RODRIGUEZ: The business case is
that our products are very visible. They’re visible at restaurants,
they’re visible at this table, they’re
visible in grocery stores, on television. Given the population trends,
we can’t be successful, we can’t
grow our share, we can’t grow our
margins, we can’t grow our
business without understanding that everything
we do from a consumer,
customer, employee and
community standpoint
affects our ability to
grow our business.
LESSON 7
For us, that’s an absolutely critical
piece around the business case.
2 IMPROVE MARKET
SHARE
LESSON 6
LESSON 5
LESSON 1 LESSON 2 LESSON 3 LESSON 4
We look at share, we look at
how we tailor our marketing programs to different segments of the
community. We do analyses on the
different programs and the impact
that they have, and what we found
out is that the message doesn’t resonate with the same general demographics. In some cases, it actually
has an adverse impact if we make
assumptions that don’t apply to
groups. For example: thinking that
we’re going to market World Cup
to folks who are Latino in Florida,
and they’re thinking World Series,
they’re looking at baseball. So for
us, the stakes of not understanding
the nuances of subcultures and the
complexity, the emerging trends
that are out there, is that we lose
the ability to effectively market our
message to those folks.
BUCHERATI: We have an energy
drink called Full Throttle, and so
our marketing folks and sales folks
are trying to think about the relevancy of the different consumer
groups and being able to speak to
people in a relevant way.
They sit back, they see an opportunity: energy drinks way over-index with the Latino population.
So we took something iconic—like
the Blue Demon, this Mexican
wrestler—and we created Full
Throttle: Blue Demon, and then
our Latino-employee forum actually went out with our sales force
into the Latino-owned outlets and
helped position it. They said, “This
is what this product is all about
and this is how you could promote
it.” We saw not only a successful
product launch—so there’s your
obvious metric, what’s going on
with sales—but what was really interesting, in all these other
Latino-owned stores, we actually
saw a real bump up with our other
brands … It’s not about the consumers, it’s this growing diversity
of your customer base. And so
here are the customers, who really appreciated the fact that our
Latino employees who had nothing
to do with sales and marketing
[were making the difference here].
They were out there helping them
understand the product and they
turned to the sales guys and said,
“And while you’re at it, ship up
some more cases of Coke and Diet
Coke and Coke Zero.”
For more on the Blue Demon as an
example of successful multicultural
marketing, read the July/August issue
of DiversityInc magazine,
www.DiversityInc/subscribe.
Steve Bucherati
LANDMAN-GONZALEZ: It’s the
expectation. What do you expect
when you go into a Darden restau-
