Commentary

Many leading fast food companies are using analytics about customers and pricing to help gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. When armed with the capabilities and technologies to transform huge amounts of transactional data into actionable insights, a company’s leadership can be confident in decision making to help improve not just the efficiency of day-to-day operations but also the effectiveness of strategic planning. The ‘hats’ a CFO wears The CFO can be the catalyst that typically brings together managers, the chief information officer and the Information Technology (IT) organisation, and the functional executives accountable for performance in sales, marketing, and operations to ensure the organisation is using and applying analytical data. Second, as a strategist, the CFO focuses on enhancing shareholder value. The use of innovative analytics is fast becoming one of the critical tools to help achieve this result. The CFO should know: • Do we have the capabilities to deliver analysis-driven improvements? • What data should be captured? • Which analytical tools make sense for our business? • Do we have the required people and organisation in place? • How big is the gap between what we need and what we have? The modern CFO wears many hats in the typical fast food company: • As a steward, finance oversees the accounting, control, and asset preservation tasks which can be necessary for compliance with external financial reporting requirements. • As an operator, finance seeks to balance cost and service levels in doing its job. • As a catalyst, finance can be an agent for change and business alignment, using its central position to help identify, evaluate, and execute strategies and act as a business collaborator with other decision makers (including business unit leaders, the chief information officer, and sales and marketing executives). • As a strategist, finance helps define the future of the company and focuses on enhancing shareholder value through a focus on profitable revenue growth, helping to manage operating margins and monitor business risks. Business analytics Typically, the top two objectives of finance in fast food companies are 1) improving/maintaining margins and 2) growing and preserving revenue. Business analytics can be fundamental to these mandates. The CFO is typically the natural leader in the quest to use analytics to help drive bottom-line growth. With an eye toward profitability and the external market, with a cross-functional view of the business, with sensitivity to risk management, and with an appreciation of the value of fact-based decision making, the CFO can be the most effective choice to help leverage technology and analysts in the pursuit of higher margins and greater revenue. The intense competition for high-value customers can underline the importance of using analytic tools to get close—and stay close—to the high-value customers. Also, advanced analytics can identify the dollars potentially being left on the table because of less-than-favourable pricing or special sales initiatives. In fact, research has shown that a company can gain an average margin uplift of one to three per cent by implementing a pricing improvement initiative—a crucial differentiator and competitive edge during times of saturated markets, unfavourable macro-economic conditions, and shrinking margins. Segmentation as the basis for customer profitability Improved ‘profitability per customer’ should begin with a customer segmentation analysis, which can provide insights into customer preferences and subsequent purchasing behaviour which drive overall sales, product mix, and margin contribution. Customers can be segmented in different clusters to create multi-dimensional views based on categories such as historic and predicted performance, strategic fit, buying behaviours, and cost-to-serve. With an improved understanding of customer categories and the ‘why’ of their buying patterns, the sales and finance functions can work together to manage customer, marketing, pricing and operational strategies more effectively. Implementing analytics should not be a ‘big bang’ initiative; capabilities that can meet the company’s needs should be developed over time. A crawl-walk-run approach can allow the CFO to focus on one step at a time. First, ask questions: before taking any action, CFOs should ask, ‘What capabilities are required to deliver these analytic-driven improvements?’ Data quality plays a crucial role, and the CFO should confirm that the organisation’s technology can provide the ability to pull and integrate data from multiple, disparate systems. In other words, the data sets should have the required integrity. The next question is ‘Are we capturing and analysing the proper data, the proper way?’ The analytical process should be appropriate and defined. One way to determine whether this is the case is by using multiple analytic tools to triangulate to an answer when addressing an issue. Next, determine customers’ needs. By working collaboratively with marketing and sales to determine customers’ needs, the CFO can gain insights about the nature of the business and demands of the marketplace. Then, in defining customer segments, the cross-functional team(s) can align each segment’s features with the company’s strategic goals. The CFO’s subsequent go-to-market recommendations for profitable revenue growth should reflect the segment performance analysis. The CFO should use business analytics to quantify the potential impact on revenue and profitability of each go-to-market initiative, as well as to determine the feasibility of each in terms of ease and pace of implementation. The CFO should prioritise the initiatives by value, focusing on the realisation of tangible benefits early on as the most effective way to get buy-in to the use of business analytics from finance’s business colleagues. Prioritisation can include the design of an implementation roadmap that would specify “owners” and their responsibilities. 

New digital marketing platforms- a flash in the pan, or something to seriously focus on? While traditional marketing channels are still relevant, like all other companies in the global marketplace franchises are moving their marketing to new media. Facebook, Twitter, Pointpal… should you be using them? More to the point, how should you be using them?

A QSR normally fits into one of 4 categories:

A QSR normally fits into one of 4 categories: · Free Standing with Drive Thru (FSDT)

A QSR normally fits into one of 4 categories:

A QSR normally fits into one of 4 categories.

How people choose restaurants today has changed. Traditional marketing used to be enough to drive diners to your restaurant, and then word of mouth would bring their friends. Over the past couple of years though, consumer behavior has shifted significantly.

It’s probably just coincidence, but a number of our clients in recent months have raised their concerns about how their workers’ compensation insurance provider hasn’t handled a particular claim well, and this has cost the employer dearly, either in an employee’s ongoing lost time from work, or by causing an increase in the employer’s workers compensation premiums.

Brief your creative agency effectively for the best possible outcomes.

Typically a QSR marketing team receives pressure from the top, from board and management and from the franchisee community or both individually or via advisory councils. With a role that covers everything from working up the overall strategy to following up on every little implementation detail, QSR marketing teams have their own complexity, from managing menu rollouts to product nutritional information and seasonal produce only available in some areas. It isn’t hard to see why things can rapidly get out of control, potentially overwhelming even the best resourced and most skilled teams.

Today, communicating with our friends, family and work colleagues has never been easier. We can communicate literally at any time from almost any place simply by pushing a “touch screen” button on our latest mobile phone or tablet, or by sitting at our computer.

From my observations of a number of businesses over the past 6-9 months it is very apparent that most businesses are very good in some areas of their business and not so good in areas that could make major differences to their actual operating basis and their profitability.

Many Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s) are struggling to know where to begin with social media; What channels (Twitter, Facebook etc.,) will work for them? How will they engage their audience? What budget should be set? How will they effectively build a trusting relationship with the consumer?

With Federal Government Industrial Relations policy coming increasingly under the spotlight, QSR Media asked regular contributor, Steve Champion, Director of employee relations consultancy ER Strategies, to explain what opportunities and limitations existed in relation to enterprise agreements under the Fair Work Act. Champion replied that, in his view, there was little logical scope for QSR operators to want to enter into enterprise agreements. “The first and biggest hurdle is that an enterprise agreement must leave every employee ‘better-off-overall’ than the award. This BOOT test is primarily a financial test. So any agreement is most likely going to cost the operator more than the award.

As the GFC started to impact businesses in Australia towards the end of 2008, the Australian foodservice market, like most around the world, was one of the first market sectors to feel the impact of the economic downturn. Although consumer spending on eating out is discretionary, Australians still wanted to go out for a meal. However, they have traded down in their choice of outlet, they don’t go out as often and they spend less each time. This has made QSR chains one of the winners in current market conditions as they represent value for money as well as entertainment for the entire family.

As the GFC started to impact businesses in Australia towards the end of 2008, the Australian foodservice market, like most around the world, was one of the first market sectors to feel the impact of the economic downturn. Although consumer spending on eating out is discretionary, Australians still wanted to go out for a meal. However, they have traded down in their choice of outlet, they don’t go out as often and they spend less each time. This has made QSR chains one of the winners in current market conditions as they represent value for money as well as entertainment for the entire family.