The impact of consumers’ use of social media on the restaurant industry in the UK Assignment Help

This assignment requires you to engage with the Business and Management Research Methods tools typically employed to plan for a proposed piece of original research. It requires you to produce a Research Proposal to investigate a relevant business issue and contribute to existing knowledge. It is imperative that you complete the requirements as part of the marking criteria.

Approaching the Assignment

1. Identify the key terms and requirements for a Research Proposal

2. Use the Marking Criteria to understand the expectations of the reader.

3. Create an outline of your assignment.

4. Use your Research and Referencing to support and justify all your points

5. Use Evidence to support your proposed research design and methodology 

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Introduction : 

The social media's influence in different aspects of an individual life is increasing daily. One of the aspects for which the consumers use social media is their different activities related to the taking service from a restaurant (Hudson et al., 2015). The consumers use social media for different purposes related to before taking a restaurant service or after taking the restaurant service. All these activities of the consumer empower them more than before and also in a true sense made the different UK restaurants accountable for providing a particular level of service to the customers. Now reporting of a bad incident of the customers in the restaurant posted in social media like Instagram or Facebook can create a lot of impacts (Pos.toasttab.com, 2019). In this research study, these impacts of the use of social media by the consumer will be discussed.

This research topic is highly relevant and significant for the current restaurant industry as the use of the social media predicted to increase in the upcoming and also the number of individuals using the social media is also quickly increasing. Therefore, it is justified to select this topic as the research subject. Besides, this research will have significant value in the future period as the different restaurant owners, or managers will want to know impacts of the social media have on its business and how to use social media for the growth of the restaurant business.

Research questions and research objectives

There are some queries which the researcher of this study will be addressed by the research questions of this research study. These research questions of this research study are listed below.

• How social media are used by consumers in their interaction related to the restaurant?

• How the use of social media by the restaurant consumers or potential consumers affecting the restaurant or restaurant industry?

There are some aspects related to the research topic for finding which answer, this research has been created, and these are called

research objectives. These research objectives of this research study are listed below.

• To find out how social media impact customers to the visitor to visit the restaurant.

• To find out the positive and negative impacts of the social media on consumers, restaurant and restaurant industry.

• Identify the difference in the consumer behaviours in pre-social media and social media era.

Literature review

The use of social media nowadays is not restricted to people coming online to make friends or communicate with each other. With the increase of consumers using social media, the use of social media has currently become vast and different consumers of social media use social media for different reasons. The Balance Small Business, (2019) stated that the different types of business organisations including restaurant also have recognised the power of the social media to reach consumers and use in it different ways to fulfil their different consumers' related activities like social marketing or taking feedback from the consumers and fulfilment of many more activities like these.

Besides, the potential consumers or existing consumers of the restaurant use social media for different activities related to the restaurant and some of which are discussed here in this section. Cada Design, (2019) stated that first and foremost use of social media is the giving review of their experience in the restaurant. This can impact the restaurant negatively or positively depending on the number of good reviews or bad review that the restaurant gets. On the other hand, it has helped the consumers to empower themselves and make the restaurant authority accountable for any bad experience they have. Šeric and Pranicevic, (2018) stated that use also impacts the overall UK restaurant industry standard of quality positive as the UK restaurants increased their quality of service toward the customers in general due to the knowledge of how bad reviews can negatively impact their business.

Modernrestaurantmanagement.com, (2019) stated that consumer also uses social media to compare the prices of different restaurant, and this made the consumer more knowledgeable about the different prices offered by the different restaurant for the same dish. This eventually impacts the UK restaurants to become more competitive in their pricing and also offer a discount to different existing or potential customer to retain or increase its customer base.

Song and Yoo, (2016) stated that the social media used by the consumer related to the restaurant is that it checks the environment or other facilities that the restaurant provides other than the food which can enhance their experience in the UK restaurant as a customer. This had made the customers more demanding about the extracurricular activities or environment that the restaurant provides. This made the customer base of some restaurant more niche, or the environment of the restaurant unique selling point had become its environment rather than its food. This increased the scope of the UK restaurant revenue generating sources as for providing extra facilities of a restaurant, and the restaurant charged consumers extra money.

Kim et al., (2015) stated that the consumer uses social media to interact with the restaurant official representatives to details about different aspects of the business. This made the customers take more educated decisions related to the restaurant in the UK market. The impact of this restaurant is that all major restaurants have individuals or employee working for them who answer to all queries that the customers or the potential customer. The right or effective management of this interaction can be used by the restaurant management to reduce the customer dissatisfaction as the customer will be already made aware of the different aspects of the UK restaurant. Although, the unethical use of this interaction to give inaccurate information to the customers can cost the UK restaurant heavily.

Food Newsfeed, (2019) stated that there is also another side to this use of social media where the contents are put by the UK restaurant themselves to be viewed or used by the consumers, and this mainly is the part of the customer engagement or social media marketing activities of the restaurant. This has the type of marketing has increased the scope of social marketing significantly as the UK restaurant can get high benefit from this type of marketing in a comparatively low cost than other ways of marketing. Some of the ways by which social marketing is used are constant updates about any new positive thing happening in the restaurant, taking positive reviews of individuals who can be a significant influencer for the business and posting it online with that person permission. Also, the services of the restaurant are related to any trending topic of social media and tagging the restaurant in it. Besides, some restaurants also use the social marketing to create an online contest or event where the products of the restaurant are highly promoted, and the winner or the participants of the event are given a coupon as a gift or price of the winning the contest. This is a win-win situation for the restaurant as it helps the business increase its customer base and also decrease the cost of promotion.

Therefore, after evaluating the use of the social media from the above literature, it can be said that the social media has a huge impact on the growth and the success of a restaurant and also helping the restaurant increase its standard of service quality.

Methodology

The research methodology means the methods and techniques that are used by the researchers to reach the solution or findings related to the research questions and objectives. The research methodology is also used to determine other aspects of the research like in what period the research should be concluded, what will be the scope of the research and many more aspects like these.

Research design

The research design of this research study will include the qualitative method for finding the solution to this research. The research philosophy of this research study is interpretivism as the qualitative methods will be used to interpret the opinion of different stakeholders to understand the different viewpoint on the research subject (Thompson and WooCommerce, 2019). Therefore, the data of this research study will of the qualitative data type. Observation and interviews will be used in this research design. The strategies of this research study will include taking structured interview of the three managers of three different restaurants and forming two different focus group having people of different age group and discussion of the research topic among them. The time horizon that will be taken to conduct this research study will be of around ten weeks. Also, the secondary data of this research study will include the review of the literature from different authentic sources related to the research topic, and at least literature of eight different authors will be included in this research method. It will be also be used that all the sources which are used are authentic.

Data collection methods

The data from the structured interview of the three managers will be in the descriptive form, and all the point given by the managers in that interview will be included in the data in summarised ways. The data from the focus group will be collected by observing the main points or facts that are coming out of the focus group discussion related to the research study and also if some point is constantly coming out of that discussion, that fact should be highlighted. The data collection method that will be used in the literature review method will be summarising the finding or opinion of the authors of the different sources that will be used in this section.  

Research ethics

This research will take care of all relevant ethical criteria and requirement to ensure that this research finding can be used in the future research study and the findings of this research study are authentic and valid. Although there are some risks or limitations in this research study which can create some biases in this research study and these limitations are listed below.

• Regional biases can be formed as most of the data will be collected from the nearby areas of the researcher due to time constraint.

• Demographic biases can also form due to taking only two age groups for the focus group method for data collection.

• Some of the areas or aspects are not covered by this research study due to the vast scope of this research topic and different constraint of the study.

• The sample sizes used in this research method are small, and this could create a biased opinion although the researcher will try to make the focus group as diverse as possible.

Timescales and resources

The time that will be taken to collect data from interviewing three managers will be five days in which one day will be kept for each manager and two days extra will be kept for any unforeseen obstacles preventing the interview happening on the determined date. Then two week time will be taken to conduct the two focus group out of which one day will be taken to set the different requirements to qualify for the focus group. Then one week time out of the two weeks will be taken to post an advertisement for the procuring focus group participant and selecting the participant after which two focus groups will be conducted in two separate days. Remaining days has kept as backup for any emergency. Then data will be interpreted, summarised and analysed of the past authentic literature related to this topic in 3 week time. Then the finding from the focus group and interview will be analysed, summarised and recorded in the research study. For more detail about the timescale of this research project, the table below has been given.

Research activities Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10

Collecting different literature related to the research topic from different types of sources

Summarising and analysing the finding and recording in the research study

Fixing the interview date and other detail with the three managers

Conducting the interview

Summarising and analysing the finding of the interviews and recording in the research study

Setting different criteria for qualifying for the focus group

Placing the advertisement for the focus group

Selecting the participant in the focus group

Conducting the focus group discussion

Summarising and analysing the finding of the focus group and recording in the research study

Reviewing and updating the finding of the research study

Backup time taken for any unpredicted drawbacks

Submission of the research project

The resources that will need that will be needed in this research study are the cost of each participant of the focus group for participating in the focus group. Each participant will be given $8, and there will be eight members in each focus group. Then the travelling cost for this research will be about $50. The rent for the space conducting the focus group will be about $75. The food and beverages of the focus group member will be around $20.the cost advertisement for the focus group participants will be around $15. There are also will be need of two assistants that will help the researcher conduct the focus group. Besides, the indirect resources that are involved in conducting this research will be around six months of the researcher.
 
Conclusion

In this research proposal, the different aspects of the research study had been discussed. There is an introduction in this research proposal where the significance of this research study had been properly explained. Then the research questions and research objectives had been identified. Then there is the literature review section where the different past literature from different authentic sources of different authors had been used to summarise the different finding related to the research topic. There research methodology consisting of research design and data collection method description had been given. Then the research ethics section had been include where the biases that can remain in the finding of the research study had been identified. In the end, the timescale of the research study and resource needed to conduct the research study had been stated.

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