Restaurants
1) Development planning
a) How the app will be positioned
Our IT team had 4 years' preparation time while we developed software to be used in 4 other industries (motor, property, financial and accommodation).
We had enough time to study the positive and negative aspects of Whatsapp and of Facebook. (Facebook owns Whatsapp and they bought it for $19 billion in 2014 without Whatsapp earning a single penny in revenue)
We can position the Enjoy Life app where we ensure that negative aspects are limited.
Positives
You can message a single person or a group at once. You target people you want to reach and it is only possible when you have their cell phone numbers, and when they also have installed Whatsapp on their phones.
It is a low-cost message platform. It might change in future where users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use the platform. They used to ask a percentage of users to pay after one year’s usage a subscription fee. Whatsapp later decided that they will rather try to see if financial institutions and other companies cannot pay them when these companies want to communicate with Whatsapp users. https://blog.whatsapp.com/615/Making-WhatsApp-free-and-more-useful
We cannot predict the future. People might in future be asked to donate or pay subscription fees to use the communication platform.
Negatives
The only negative for users is that they often get messages from people on their phones while they are busy in work meetings. There is unfortunately no way to manage when a message should reach the receiver. Users can turn their phones onto “silence mode”, but they often forget about it.
Out of a business perspective, it is difficult to use Whatsapp as a tool to communicate with all the people within your geographical area. Businesses do not always have all the people’s cell phone numbers. There are businesses that work hard to collect this data. You cannot guarantee that the cell phone users will all have downloaded Whatsapp onto their phones. Therefore, you cannot be sure that all the people will receive Whatsapp messages. Most companies still use sms as communication as they know that sms messages reach the entire database. It is very costly though.
Positives
Facebook enables companies to post messages on their own Facebook pages, and followers of the business can be reached if they liked the business page.
You can post specials and use images etc. It is a great tool when you have a large Facebook friend network.
Negatives
Facebook sends mail communications to all the friends in the network without managing time slots. They also over do their communication strategy. When one friend comments on a picture Facebook will notify all the other “friends” that this person commented on a picture.
You might get annoyed if you are a Facebook user and is in the wrong friend network. People are often bothered at work and this results in the person getting into trouble at work. Companies ban Facebook pages at the works place.
Negative aspects for business.
A company can only reach people who are Facebook followers of the company. You cannot reach people who do not know about your business.
We took the negatives and the positives into consideration and we realized that the most challenging part is to communicate with people when it is convenient to them, and more importantly, to communicate with them on aspects they are interested in.
We can position an app between Facebook and Whatsapp. The only “negative” is that we will not reach lower income people. This might actually be better for businesses. You want to use a “special” to draw clients to your business, but you want these people to spend money on other products at your business as well.
We support companies that are categorized as businesses that want to help a person “Enjoy Life”. This might seem like a small group of companies, but in reality, the list is almost endless. This includes restaurants, coffee shops, hairdressers, beauty salons, video shops, cinemas, cycle shops, golf shops, event companies (Cycling events, marathons, and numerous sport events) fuel stations, lodges, guesthouses, guest farms, hotels, wine farms and even butcheries. A butcher will be able to publish specials on meat that people need for a braai… enjoy the weekend, enjoy Life!
There is limited space on a phone for Apps
The Enjoy Life app can also provide marketing support to companies such as boutiques that sell clothes and shoes. The Enjoy Life app provides marketing solutions to thousands of companies that cannot develop their own phone apps.