How to
Go Beyond Consumers’ Expectations: Different Consumer Value of McDonald’s and
Shake Shack
LU Yi, 1155082008
The
role of consumer value
As one of the significant metrics of buying behavior, consumer
value attempts to analyze the satisfaction received by a customer from a
purchase especially when the market is saturated. Simply, when consumers
perceive consumer value to be high, they will spread the reputation of the
business through word of mouth, which can lead to more sales for businesses.
Besides, it also tries to analyze the likelihood that the consumer will become
a repeat customer providing ongoing business for the products or services. Thus,
for solidifying a customer base and studying product performance, it is crucial
for businesses to analyze consumer value and to find what will exactly make
consumers achieve higher value so that they will become loyalty.
Negative and positive
disconfirmation
The expectations-confirmation
model is one model for estimating consumer value. It says that customer satisfaction
concerning a product is based on the consumer's expectations for that product,
in addition to the perceived performance of the product. Disconfirmation
occurs when customer's expectations differ from what the product delivers.
Negative disconfirmation means the product did not meet expectations while
positive disconfirmation means the expectations were exceeded.
Negative and Positive disconfirmation: McDonald’s and Shake
Shack
The American
Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is the only national cross-industry measure of customer satisfaction in
the United States. In recent days, they published a “ACSI Restaurant Report
2016”, from the figure shown below, we can see McDonald’s is the last one.
Figure
1: ACSI Restaurant Report 2016
McDonald’s can always be seen on the bustling streets, but
obviously, most people come there with an exhausted and impassive expression for
a fast meal but not an enjoyable meal. Although in recent years, McDonald’s has
realized and changed a lot, in fact, the biggest satisfaction that consumer
gain from it is still the “speed”.
It is no doubt
that for an energetic fast-food restaurant, being “fast” is essential. But
currently, if you cannot provide healthy food, human services, varieties of
foods and ordering methods, even the beautiful brand website and interface, the
abundant content in social media etc., just being “fast” cannot make yourself
attractive. In other words, the more your
consumer added values are, the less they will focus on the serving speed.
Shake Shack, another fast-food restaurant
known as its hamburgers, the price of burgers is twice than McDonald’s while
the speed of serving is lower than the average level of the industry, but these
cannot stop the consumers coming here.
Figure 2: The customers are queuing up
for Shake Shack
It has created a fine-casual concept which beyond consumers’ expectations of fast
food. The fine-casual restaurant is a hybrid of the fine dining and fast-casual
dining formats. The company uses high-quality ingredients and unique
culinary inspiration from the fine dining format. As for Shake Shack, its ingredients include
“all-natural, hormone and antibiotic-free beef.” This point satisfied the
consumers’ value of keeping a healthy lifestyle and enjoying the lifetime at
the same time.
Figure 3: The sample menu of Shake
Shack
In addition, the design of Shake Shack is impressive. The low-key houses and simple
logo provides a subtle hint that “we are only focusing on the burgers
themselves”. We must admit that the 70s’s indoor design, open kitchen, fresh
potatoes stored in the corner, are expressing a better emotion than the
monotonous stores of McDonald’s.
Based on this design
concept, Shake Shack has reduced the commercialization but keep the attitude of
being true and transparent by using basic elements such as the ingredients.
Actually, it is a graphical and flattening process of catering industry.
Figure 4: The logo of Shake Shack
Figure 5: The package design of Shake
Shack
From this kind of design, Shake Shack gives the choices to consumer. To
be more specific, they just provide a better visual design, but it is consumers
to decide whether they like it. It means that the value is what the customer thinks is value but not the
business. It makes consumers believe that they choose this brand based on their
own fashionable and unique taste.
Thus, consumer values will realize step by step, higher and higher in
the end-to-end buying process. At
first, the ideas of Shake Shack attract them, make them curious about this different
fast-food restaurant and they want to try something fashion, young and new. When
they look at the menu and enjoy the food, they feel healthy and think that they
can own the body they have always dreamed of even they eat lots of meats.
Sitting in the chair and looking around, they realized they have found such a cool
and design concept restaurant and gain self-fulfillment. If they come with
friends and if the friends also love this restaurant, they will gain social
acceptance immediately, after all, nobody will refuse a comment such
as “Woo, your selection of eating is quite discriminating!”. In this case, we
can see the expectations of consumers are totally exceeded when eating in such a
fast-food restaurant.
After giving a positive example of consumer value, I want to talk about
the redesign of McDonald’s which seriously cannot be regarded as a “success”.
Figure 6: Old package design of
McDonald's
Figure
7: New package design of
McDonald's
The main change is to simplify the package. We can see that they have
removed the messy icons and codes, but only kept the big logo and letters. The
big, yellow M expressed only signs to consumers but not any elements about
food, ingredients, ideas, emotions etc. Thus, compared with Shake Shack, we can
say that this kind of redesign is based on business’s needs and values but not the
consumers’.
From the discussion above, I list three conclusions:
1.
Consumer
value means that a business must design and create products and services which
customers consider as value and not in the opinion of the business.
2.
Consumer
analysis is of vital importance in marketing, as it is the route for finding
out what is of value to the customer.
3.
Pay
attention to the
added value of brand or product will conduct positive disconfirmation so that
produce higher consumer satisfaction.
Reference:
ACSI Restaurant Report 2016 Download
Analyzing Shake
Shack’s Fine-Casual Concept
Shake Shack,超越麦当劳的汉堡快餐品牌
Shake Shack快餐店另类“傍大款”模式：我比麦当劳更有逼格！
Shake Shack official website
