Marketing

The State of Marketing in the Food Service Industry

by Roy MacNaughton

To put it bluntly, there are too many outlets and too many choices available today. How do you survive in this brutal, hyper-competitive, over-segmented marketplace? The only way to survive is to differentiate your outlet in a preemptive manner. This is extremely difficult since copycats are on every corner; and the public no longer responds to traditional advertising.

To stand out from the crowd of offerings (that often seem like mediocre commodities), an operator must find that unique way to show—and prove—that his is different…and better. And he must be the first to do so, hopefully in a way that can’t be easily copied.

Then he has to make sure that his operations people can keep all the promises that his marketing concept makes to the consumer. It’s a close interdependent relationship between daily operations and marketing.

The old, vertical top-down segmentation marketing model no longer works.

Survival means innovation, which means creating new products and services with much wider markets. Or it means concentrating on a niche, that is more easily defended, and even though small, can be quite profitable.

Roy’s Picks……..

BOOKS

1. A New Brand world, (8 Principles for achieving brand leadership in the 21st century), by Scott Bedbury, Penguin-Putnam, 2002, ISBN # 0-670-03076-7, $24.95

2. The Fall of Advertising (The Rise of P,R.), by Al Ries and Laura Ries, HarperCollins, 2002, ISBN # 0-06-008198-8, $24.95

3. Lateral Marketing (New Techniques for finding Breakthrough Ideas), by Philip Kotler, and Fernando Trias de Bes, Wiley & Sons, 2003, ISBN # 0-471-45516-4, $24.95

4. Interview Tactics (How to Survive the Media without Getting Clobbered!). by Gayl Murphy, self-published by Gayl Murphy Productions (www.Interviewtactics.com ) 2003, ISBN # 0-9721391-3-3, $29.95

5. The Power of Simplicity, (A management guide to cutting through the nonsense and doing things right), by Jack Trout, McGraw-Hill, 1999, ISBN # 0-07-137332-2, $14.95

WEB SITES

1. bcentral.com (special website of small business info from Microsoft)

2. HospitalityNet.org (major site for hospitality information)

3. Hospitality-Marketing.com ( a comprehensive site of marketing resources for the hospitality industry)

4. Gettingtraffic.com ( a comprehensive site of resources for online internet marketers )

Bio:

Roy W. MacNaughton is an operator, marketer and journalist with over thirty years of international hospitality and foodservice experience. He is president of his own firm that specializes in “niche markets,” while writing for several industry on and offline publications. He has taught hospitality courses at the university level in the U.S., Canada and the West Indies. As an employee or consultant, Roy has worked with McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Wendy’s, American Express, Four Seasons Hotels, Hyatt, Hilton International, Johnson & Johnson, H.J.Heinz, John Denver’s Windstar Foundation and the Aspen Highlands Ski company, among others. He is a graduate of Ryerson University’s School of Hospitality in Toronto; and he holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. He may be reached at: roymac@winning.com