Historically…Quick serve restaurants sold burgers, fries and soda. Fast food chicken chains offered 10 ways to order your chicken, and coffee houses sold only coffee and baked goods.
Currently…McDonalds is touting Filet-O-Fish and McCafés. Burger King is selling veggie burgers and garden salads. KFC is marketing mac and cheese. Wendy’s offers Frosty-cino’s, chili and fish. Starbucks expanded with selling CD’s and Tazo teas. Dunkin Donuts is hawking Tropicana Coolatta’s and flatbread sandwiches. Chick Fil A’s breakfast menu includes a sausage breakfast burrito. Papa Johns now has chicken wings.
Traditionally, product lines were clearly defined and the associated advertising was concise and usually predictable. Advertising reflected the basics…quality of ingredients, the family experience, pricing, value, fast service, and sometimes promotional tie-ins like Spider-Man toys or “Star Wars” glasses.
Over the past 20 years, an ad agency’s research department compiled meaningful data for future ad campaigns. They needed to understand the competitors marketing activities. They needed to know where competitors were focusing their creative, media expenditures, spend by message and product, geography, media mix and weight, and be able to decipher specific messaging. The research was fairly straight forward since the playing field was relatively narrow. While creatively ads have always been unique, the major quick service restaurants (QSR) had similar messages, product lines, price points and targets. And that was then.
Fast forward to 2009, QSR companies that were generating the majority of their revenues from selling burgers have now expanded into multiple product purveyors. Some chains even sell frozen branded meals in supermarkets. Chick Fil A introduced three new breakfast meals this year and expanded into western markets.
QSRs previously known for no-frills and efficiency have jumped on the improved service bandwagon. Chipotle employs greeters and is marketing an “interactive experience” initially targeting upscale zip codes.
In some markets by law, QSRs need to display calorie counts. How can you effectively display a 1000 calorie meal without turning off some customers?
Remember trans fat? In 2007, removing it from the menu was the hot topic for the industry. Two years later, is it still important, is it part of current ad messaging?
Complicating matters more, marketers and advertisers today are faced with intense scrutiny and belt tightening. They are clamoring for better ways to measure return on investment. How can marketers be sure that strategies are launched wisely, efficiently and competitively? Can they reconcile how they are addressing relevant issues, hot buttons, applying advertising focus in the right media environments, in the right proportions to the desired consumer targets?
The lines are blurred…the QSRs now also compete for the same customers as the coffee, pizza and chicken chains. They are vying for supermarket dollars from upscale or frozen fast foods with products like, Tyson’s’ 1 minute meals, Emeril’s servings or Wolfgang Puck Pizzas. The mass marketers like Wal-Mart also target QSR dollars by competing with overlapping product offerings and also align with QSR in-house restaurants.
In the current economy the casual dining restaurants like Chili’s and Applebee’s have expanded their target customer base, adjusted their menu offerings, lowered prices to expand their appeal and market to the same QSR target consumer. And the opposite is also occurring; QSRs are targeting fast casual dining consumers.
And then there’s the media. On YouTube, video is downloaded millions of times showing rats in some Taco Bell NYC locations and Dominoes employees playing grossly with the food during preparation. Does negative PR have an impact on sales? Do we need to consider the impact of PR on advertising?
QSR magazine states that the restaurant industry reached a record of $558 billion in sales in 2008. This represents an increase of 4.4 percent over 2007. Forecasters are predicting casual dining and quick service restaurants to be one of the few major industries that will experience growth in 2009- 2010.
Many industries today have blurred lines when it comes to defining their target customers, product lines and competitors. QSRs are just one example; we could also be talking about many other industries such as retail, cosmetics, travel or pharmaceutical with OTC, DTC and RX.
It’s clear…In today’s marketplace in order to create stand out creative and develop effective media plans for the net result of driving sales, we must create a horizontal, vertical and integrated view of all the necessary data sets. As marketers, we need the capability to slice and dice the research to understand how to best position advertising efforts and to be able to change gears at a moments notice. We need to know holistically where, when and how competitors are advertising in near real time.
The days of waiting months for reports after the fact should be long gone. Agency analysts have the toughest jobs in the industry when you consider the plethora of media options. The industry has gone from zero to 180 degrees in record speed with the combination or integration of traditional and new media, consumer generated media and the impact of unpaid media on paid media. Additionally, there isn’t a currency available today that enables us to value each media as an equivalent measurement.
It’s clear our industry is in dire need of improved, relevant standard measurement business tools to drill down and closely examine all the applicable data in order to achieve the desired outcomes for maximum success.
Leslie Stubin is senior vice president, advertising sales and services at VMS.
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