Case Study For this assignment, following APA style, answer as comprehensively a
ID: 458626 • Letter: C
Question
Case Study
For this assignment, following APA style, answer as comprehensively as possible the questions after each case summary.
- What are the main problems or issues of the case?
- What alternatives have been attempted to resolve the problems or issues?
- What recommendations can be made to resolve the case?
- Relevance of the issues raised in the case to real life business problems and applications
- Other questions raised by the instructor
For this assignment, following APA style, answer as comprehensively as possible the questions after each case summary.
A. Please read the “To Pay or Not to Pay: Zagat’s Dilemma” case study on page 413 of your textbook and answer the following questions:
1. Evaluate Zagat using the competitive forces and value chain models.
2. Compare Zagat’s and Yelp’s e-commerce business models. How have those models affected each company's Web strategy?
3. Why was Zagat’s content well suited for the Web and for the mobile digital platform?
4. Do you think Zagat’s decision to use a pay wall for its Web site was a mistake? Why or why not?
5. Will Zagat’s acquisition by Google make it more competitive? Explain your answer.
Explanation / Answer
1. Zagat has been involved in publishing surveys and guides with respects to restaurants, hotels and night clubs.Their guide served as a comprehensive source for many of the users and tourists since they were able to get a clear picure on the service and offers of the restaurant's based on the real time experience of the visitors and customers. The company reached the top spot in user generated survey content. Though there was competition it was able to retain it market share. Later Zagat took the web platform to popularize its contents. Zagat targeted at the interested customers and were able to attract those who were interested in these information. But it insisted its customers to pay a few bucks for accessing the information. This paved way for its competitors to enter the market. Zagat started losing out in the value chain model after it failed to update its contents from time to time. It also charged its customers for the contents that were about a year old. Hence the value chain model of Zagat suffered a major setback.
2. Zagat's Web Strategy - Zagat followed the e-commerce style of model where the interested customers were asked to subscribe to the website to get access to Zagat's information. Their model was also limited to the range of customers who were eligible to make reviews. This model was more rigid and made less penetration in the web strategy due to its paywall concept.
Yelp's Web Strategy: Yelp used the wiki style of model when it entered the web market. It followed a social media platform where in all the interested customers were allowed to give their feedback without having to pay anything for the service. It had a global reach since individuals from anywhere were able to give their feedbacks and all those who visited their website were able to read the reviews and contents. Yelp was more flexible and reached a lot of audiences. Yelp's web strategy was more successful as they were able to tap the requirement of the customers and acted to the need of the hour.
3. Zagat's contents seemed to be more genuine when compared to Yelp since there was less chances of bad-mouthing. Yelp was open so anyone in pursuit of spoiling the name of the restaurant had more options to do so which was not possible in Zagat. The contents of Zagat were professionally prepared. Further they are best suited for Web and mobile digital platform due to the following reasons:
4. Zagat/s decision to use a paywall for its webstore was a major blunder by the company since people who browse for various informations on web would only first go for free sources of information rather than going in for paid sources. When the same information is available globally for free of cost the customers would never give a second thought about the paid informations. Moreover with the search engines like Google that rely on publishing web contents were not able to penetrate beyond its paywall to extract information which was a major setback for the company.
5. Google's acquisition of Zagat will definitely make Zagat more competitive since Zagat's user generated contents best matched the requirements of Google places. Initially when Zagat was individual entity it was difficult for the company to penetrate inside the paywall of Zagat but now after its acquisition Google was able to access the data and publish it in its sources.