What is the impact of service in the fast food industry ? (common points and differences arisen by a comparison between McDonald and Burger King in Bergen city)

Résumé du document

Through our course "Service Marketing and Management" at NHH, we got the idea of doing our own study to figure out the major differences of McDonald and Burger King in Bergen by examaning customers' different perceptions, expectations, satisfactions and loyalty towards them. We tried to answer the question if customers receive the same service quality they expect and if they see a different aspect of McDonald and BurgerKing that makes them choose one or the other. Assuming that people are satisfied with the food quality, we went deeply in our study to figure out what else makes these fast-food companies so successful. Our objective was to find the main criteria that customers consider the most.


This study was conducted consequently to the Service Marketing and Management course. Our group story has been quite under staffed since we were four members at the beginning (theoratically all other groups were composed of five members). Then a member, who had agreed to work with us to study the topic of this report left us and , another member did not share the same enthusiasm for this topic and eventually came out with his own report. Finally we, only two, had to study and file the report
Since we landed in Bergen city as exchange students, we catered an idea to conduct a study comparing the two leaders of fast food industry, Burger King and McDonald. We have noticed many similarities among the two and there were many differences too. Then we decided to understand the main differences in terms of service that customer gets while choosing McDonald or BurgerKing ? Is it only a question of taste ? Is there any othercriteria like, loyalty for this choice ? Or a normal customer just do not care and go to the closer fast-food restaurant ? Is there any difference in the customer expectations between the two restaurants ?

Our main goal was to understand the key criteria for a customer to decide to select BurgerKing or McDonald.

Extraits

[...] Bibliography 1. Official web- page of Burger King- www.burgerking.com 2. Official web- page of McDonald's www.mcdonalds.com 3. Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, New York: The Free Press pp. (with A. Parasuraman and Valarie A. Zeithaml) Lovelock, Christopher, and Wirtz, Jochen. Services Marketing. People, Technology, Strategy. [...]

[...] What is the impact of service in the fast food industry? comparison between McDonald and Burger King in Bergen city) Summaries Abstract 2 Introduction 2 Procedures of our study 3 The scope of the study 3 Methodology 3 a. Building a questionnaire 3 Questionnaire: 4 b. Our samples 6 Our goals and expectations 7 Theory applicable and tested in this study 7 a. Customer's satisfaction 7 b. Customer's loyalty 8 c. Service quality 9 II) Presentations of Companies background 10 McDonald 10 Burger King 11 III) Findings 11 a. [...]

[...] Figure The support rate of McDonald and BurgerKing Case one: Assume a McDonalds and a Burger King are next to each other. Which restaurant would you choose? In this case customers didn't face any confusion. It's not a very big difference between always BurgerKing and always McDonald. We assume the customer would choose their favorite restaurant directly. But the interesting part is that if we have two easy choices like this case, we got 38% (mostly McDonald and mostly BurgerKing) uncertain vote. [...]

[...] The second part is a direct comparison between McDonald and Burger King. From this part, we conclude our perception of differences that separate both restaurants. The final part aimed at understanding customer's behavior when they have choice to go either to McDonald, or to BurgerKing. Find below the questionnaire that was used for the study: Questionnaire: Rate on a scale from 1 to 5 how important the following aspects are when you go to a Fast-food-Restaurant means the aspect is not important means the aspect is very important. [...]

[...] In terms of geographical scope, we focused on the two main restaurants of each McDonald and BurgerKing in Bergen, which are located in the city center and that are quite similar. Indeed, there was no use to extend our research to restaurants located out of city center since we assumed that customer base are slightly different and that will not have much impact on our study. The four fast-food restaurants (two McDonalds and two BurgerKings) are in the city center. They are located quite close to each other, which was relevant to our study as we were looking for the criteria determined by customers to choose between one of them. [...]