From the left Ooi Xiang Wen, Lim Sze Xian, Loh Shen Li, Phan Yi Lin, Khor Zi Yan, and Yeong Wei Hao.
Petit Mary Patisserie is a cafe that served desserts and Western food which is suitable for people to enjoy during breakfast, brunch and also high tea. Petit Mary Patisserie started their operation in February of 2015. It is located near AEON Ipoh Garden. Before the opening of Petit Mary, the owner has his own Purple Moon Valley Bakery at Bercham. Besides, he told us he was selling cakes and breads at morning market before he owned his bakery.
Petit Mary is an inspiration from the owner where he starts to fulfil it by opening a theme café called Petit Mary Patisserie. It is a European style cafe with tiffany blue paintings for their buildings. The cafe is renovated through a double storey terrace house into a cafe. Petit Mary is named after a small girl who named Mary with her growing diary and her dreams to be accomplish when she grow up.
Feedback by the existing customers
Most of the customers of Petit Mary are very satisfied with their products and services provided. One of the customers, Susan Hoh that has tried the food in Petit Mary commented that service is good and the food provided is nice which is a great place for get together with friends and she love it so much. Besides, a customer name Jasmine commented that the coffee and cakes are really good. The furniture is very beautiful. She really enjoys herself there. Some of feedback from customers is that Petit Mary Patisseries has provides fantastic services, nice pastry and cakes. It is really a cozy place to enjoy and relax. Moreover, a customer name Sky Lee commented that Petit Mary is a cozy and nice lunch spot by serving variety of nice pastries and offer all day breakfast.
Furthermore, we are also the customers of Petit Mary and have tried the desserts there. My group members commented that the environment of Petit Mary is really relaxing and enjoyable and able to provide customers the feeling of home. In addition, the desserts served by Petit Mary are also nice with their own unique and cute designed. The services provided by Petit Mary are also in well and polite manner.
Furthermore, we are also the customers of Petit Mary and have tried the desserts there. My group members commented that the environment of Petit Mary is really relaxing and enjoyable and able to provide customers the feeling of home. In addition, the desserts served by Petit Mary are also nice with their own unique and cute designed. The services provided by Petit Mary are also in well and polite manner.
Value Proposition of Petit Mary Patisserie
Inside the cafe, they have different sitting areas for customer to choose from. They provided 3 different areas located at ground floor and first floor. Ground floor sitting area is spacious and like a family dining room style whereas upstairs sitting area is divided into 2 sections, one is an open area of seating and another is a door to go through the seating area like a secret garden feel after you walk in. The decoration of their cafe is using Mary, a little girl as the icon of Petit Mary. Pictures, drawings and the dreams of Mary can been seen easily in the cafe.
The value proposition that is able to attract customer to revisit Petit Mary is their quality of their foods and the hospitality from their workers. Before customers enter into the cafe, they have worker who open the door for them and greet them. When customer is ordering their foods, they will recommend their best selling to customers. Their customer service makes customer feel that they are treating them as their own family members.
The food quality of Petit Mary is worth the money the customer pay for. They are using the freshest ingredients to produce their food. For their bread and pastry, they are using the natural yeast baking method which is using natural yeast to produce them. It does not contain any preservatives or unknown ingredients to bake their cake. The Petit Mary owner, Mr Phan said that in Malaysia there are less than five bakeries that are using natural yeast baking method to sell their products. Petit Mary bread and pastry is freshly baked from the oven daily and they do not sell their leftover bread the next day. They believe by providing daily baked fresh bread and pastry they will be able to gain the customer loyalty toward their products.
The food quality of Petit Mary is worth the money the customer pay for. They are using the freshest ingredients to produce their food. For their bread and pastry, they are using the natural yeast baking method which is using natural yeast to produce them. It does not contain any preservatives or unknown ingredients to bake their cake. The Petit Mary owner, Mr Phan said that in Malaysia there are less than five bakeries that are using natural yeast baking method to sell their products. Petit Mary bread and pastry is freshly baked from the oven daily and they do not sell their leftover bread the next day. They believe by providing daily baked fresh bread and pastry they will be able to gain the customer loyalty toward their products.
The decorations attract lots of customer to come and visit and taste their desserts. They have portrait that hang on the wall, while the calm and peaceful environment attract customer to gather with their friends to spend wonderful moments together. Customer can take picture with cafe theme decoration and enjoy tea and desserts there.
One of the famous desserts that served by Petit Mary is Belgium Chocolate. It is designed in a bear shape. It contains 58% of Belgium chocolate and taste smooth, fragrant and sweet. This Belgium Chocolate sells at the price of RM12 each.
The dessert which designed in shape of a cute present or gift namely Berry Berry. It ribbon is made of white chocolate and with berry favor inside. It does not taste too sweet so it suit customers who does not like too sweet dessert. Most of the ladies customers love this dessert so much. The Berry Berry sells in price of RM13.50 each.
If you have a sweet tooth, then you’re in luck because Petit Mary meticulously decorated dainty morsels of sweet desserts like macarons. Macarons is one of the famous desserts from French. These macarons are in chocolate mint, yam and pistachio nuts favors. Each of the macarons is designed with different colors to attract customers. Each macaron sells at price of RM4.80.
Another dessert serve by Petit Mary namely Strawberry Yogurt is a three combination favours dessert with yogurt, strawberry and chocolate. It has designed and made of strawberry and chocolate as topping. It tastes nice with this combination of favours. It tastes smooth when eat into mouth. Price for this strawberry yogurt is RM12.
Polo Puff is considered as one of the special bread served by Petit Mary. Polo Puff is one of the famous foods from Hong Kong. Petit Mary has made the polo puff in a smaller size with crunchy layer and cream inside the puff. This polo puff sells at price RM1.50 each.
(A) Your group opinion and why you selected these places.
(B) Classification of e-commerce by the nature of the transactions or interactions
Petit Mary is a brick-and-mortar organization which is an old-economy organization that performs their business offline and sells their merchandise in a physical store. Petit Mary is a café that had transactions offline by offering a variety of food and beverages such as their own design desserts, bread, rice, pasta, spaghetti, coffee, tea, fruit juice and etc where the customers can visit the shop and have face-to-face business transactions. Petit Mary had face-to-face communication and interaction with their customers in order to serve their customers in a well manner. This will create a good customer relationship and have positive word of mouth towards Petit Mary by enhancing the communication and interaction between workers and customers.
Apart from that, Petit Mary is using the Business to Consumer (B2C) models to operate and run their business. B2C is a business or transactions that conducted directly between a business and consumers who are the end-users of the products or services. Petit Mary provides a variety of food and beverages for customers to enjoy which fulfil the customers’ needs and wants. The workers will directly serve their customers such as make order, place customers to sit, and serve customers with their order. Besides, the workers will also introduce and recommend their famous food and drinks to the customers for them to have a try.
(C) Business Model
The business model applied by Petit Mary is viral marketing. Viral marketing (viral advertising) refers to electronic word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) in which customers promote a product or service by telling others about it. This can be done by e-mails, text messaging, conversation facilitate in chat rooms, via instant messaging, messages post in newsgroups, and in electronic consumer forums. Viral marketing has also been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” and “leveraging the media,” in the Internet. It is especially popular in social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and more. Besides, having people forward messages to friends, asking them to “check out this product,” is an example of viral marketing. Other than that, viral marketing describe any business strategy that rely individuals to pass on the marketing message or products information to others by using the social networks.
Furthermore, viral marketing creates the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence when message is passing from one to another like virus. Viral marketing has taken the advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands and millions of people. Therefore, viral marketing can be done more effectively with those internet platforms. For instances, Petit Mary customers are allow to give feedback on Facebook. If there is a good feedback from customers, the review will spread out and positive response will be received by Petit Mary.
Furthermore, viral marketing creates the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence when message is passing from one to another like virus. Viral marketing has taken the advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands and millions of people. Therefore, viral marketing can be done more effectively with those internet platforms. For instances, Petit Mary customers are allow to give feedback on Facebook. If there is a good feedback from customers, the review will spread out and positive response will be received by Petit Mary.
There are few advantages that can be enjoyed by Petit Mary through the applied viral marketing business model. Petit Mary can save cost through viral marketing which required very low cost as compared to old advertisement method such as newspaper, brochure and television which is more expensive. Viral marketing is more preferred because anyone who sees it will pass along to their peers and families hence are able to increase the reach to public as compare with other business models. Petit Mary promotes their business through Facebook and word-of-mouth from customers to customers.
Besides that, publicity and public awareness about the foods, products, or services of Petit Mary can be achieved by using viral marketing business model. A company will get higher exposure and will more likely to generate a steady flow of traffic from potential customers. The potential customers for Petit Mary are mostly teenagers, ladies, officer worker, and couple for dating.
In addition, the reputation of Petit Mary will increase through viral marketing when customers recommend and share the food to their friends through Facebook. Therefore, people will have intention to visit the shop to try out the food which had been recommended. Those people who have tried the food will recommend again to other friends and continuously creating buzz about the food. The credibility of Petit Mary will be increase at the same time with good review. The reviews from Petit Mary Facebook page showed that most of the customers comment 4 stars to 5 stars for Petit Mary which average is 4.4 out of 5 stars. These shown that their customers are giving positive review in average. The below picture shown that the review of customers for Petit Mary.
Apart from that, it is easy for targeting customers. According to Knowles and Castillo (2010) it has been noted that “since the concept of viral marketing involves passing on a message from a user to another person, most likely the user will pass it to a person whom he knows will be interested in it”. Viral messages can be devised by taking into account specifications of the target customer segment and thus they can be effectively spread within the same group through online channels. Besides that, customers will search for the information they are interested in with the set-up Facebook page and at the same time it will attract those potential customers to visit for Petit Mary Patisserie.
(D) Its basic approach used in marketing and advertising
Marketing is not only much broader than selling. It is not a specialized activity at all because it encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result that is from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must therefore permeate all areas of the enterprise. (Philip Kotler, 2015).
Advertising is one of the promotional methods to attract customer come to visit their cafe. Petit Mary has limited advertising method. They are using online marketing as their marketing strategies to advertise their foods and beverages available.
Digital marketing use by Petit Mary is social networking like Facebook, TripAdvisor and Offpeak.my.
Facebook
Currently, Facebook users are around 1.44 billion which has a good connection to let people to promote their products and services in social media. Creating a Facebook page does not incur cost and it is reachable around the world. Petit Mary has their own Facebook page to promote their desserts and foods. In their Facebook page, is clearly written operating hours, location attached with Maps, contact number and the review from customer.
Source : Petit Mary Patisserie. (n.d.). Retrieved March 3, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/pages/Petit-Mary-Patisserie/829771733735722?fref=ts
Offpeak.my
Offpeak.my is an online platform that helps diners save money and time when booking great restaurant online. All restaurants have their peak and off peak hours with empty tables available. In this website, it works with the restaurant to provide special discount across various operating hours and creating a win-win situation for customer and the restaurant or cafe owner. Customer just need to book their reservation online and go to the restaurant during the designated date and time to enjoy meal at a discount without buying coupon nor pay in advance. Advertising through Offpeak.my does not require any fees where they gladly feature restaurant and cafe on their website.
Source: Teh, T. S. (n.d.). Petit Mary Patisserie (Ipoh), Bakery, UP to 15% OFF. Retrieved March 8, 2016, from http://offpeak.my/restaurant/1415/petit-mary-patisserie-ipoh
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is the world's largest travel site that enable travelers to plan and book the perfect trip. They have more than 60 million member and over 170 million review in the website. It creates community around the world and gathers review and opinion from customer’s accommodation, attractions, cafe and restaurants. They will recommend cafes and restaurant which is near to customer's accommodations. Petit Mary is recommended by TripAdvisor in their website when customer starts to search for cafe available in Ipoh.
Source: Yeoh, M. (n.d.). Restaurant Reviews, Phone Number & Photos. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from https://www.tripadvisor.com.my/Restaurant_Review-g298298-d9755527-Reviews-Petit_Mary_Patisserie-Ipoh_Kinta_District_Perak.html
(E) Recommendations to improve businesses through e-commerce
In the crowded world of e-commerce, every outlet strike hard in order to compete with other competitors. There are weaknesses that Petit Mary needs to concern and make improvements in order to succeed their business in a competitive e-commerce world.
First of all, we find out that Petit Mary has less marketing strategic for their advertising. They actually have a number of free social media and it is a waste if a company cannot fully utilize all the resources. Petit Mary should create personal website, blog and mobile apps like Wechat in order to advertise their latest products to customers. Besides, Petit Mary can upload their menu, foods and beverage photos, sales and promotion to public. The information would drive people to the website which engages visitors and among those visitors it might include the potential customers.
Besides that, Petit Mary should be more sociable and interact with their customers in order to maintain a good relationship. Petit Mary can communicate with their customers through social media. We found out that the Facebook page of Petit Mary less update about their latest products or introduce something new even the promotion. Hence, Petit Mary should keep updating about their products and services all the time through their Facebook page. For instances, promotion for the month or introducing new dessert for customers to enjoy. Additionally, Petit Mary can post some questions or polls asking opinion of their valued or loyalty customers. Petit Mary may get information about what their customer’s lifestyle, what they interested and what is their favourite dessert or dishes through comment. For example, Petit Mary should advertise their products or services in term of personal interest stories like story-line advertisements. Customers or visitors would prefer a source of lifestyle contain in the Facebook page.
Other than that, create appealing images of products, services and even the environment in the Petit Mary personal website is also an important element to attract people attention. The beautiful photo will incite people to look through the content and they will decide to view the website if it is interesting in order to know more about Petit Mary. Besides that, the photography used in the website must have consistent look that help make the experience of browsing and shop more enjoyable. An easy navigate webpage make visitor easy to browse. Visitor can look for what they need or want for and the information about certain food and beverage of Petit Mary. Moreover, the personal website of Petit Mary should contain online ordering system and online booking system to allow customers to make their order or reservation. Thus, this helps to increase customers’ satisfaction towards Petit Mary.
Petit Mary Patisserie
Address: 85, Jalan Langsat, Taman Teh Teng Seng, 31400 Ipoh, Perak
Business Hour: Monday to Sunday (9am - 8pm)
Tel No : 05-5471328
Longitude and Latitude: 4.6157503, 101.1171673
Longitude and Latitude: 4.6157503, 101.1171673