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The latest trend in fast-food growth has to do with location. Myers is now the chief development officer for Church’s Chicken. He said one of the keys to growing the Church’s brand is making Church’s available to consumers in nontraditional locations. Of the 58 Church’s in Atlanta, nine are in convenience stores (or c-stores), where customers come inside after filling up their cars with gas.

“The original fear was that people would associate your restaurant with the sort of dirty job of filling up the gas tank or changing the oil,” Myers said. “But when you walk into a Church’s in one of these locations, there is always a clean separation of the restaurant from the area of your car. We have 145 c-store locations around the country.”

In addition to adding more convenience store locations, in the next three to five years Church’s hopes to become the Big Chicken on Campus. Church’s has stores near many schools but not on any campuses. In hopes of enticing universities and private contractors to carry the Church’s brand, the company has developed “Church’s On the Fly,” a portable product.

“There is so much competition for real estate these days,” Shumacher said. “If I’m an owner of a small Dunkin’ Donuts and I can either spend $300,000 on a location for a stand-alone store or spend $300,000 on my store and co-brand with Baskin-Robbins and Togo and move into a million-dollar location, all of a sudden co-branding makes all the sense in the world.”

[Read more…] about Co-branding: Fast food finds strange bedfellows

These are the figuers for the US but the picture is very simelar in Europe:

Golden Boomers. “The 45-plus market is the new customer majority, ” says Lori Bitter, as quoted by Kenneth Gilpin in The New York Times. “This isn’t anything we are making up,” she says, “This is real. It’s huge.” Lori is a partner of J. Walter Thompson’s Mature Market Group, and if you don’t believe her, then just take a look at Census Bureau estimates that “roughly half of the nation’s population will be older than 40″ by the year 2010 … Right now, about four million people a year are turning 50,” and that’s a trend that will continue for years … in addition, more than 40 million Americans are already 65 or older.”
[Read more…] about Golden Boomers

Reply from Scott Deaver, chief marketing officer of Avis:

Well, a couple of things work in our favor. One is, Avis is more focused on excellence in customer service than any company I’ve ever worked for. And I mean focused. Everybody thinks about customer service all the time. Everybody’s measured for it. People are dead serious about fixing the things that are wrong and making the good things even better. That focus really does pay off in a better customer experience.

The second thing is, if you dig into research about Avis and Hertz, what you find is that Hertz tends to get credit for high-tech products and innovation. Avis tends to get credit for “people” values. One of the things that enables us to at least go toe-to-toe with Hertz is that we’re focused on those values. We’re true to them. We build in that brand space. We’ve got that real, unique and differentiated position in the car-rental market that gives us a lot of strength. [Read more…] about Why does Avis score so well on customer loyalty versus Hertz?

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