Tgi Fridays Marketing Case Study Report

London School of Business & Finance

Module: Marketing and the Business Environment

Towards a global, holistic marketing future:

 TGI Fridays

[pic 1]

Sidorova Natalia Iosifovna

July 2018

Table of contents

Introduction                                                                        3

Holistic marketing                                                                6

Factors in the global environment                                                9

Strategic marketing                                                                11

Recommendations                                                                13

References                                                                                 15

Introduction

The main character of this review is a world-wide restaurant chain TGI Fridays. The first restaurant was found in New York in 1965. Today there are 437 TGI Fridays restaurants in the USA. The chain is spread over 55 countries. The most of African countries still don’t have any TGI Fridays while almost all American (both Northern and Southern) countries have more than one. When the first restaurant opened  in Moscow (Russian Federation) in 1997 I used an opportunity to work there. So it’s even more inspiring to investigate its marketing position as time passes.

According to Kotler’s categories of Service Mix (Kotler, Keller, 2015) restaurant meals is highly based on experienced qualities but still combining parts of goods and services. Everything matters in the restaurant: both food quality and processes of preparation  and serving meals. That’s why personnel hiring and training together with monitoring of customer satisfaction are cornerstones of any restaurant business. A founder of Outback Steakhouse considers people the first and the main source of success (Sullivan, 2005) bearing in mind several categories of them – suppliers, partners, customers, employees and community. The same idea is promoted at TGI Frodais. In any case marketing approach insists on seeing organization as a complex of communications towards delivering value to customers (Golub, Henry, Forbis, Mehta, Lanning, Michaels and Ohmae, 2000).

In several figures below we can see that restaurant industry sales are growing from year to year since 1970. TGI Fridays is not the first of market leaders but it can be met as one of the most visited and what is more important – one of the most customer satisfying.

Figure 1 (National restaurant association)

[pic 2]

Figure 2 (Statista.com)

Sales of the leading chain restaurants in the United States in 2017 (in million $)

[pic 3]

Figure 3 (Statista.com)

Branded restaurant consumers have dined at most in the last 12 months in the United Kingdom (UK) as of 2016

[pic 4]

Figure 4 (Statista.com)

American customer satisfaction index scores for leading full-service restaurants in the United States in 2017

[pic 5]

Through the analysis of these figures and of some online resources as pissedconsumer.com we can understand the main TGI Fridays competitors in the USA are: Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse, Applebee’s, Steak N Shake, Bob Evans Restaurants, Dennys Restaurant, Cheddars and some others serving drinks, burgers and a variety of casual dining food in American, Mexican, Australian style which are accepted as “domestic” in the U.S.A. In the foreign markets situation is a bit different – TGI Fridays comes there as a representative of so called “national cuisine” restaurant. That’s why we’ll take socio-cultural aspect as one of the most important while speaking about global environment forces.

TGI Fridays is a casual guest-oriented restaurant: one of those who say that desire of a guest is a law for them. To be honest – the core value of all the restaurants is to fulfill a wish of their customers to be pleasantly served with a high quality food.  

Holistic marketing

Restaurant business is highly socialized sphere of  business – it’s not possible to imagine restaurant without direct communication between people. So we’ll adopt social definition of marketing as a societal process  by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating, offering and freely exchanging products and services of value with others (Kotler, Keller, 2015).

Both goods and services are marketed in the restaurant. People usually don’t go to the restaurant every day and restaurants have to deal with irregular demand which is rising on holidays and declining during summer vacations period in cities. TGI Fridays restaurants are full on Friday eves and Saturdays thanks to the brand name (Thank Goodness it is Friday) as they are targeted to serve young working singles who can appreciate the end of working week. The other days restaurant filling is a work of marketers.

Speaking about five types of needs that can be met by TGI Fridays there is a stated need for simple and tasty food, real need for quick and inexpensive dinner, unstated need comes as expectation of good service from waiters and cooks, delight need is presented in the form of looking for a good company in the restaurant and a secret need comes as a hope to find something new and special during the time of dinner. But real value is created by mix of service, product quality and price. Will the customer be satisfied by served dish or not depend on every part of value chain.

According to McKinsey (2000) the value delivery system includes not only product design and process design as a part of product creation process; procurement, manufacturing and service as “making product” steps; marketing research, advertising, promotion, price, sales and distribution; but also choice of value by understanding value drivers, target selection and defining price and benefits with the following steps to provide chosen value by product and process design, procurement, manufacturing, distribution, service and price and at last communicating value to customers.