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Small
Business, BIG Marketing™
by Will
Dylan ©2007
Two
“Fast-Food” Marketing Lessons for your Small
Business
There
are two lessons in the examples above that have a HUGE
impact on the marketing choices you make as a small
business owner.
1)
Take a lesson from McDonald’s – you can’t please
everybody so don’t bother trying.
Despite
their incredible growth over the years, McDonald’s has
pretty much stuck to their original game plan. Get
families and children into the store, keep the menu
short in order to prepare meals quickly, offer food at
the lowest possible price, and so on.
Sure they
have made attempts to go after health conscious
customers by offering more low-fat menu items as the
market for healthier food has grown, and they’ve had
some success doing so. But in the immediate future,
these tactics can’t replace the dollars they earn from
their core customers – families and the youth market.
Even the
mighty McDonald’s realizes that you need to take up a
market position to have any chance of succeeding in
business today. You must stand for something and make it
known to the market what you stand for, or else you will
easily be forgotten.
2)
Take a lesson from Wendy’s and Burger King – find
market positions that aren’t taken…and take them!
Just because
some other company is dominant in your market doesn’t
mean that there aren’t some great marketing
opportunities for your business. BK is using their
marketing and advertising to win back young males and
teens from McDonald’s. Wendy’s is using a healthier
more flexible menu to target health conscious adults who
want the convenience of fast food.
In both
cases, they are still in the fast food business, but
they are focused on a particular part of the market.
Their “market position” is designed to establish
them as an alternative to the leader, McDonald’s.
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