agreeing to, but sign anyway because you want to use the application. This is the important backend work that more people need to know about. Many consumers probably had the same mindset as you in trying to help their favorite local business during the pandemic, but had no idea most of the profits didn’t support the business. Many consumers also have the “digital first” mindset where they think every business needs to adapt to these digital times. They disregard the fact that if the company doesn’t have enough resources, revenue, knowledge, bandwidth to create their own app it will just hurt their business. This is the case for most small businesses.

This really put QR codes into a different perspective for me. Personally, I think the ways you are talking about using the QR codes are not the best but they are great ideas. I struggle on a daily basis with keeping up with users and the best way to target people. You want to have the most up to date marketing but at the same time is this really going to work for your target market? I think about this often and also struggle with this. One struggle I see in my job is having events and seeing if any of the social media campaign I am running are driving results for these. For instance, we had a job fair today and I ran a 2 week ad on LinkedIn and Facebook. Yes, I can see the results of the campaign and how many people clicked on the careers page but I will never know if these people actually showed up to the job fair.

This post underscores what was taught tonight in class that we need to know were our customers communicating and how they are communicating. For instance, I belong to a MeetUp group, a community online that share and experience activities based on their interests. My specific MeetUp group was hiking, and sure enough, it was only a matter of time before REI and Eastern Mountain Sports got their grips on sponsored ads, and offering our group discounts on products if we reviewed them. I think marketing can be more of an act of “listening” then it is talking.

Really love the direction this conversation is going. Lesley, the challenges your are facing are so common in my industry.. As Dan H. pointed out though, it really ties well into our Learnathon.

The design questions your are asking are entirely logical, but they start from a “moment of weakness”. You are assuming that consumer NEED a hard prompt to take action. I’m not advocating against including a URL or a QR code, but don’t restrict yourself to thinking that’s the only way people will engage (I am advocating against creating a vanity URL. They are almost always a waste of time, for reasons I will get to in a second).

What do you do when something catches your interest? More than likely, you Google it.

Trust your message to stand out. Trust your logo to be memorable. Trust your targeting to be on point. And then look to search trends to validate it.

For the minority of people who might scan a code or recall a URL, my experience is that a much larger # of people are more competent than advertisers give them credit. They’ve been conditioned to “knee-jerk” to search when they want info. Try to use that to your advantage.

We’ll talk more about bridging the physical and digital worlds as the semester progresses. Thank you for sparking this discussion!

So much of your post resonated with me Lesley! I agree with what others have said, especially Greg’s point about avoiding vanity URLs – I can’t tell you how many times a supervisor has asked me to include a tiny url or bit.ly link on an ad. No one’s going to type that in! QR Codes are a step up, but still not a guarantee that someone cares enough to use it. To echo Greg and Dan H., I think it all comes down to the ad itself, and making sure you’re reaching the right people in the right channel. If your ad is effective on its own, I feel confident that most viewers will remember the ad and Google it – either in the moment, or later. (But that’s all easier said than done when you have higher ups to answer to !!)