Assesing effectiveness of Zomato gold memership plan

Abstract

Zomato Gold is a product introduced by Zomato, a food search and delivery platform operating. In the year 2017, to capture the developing dine out market in India this exclusive paid membership programme was released. Zomato Gold users are offered either a complimentary dish (1+1) or complimentary drinks (2+2) whenever they visit a partner restaurant or a bar. Zomato quotes, “Users get the benefit of complimentary items with their meal. Restaurants get the offer a premium service to their patrons at little/no extra food cost”. Recently, Zomato has upgraded its Gold platform to cater to delivery customers. Now, users can avail 1+1 discount on food items on delivery through Zomato app. The highest priced item will be billed, while the discount is capped at a maximum of Rs.300. It's interesting to note that this product has been launched amidst the recent controversy regarding Gold voiced by partner restaurants against heavy discounting offered by aggregators. The aim of this project is to understand the effectiveness of the new Zomato Gold membership which now includes both delivery as well as dining privileges over the previous Gold membership which had unlimited unlocks and no dining privileges. Secondary research and In-depth interviews were done to understand customer preferences. Questionnaire was developed based on these inputs. The survey was sent to students of the IIMB community and family/friends. Using factor analysis we tried to reduce the number of attributes to a smaller set of variables. Regression testing was done on these variables to understand if there is any significant difference on purchase intention of customers in the old and new Gold membership. Our analysis shows that the new Zomato Gold model is more effective than the previous membership model