Favorite Brand Paper Essay Examples

Essentially, Foursquare is a social city guide with the ability to recommend you places to visit, based on your activity, the activity of your friends and other users of the service. This application is available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. According to Cuddy (2010), Developers focused on two basic keys: check-in and relevant advisor for travelers. This great talk concerns not only travelers, but the others who appreciate good places. This decision turned out erroneous and the new philosophy of the Foursquare Company is to compete with services like Yelp that provides information about new places to visit. Therefore, is was decided to divide one product in two applications. The Vice president of product Foursquare Noah Weiss argued Foursquare division into two application that only 5 percent of users use the application at the same time for Check-in and finding new places.
With the phone you do “check-in”, that registers visited institutions. It can be absolutely any place, from bars and restaurants, museums and ending supermarkets! Firstly, this highlight was based on games and pleasant rewards, and opportunity to compete with friends. Thus, developers decided to create application “Swarm” that simply shows the whereabouts of friends. The other application conducted the functions of advisor. Subsequently, company could survive this division and safe the valuable relationships with users in spite of critical periods.
I have recently become interested in Foursquare. My team works on own mobile application oriented on the needs of travelers. Thus, we made a large base of our competitors in order to explore the design, monetization, different features of these application. Among them we emphasized Foursquare as the progressive IT solution in this sphere. Surely, the best testing is the real long-term usage. Our team had been travelling locally and abroad for one week.
Foursquare turned out not only the serious competitor, but the useful guide on the journey. This application became the inherent attribute of each travel when I was going on. While other application don’t emphasize many interesting places in my city, Foursquare illustrates the wide range of place reviews. Obviously, I may have not been the target audience or my region in general, but I suppose that is the case.
I have never been interested in loyalty program of Foursquare till went into business. Firstly, this company implicates the well-engineered loyal relationships with customers. There several significant keys really support this point.
According to Frith (2013), Foursquare has teamed up with payment systems to create loyalty programs. Social network Foursquare has signed an agreement with Visa and MasterCard, which will allow US holders of these cards to get discounts at "Check-in" in retail outlets. There was signed a similar agreement with the payment system American Express.
The other positive side illustrates the next. For each location, you can add your own notes. In Foursquare there are two types: “Tips” and “To Do”. “Tips” is the advice to other users on the network, and “To Do” - notes, which you can use for personal use as a reminder.
According to Gallo (2012), Every time you register (for the first time or again) in any place, you are credited points - this is a moment of involving. Points accumulate on your account, encourage various badges and motivate you to actively use the service.
And if you are in some place other more commonly, you get the status of mayor (mayor). Being in the network, you see not only their registration, and your friends but your account. And if one of them is nearby, then you may want to meet and chat. In this environment it has become a major player in service, attracting crowds of loyal users obsessed earn more points.
These features were advised for loyal program, but the division into two mobile application has detruncated some of them because the loyal program had to be divided as well. And developers faced such interesting fact. What application needs better features? As it was mentioned above, company survived critical period, but could save the popularity of useful service for users.
Competition in this field becomes the vital factor of this business because the sphere of travel is explored in details and developers have to occupy the unique niche. TripAdvisor followed the same strategy entering the market.
TripAdvisor - the world's largest travel site and application, with which you can plan and book the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers real travelers tips, you can trust, and a wide range of options for travel planning, as well as convenient links to booking tools that are searching for the best prices on hundreds of websites.
Surely, it is the best service for trip planning, but as for reviews I cannot agree completely. In this case, I cannot help emphasizing the advantage of Foursquare. Because exactly its comments related to places inspire confidence, especially when you see the notes of your friends.
Therefore, we cannot be sure in the future success of Foursquare. Because the division turned out really risky for the developers. Facebook started to share its product - the company has released Camera, Poke, Messenger and Paper. But we cannot compare these services. If the problem of loyalty division is resolved, Foursquare will become competitive among these brands.

References

Cuddy, C., & Glassman, N. (2010). Location-Based Services: Foursquare and Gowalla, Should Libraries Play? Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, 336-343.
Frith, J. (2013). Turning life into a game: Foursquare, gamification, and personal mobility.Mobile Media & Communication, 248-262.
Gallo, C. (2012). The power of Foursquare: 7 innovative ways to get your customers to check in wherever they are. New York: McGraw-Hill.