Speaking at the UBS Global Consumer Conference Wednesday morning, McDonald’s USA president Mike Andres said that the program could be a big sales driver for the Oak Brook, Ill.-based burger giant.
“We’re working on a customer-designed loyalty program that we think will be as good as there is out there in the marketplace,” Andres said.
McDonald’s released its app last year, which in many markets has a beverage loyalty offer that gives customers a free McCafé beverage after they’ve purchased five. The app has been downloaded 7.5 million times, Andres said, exceeding the company’s expectations.
Yet Andres said that McDonald’s new loyalty program would be “more robust,” and would be linked to consumer purchases, based perhaps on the number of visits customers make to the chain’s restaurants every month. Customers would likely have a limited time to take advantage of whatever deals the company offers through the program.
Such a move would be consistent with McDonald’s oft-stated belief in recent months that it needs to use technology to communicate more directly with customers.
Andres noted, for instance, that a loyalty program could entice customers to come in after they’ve been absent for a while. McDonald’s could use information it has on those customers’ buying habits to do the convincing.
Continue reading at Nation's Restaurant News Online.
Written by Jonathan Maze, NRM.com.
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A study on generational shopping behavior by the Wharton School’s Baker Retailing Center and The NPD Group found that, based on customer receipts, gift cards are particularly popular with Millennials. Their share of wallet of gift cards is higher than that of other age groups at mass merchants, convenience stores, and warehouse clubs.
What could be driving Millennials’ preference for gift cards? Making up one-third of the U.S. population, Millennials are the largest and youngest shopper generation and will continue to be an important segment for gift card purchases. Thus, understanding the drivers of Millennials’ liking of gift cards may be useful.
To be sure, gift cards have become more popular with consumers in general. Sales in the U.S. have grown gradually over the past several years, reaching record sales of an estimated $130 billion last year, an increase of more than six percent from 2014, according to an annual study by CEB. For nine years in a row, gift cards were the most requested gift during this past holiday season, as a survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) found, and almost three-quarters of respondents were planning to buy at least one gift card. One in six Americans received a Starbucks gift card during the 2015 holiday, an increase from one in seven in 2014. Further growth is expected, which retailers will welcome since gift cards generate store traffic, online and offline, including from new customers. Plus, most gift card users spend above the card’s face value.
This preference for gift cards as well as cash as gifts — a 2014 holiday survey by Deloitte found cash to be the second-most desired gift (35%), closely trailing gift cards (37%) — should also please economists since gift cards reduce or eliminate the loss that occurs when people give gifts that cost more than recipients value them. Joel Waldfogel coined the term “deadweight loss of Christmas” for this economic waste.
Denise Dahlhoff, PhD, is the Research Director of the Wharton School’s Baker Retailing Center, a research center in the retail, fashion, and e-commerce space.
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MILAN — Standing in the art-soaked splendor of a Milanese parlor as an array of A-list Italian business leaders listened intently, Howard D. Schultz, chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, recited a remarkable statistic on Friday: Each week, roughly 90 million people pass through a Starbucks somewhere on earth.
Equally remarkable, given that Starbucks operates in 70 countries, is this: Not one of those people is in Italy, a country where coffee culture is central to daily life, and that represents something of a coffee holy grail to Mr. Schultz. Italy, land of the perfect espresso and the exquisitely frothy cappuccino, is a Starbucks-free nation.
Or it was. Mr. Schultz swooped into Milan during Fashion Week to announce that Starbucks would open its first coffee shop in Italy early next year, in Milan. Given that Starbucks is opening 500 stores a year in China, the Milan venture might seem like a nice little ornament. But for Mr. Schultz, coming to Italy is personal. It is also delicate — and a bit of a risk.
“There are very few markets and stores that I’m as intimately involved in as this,” he said in an interview after the announcement. He added, “We’re going to come here with great humility.”
Starbucks has always been careful in Europe, aware that the Continent’s coffee aficionados have refined tastes and an abundance of good coffee shops — and might take offense at the idea that an American company is needed for a better espresso. Yet Starbucks has marched successfully into Britain, France and Germany, and it has even found success in Vienna, the Austrian capital, which gave birth to the coffeehouse.
Italy, though, is Italy.
“I think young people will try it out, for curiosity,” said Orlando Chiari, the 82-year-old owner of Camparino, a century-old coffee bar in central Milan, “but I doubt it will become a major player in Italy.”
Mr. Chiari, impeccable in a gray suit and light blue shirt, said that about 1,500 clients came to his bar every day, and that few were titillated by “new trends.” He decided against deliveries of the sports drink Red Bull because it simply would not sell at Camparino.
“We worship coffee in Italy, while Americans drink coffee on the go in large cups,” he elaborated. “It’s two extremely different cultures.”
Read entire article at The New York Times.
Written by Jim Yardley, February 28, 2016
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