Unfortunately I only caught the very last few minutes of a great documentary on CNBC about McDonalds. The section I caught was about their growth in China. One thing I found interesting is that when McDonalds first introduced the drive thru in China the customers didn’t completely understand. They would drive through, order, pay and receive their food. They would then go park their cars and walk back into the restaurant to eat

McDonalds then had to train the customers. It looked funny, at least to me, seeing the employee holding the bag of burgers out the window waving the car to drive up to the next window. To most of us using a drive thru is almost instinctual however, to a country where only a few years ago the bicycle was the primary mode of transportation it is not so common and had to be taught.

That got me thinking. Sometimes in marketing we are faced with introducing new concepts and products to people. If the concepts or products are not a success we usually think that maybe the concept was too whacked or that the product was not that good. If we are trying to introduce something so new it may not be considered normal we may need to look at training the consumer as part of a successful strategy…

Also equally as interesting McDonald’s builds its new restaurants in underdeveloped areas. They take a risk that this new area will soon be filled with condos, shopping malls and other retail stores as China grows faster then any other country today. This risk continues to pay off in a big way because they will be the first in the area when prosperity arrives, and, as Seth Godin tells us in his new book “The Dip” , being the first in a market will give you a huge leverage.

J Paul Getty, one of the first people in the world to amass a fortune of over 1 billion dollars once said that in order to be rich you not only have to take risks with your own money, but, you also have to take risks with other peoples money.

Are you taking any risks? If not, why?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 2:41 am and is filed under Just Me, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.