For fast food, my family of six always chooses Burger King.....this is in spite of the advertising and their much lauded web 2.0 efforts. In fact, evidence is beginning to pop us that like a lot of advertising that's really creative and entertaining, it's not actually helping....
As you can see from this chart provided by AdAge, Burger King is actually declining over the past year at a pretty rapid pace. Why? Well...I would blame the old fashioned focus on a mythical segment. In this case the "18 to 24/male". (same people that Taco Bell is targeting, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., Rally's etc....)
To me, what's broken is the idea that customers can be categorized into giant homogeneous groups and aiming a giant expensive missile at them will generate enough mass to make the Advertising efforts worthwhile and compensate for the incredible cost.
The problem is, you can't win with big attacks any more. My Suburban pulling up to the drive through represents 6 individuals all influenced by something different. The driver is my wife..she like BK because of the ice (go figure?), a couple of the kids like that they have Lemonade and the burgers are better. Dr. Pepper and the chicken fingers wins my older son over.
My point here is that for any business today, you have to sell to individuals, not to segments. For many businesses blogging and focus on organic search marketing is the best way to get in front of potential customers when they have a problem they need solving. Can't say this will help the fast food giants, although there are a couple million searches a month around the term "fast food". Clearly these people are searching for something?
For the vast majority of companies blogs will make a big difference as it realates to both getting found on the search engines, and as a platform to tell lots of stories to lots of different segments.
As you can see from this chart provided by AdAge, Burger King is actually declining over the past year at a pretty rapid pace. Why? Well...I would blame the old fashioned focus on a mythical segment. In this case the "18 to 24/male". (same people that Taco Bell is targeting, Hardee's, Carl's Jr., Rally's etc....)To me, what's broken is the idea that customers can be categorized into giant homogeneous groups and aiming a giant expensive missile at them will generate enough mass to make the Advertising efforts worthwhile and compensate for the incredible cost.
The problem is, you can't win with big attacks any more. My Suburban pulling up to the drive through represents 6 individuals all influenced by something different. The driver is my wife..she like BK because of the ice (go figure?), a couple of the kids like that they have Lemonade and the burgers are better. Dr. Pepper and the chicken fingers wins my older son over.
My point here is that for any business today, you have to sell to individuals, not to segments. For many businesses blogging and focus on organic search marketing is the best way to get in front of potential customers when they have a problem they need solving. Can't say this will help the fast food giants, although there are a couple million searches a month around the term "fast food". Clearly these people are searching for something?
For the vast majority of companies blogs will make a big difference as it realates to both getting found on the search engines, and as a platform to tell lots of stories to lots of different segments.
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