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The restaurant is an independent family business running in the form of casual dining. Customers sit around the table and order foods from the menu. Cleaning, setting up and serving, that make Yummy Cafe even more special comparing to other restaurants that serve light Chinese cuisine. Restaurants like Big Bowl noodle house, Uncle Chen's and Panda Express doesn't offer much spicy food, and they're all fast casual restaurants, which means there's not much customer service. The most important thing is their Chinese dishes are mostly americanized, the dishes became sweet and sticky, though supposedly spicy, as they worked to expand the market for American students. At the beginning of the establishment of Yummy Cafe, Chinese students were very excited about it, because we would finally have a chance to taste traditional sichuan food, and they are the person who help promote the restaurant on social media and recommend friends to go there.

We know that there are many popular Chinese restaurants in the urban area. While their tastes and service levels vary, they are all strong contenders for Yummy Cafe. The most popular restaurant which has the same reputation as Yummy Cafe is little sichuan. It have their own location advantage because it is located in W college Ave, which is very convenient for students to walk through and it’s near the starbucks, a popular place chinese students want to go. It also offers customers parking outside the restaurant. Besides, these dishes are served quickly, considering the standard of casual restaurants. For their services, front desk staff performed well even during peak hours. While the customer is sitting, the waiter will immediately ask for the needs of water or tea and offer a menu, the guest won't be waiting for long time. That makes Little Szechuan a tough compeditor.

For the flavors, the Little Szechuan can also be considered as a competitor. Firstly, the menu provides a variety of choice for customers and it contains diferrent spicy dishes and diferrent soups. Although the environment is not as good as Yummy Cafe, it provides a plenty of seats and students do not have to wait for seats. Secondly, each dishes are large enough which makes it a high cost performance choice for students.

In the past, Chinese restaurants have tried to accept more customers by adapting to the culture, which is an environment formed by mostly Americans. Therefore, Chinese restaurants tend to give traditional Chinese food a western twist. As a result, Chinese restaurants are more acceptable to americans. However, as the student population becomes more diverse and American students start looking for traditional Chinese food, we are always asked to recommend “real” Chinese food.

The most critical customer gap we identified for Yummy Cafe would be gap 3: The service performance gap. The most noticeable problem is the long waiting time. There are numerous complaints saying, “It took me half an hours for waiting, especially lunch, because Yummy Café provides the fast food meal combo at lunch time, so too many chinese students are going there fort lunch, if we want to order the dish, not eat fast food combo, we need to wait for a long time”, and “waited at the entrance for a long time until I get seated.” These indicated a failure to match supply and demand, as well as shortcomings in human resource policy. The restaurant is clearly understaffed. Even at the busiest times, there are usually only three employees on duty, including the owner himself. There may be ineffective recruitment. Yymmy Cafe also has problems with service agencies. According to the customer, somtimes the food quality is poor. Various reviews have said the quality of the food is unacceptable, while others have described it as “the best Chinese food at the national university”.

To sum up, our marketing plan aims to improve the image and service of Yummy cafe. Since our only source of information at the moment is reviews from Yelp and Google, we would like to learn more about customers' concerns about the Yummy cafe service. With a more comprehensive review, we will be able to develop a more effective management system that improves the organizational structure of the company and results in better service performance.

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