Question

Marketing Research Interpretation Scenario Wendy's is a restaurant chain that is immersed in the Fast Food Restaurant Industry where we can find companies that compete in different segments, being Burger, Sandwich, Snacks/Beverages, Chicken and Pizza the most important. Each restaurant is in competition with other food service operations within some geographical area. These quick service restaurants are highly competitive and include well established competitors. Quality, variety, convenience, price and value perception of food products offered, locations, quality and speed of service are the competitive key advantages (10-K Annual Report, 2010) By system wide sales, Wendy's Company is the number 4 in the US, behind McDonalds, Subway and Burger King. For the year 2010, it has almost 6.000 restaurants (owns or franchises) and approximately S 8.3 billion in sales. Analyzing the information from the last 5 years we can conclude that Wendy's is losing Market Share in the US Fast Food Restaurant Industry What are four variables Wendy's marketing team might be 2. Using the variables identified above, what are three hypotheses the marketing team might want to look into to determine a marketing course of action to increase market share? If all of your hypotheses are supported, what actions would you, as a marketer, give to management? Write at least 3 sentences detailing each action-one action per hypothesis.

Answer 1

Four variables marketing team of Wendy are interested in are:

• Positioning of products and their impact
• Pricing strategies used by Wendy compared to competitors
• Promotional activities of Wendy and how they would rate compared to its competitors
• Distribution channels and distribution strategies implemented

Three hypotheses the marketing team want to look upon are:

• Wendy’s pricing strategy does not have any direct impact on the sales performance
• Wendy’s promotional activities had not much impact on their sales performance
• Distribution channels and strategies implemented by Wendy did not have impact on sales performance

Marketing advise to management:

Pricing strategy hypothesis: I would like to suggest management to recheck the pricing strategy implemented by Wendy. The primary objective is to compare the pricing strategy of Wendy with its competitors and go for competitive pricing technique if it is not implemented as of now. The best pricing strategy is to go aggressively and shift to competitive pricing to increase its market share.

Promotional activity hypotheses: I would like to suggest management to perform SWOT analysis on all the promotional activities implemented by Wendy. I would advise them to formulate an innovative promotional campaign which actively increase the customer base for the company. Before formulating a campaign, I would like to suggest Wendy to analyse various promotional campaigns of other top 3 players and design the best campaign to increase their market share.

Distribution strategy hypothesis: I would like to suggest management to identify the potential distributors and how effective are their performance. I would also suggest to provide some incentives to distributors, franchise owners, channel partners based on their performance which would encourage them to improve the sales of Wendy

Apart from these, I would also advise management to recheck their positioning and modify it to target their customers in a more effective manner.