The Broadway Café

The Broadway Café: Introduction

The Broadway Café is a family inherited coffee shop located in Burtonsville, Maryland. The business specializes in coffees, teas, a full service bakery, and homemade sandwiches, soups, and salads. It was once a hotspot for many years but for the past five years the business has been declining. It appears as though new and improves methods needed to be in place to keep the business thriving. The system for record keeping consisted of a note pad that tracked inventory along with payroll and coupons. The advertising plan is word-of-mouth only. In order to bring the Café into the 21 Century, quite a few changes need to be made. The business needs to gain a competitive advantage though technology, deploy a wireless network for customers, use CRM to implement marketing campaigns and sales strategies, and develop project management activities for implementing solutions.

Networks, Telecommunications, and Wireless Computing

When considering innovate ideas for marketing strategies, the internet automatically comes to mind. Telecommunication systems enable transmission of data over public or private networks. Businesses can benefit from today’s modern network infrastructures that provide reliable global reach to employees and customers. Businesses around the world are moving to network infrastructure solutions that allow greater choice in wireless, voice-over internet protocol (VoIP), and radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Baltzan & Phillips, 2009).

The Café would like to broaden its horizons and offer mobile coupons (m-coupons) to its mobile customers. M-coupons are instant redemption coupons that customers receive while either walking by the Café (or within a 25 foot radius of the café). The coupon could generate for a dollar off a latte or a 15 percent discount on an order and the customer would receive the offer to his/her cell phone. To redeem the coupon all the customer has to do is present the cell phone so that the...