New Media Ecology Spring 2017: How to Go Beyond Consumers’ Expectations: Different Consumer Value of McDonald’s and Shake Shack

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.