With the announcement from the food industry research firm Technomic that Wendy's had edged out Burger King as the country's No.2 hamburger chain last week, the article analyzed how Wendy's actions facing the changing market taste lead it to the current position and pointed out the trend for fast-food restaurants to grow in the future. Actually, with the fierce competition within and outside of the fast-food chain, similar actions are taken in most of the fast-food restaurants, like McDonald's, Taco Bells, and White Castles, to generate more sales. The most obvious one is to upgrade the menus and to be creative in product offerings. The sales for McDonald’s increased significantly after they shift their focus back to providing high quality and nutritious meals instead of focusing on expansion blindly. Wendy’s, in the same fashion, placing a sharp focus on ingredients to provide more higher-end and better quality meals. For example, they offer fresh strawberries and almonds on their salads, French fries with sea salt, Bacon Portabella Black Label Burger with mushroom sauce, etc. It gives the customers more options to choose from, especially as people having increasingly desire for healthy and nutrition balanced meals nowadays. A variety of options also increase people’s incentive to try things out, especially with attractive advertising and promotions. Placing more investment on the food menu is a prevalent strategy for most fast-food restaurants today. It is a good practice to take, but one can still be backfired if the company sacrifices quality or specialty to pursue variety, or fail to implement efficient procedure to make it cost efficient at the same time. It is good for the customers to have a variety of options. Yet, the restaurant still needs to figure out what it is special at in order to make its offerings special to the customers. Similar as the way companies testing out their value of existing by asking themselves what would happen to the world if this company disappears, the restaurant should think about what people come to their place for. If people go to somewhere else, will they get the same value of product or experience? If they can or get even better experience, then maybe it is time to rethink the current offering. People go to a certain restaurant, expecting certain kinds of food. One may not go to Steakhouse for orange chicken, or go to Korean restaurants for hamburgers. With a fast-food restaurant, people expect to get quick service with easy-prepared meals. Within that realm, it is more effective to increase comparative advantage by having several five star products that people cannot find anywhere else instead of providing all kinds with an average or low quality.
The variety of product offering is not the single most important factor for people to choose one fast-food restaurant over another, but the quality is. An example for this would be the In-N-Out Burger that has great popularity in the west coast. Oppose to most fast-food restaurants’ practices that focus on increasing variety, In-N-Out only have limited offerings, but their product is quality assured. Every ingredient they use to produce their burgers is fresh- they don’t even have freezer system to keep the leftovers. People can see how they make French fries out of freshly cut potatoes, and they use fresh beef and buns to make the burgers. Their motto is to “keep it real simple, do one thing and do it the best you can.” Even during recession, they still took in an estimated of $420 million in revenues in 2008. People visit In-N-Out for healthy and quality burgers with fair price, that’s it. Their business model is simple, yet effective and profitable. Reference:
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar