Italian Focaccia vs Mc Donald's. Who won?

This story began in a city of 65,000 residents in the south of Italy called Altamura.
This city is also known as  "The city of bread", due to the quality of the bread that bakers make every day fresh, following an ancient recipe.

In 2001 Mc Donald's decided to open a fast food in there, but the company did not consider the cultural aspect that characterized this place.

At the very beginning people saw the fast food as a news and they tried it, some loved it and others hated it. Nevertheless the income did not match the expectations.
Suddenly a small bakery opened next to the Mc Donald's. Traditions were face to face with modernity and in less than two years the fast food was closed. A small bakery won against a global company!

People prefered the traditional "focaccia" to the American burgers. The company did not realised that, somehow, these people were attached to their traditions: they eat hand made and fresh food every day and the idea of eating something different was considered unhealthy.

At the end, the moral of this story is that it is important to understand the culture of the place where you are going if you want  to introduce a new product in a new market. It is always suggested to carry out a marketing research, in order to have a deep awareness of your future consumers.

This story will not be the latest news about marketing, but it is still current. It helps to learn from previous mistakes and do not make them again.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Social Media for BtoB

We all know that social media marketing is becoming always more important for companies, but what happen if your company is not a BtoC but a BtoB? are social media still useful for your company? Generally speaking yes, they help you build a strong brand awareness and ease the hiring process, because if you are looking for candidates more people know your company and more possibilities you have to find the resource you are looking for. On the other hand, wise is to use the right social networks, for instance if you sell software it could be useless to have a Pinterest or Instagram profile because actually you have no products to take a picture of (or maybe you can take a pic of their GUI?). What you can use to promote your business, instead, is LinkedIn which gives you the possibility to create ads based on your target market and target only Seniors that can be your potential customers. Indeed, it's not easy to be a Social media Manager for BtoB but not impossible with money t
Read more

New Coca Cola's drops of happiness

Image
If in 1988 Bobby McFerring spread the happiness in the world with the song "Don't worry be happy"- and it worked well, because still everybody sings his song- nowadays Coca Cola is taking his place. The new Coca Cola campaign aims to bring happiness and to associate the brand with this feeling. Coca Cola always used Emotional Marketing in order to arouse positive  feelings in the customers when they see the brand's logo. Nevertheless, in this case the company overtake the previous marketing campaigns with a new powerful guerrilla and ambient strategy. In fact, focus of the new campaign is to bring some green, colour and happiness in our grey cities and ordinary life. Watch the video and let the happiness in!!!
Read more

From next Summer More advertising on Facebook.

Image
In order to increase the income Facebook decided to boosts video advertising. In fact, latest news say that in the next months there will be a video advertising every-time you open Facebook. It is well known that Facebook is becoming the best advertising platform, because it can reach different target markets all over the world. However, it has to be said that the social network is loosing members (around 10 million in the last year) especially for what concern UK, where in the last year 1 million of members decided to delete their accounts. On the other hand, it is true that the number of members from developing countries  is increasing. Nevertheless, Facebook decided to aim at companies which want to advertise their products and increase their profits.  Statistics show that in US companies spend 4 billions of dollars for video advertising on social media, and the forecasts are that next year this data will increase of 41%. In light of this, Zucherberg decided to make his
Read more