Saturday, October 23, 2010

Case study in operations during a massive recession

Ken Bruno interviews Ron Shaich

  Pick up an article and all anybody was writing about was how they [eateries] were going to pull costs out of the menu. And our view was when you pull costs out at a rate faster than sales fall off [that] you’re basically taxing the consumer. In times of great change, which is what this recession represented, it was an opportunity to create significantly greater competitive differentiation, competitive advantage. So when everybody pulled back, we actually invested. And we invested in the customer experience, in product development, we invested in marketing in a very serious way, we invested in operations and we invested in category management. And we said now is the time to stay the course, to continue our game and to continue doing this strategy that served us so well over the prior decade.