A few interesting examples on Spotify, Google, and restaurant chains

These are some short articles on brands that may be of interest to you and your students. They offer short examples or assigned articles you might use with specific chapters noted below.

• “7 Restaurant Chains That Are Reinventing Themselves in 2024.” These mostly familiar restaurant brands are trying new marketing strategies in 2024. They deal with a range of topics from Burger King’s “Reclaim the Flame” restaurant redesign (Chapter 12) to Panera’s experiments with new products (Chapters 8 and 12). Many of the examples involve changing menus (products). I find students don’t often think of restaurants as “retail” (Chapter 12) or their menus as “product lines” (Chapter 8). I find that connecting my students with non-traditional examples helps concepts stick.
• “Spotify Q1: More Users, More Cash Flow.” Here is another non-traditional retailer (Chapter 12). Spotify distributes music. And many of our students use Spotify and enjoy music. The company’s strong growth is now leading to strong positive cash flow. This can also be used to discuss business models (Chapter 17), as it shows the growth in ad-supported users is outpacing premium users. The graphic can easily be cut and pasted into a slide which you could add to your discussion of Place, perhaps supplementing “What’s Next? Bits and bytes need distribution, too” (Chapter 10).
• “Ads Are Still The Profit Engine For Alphabet.” Most of our students are frequent users of Alphabet products–probably its Google search engine (Chapters 13 and 15), gmail, and YouTube (Chapter 16). This graphic might be an interesting one to discuss in class. It is easily cut and pasted into a slide and shows just how important advertising is to Google’s profits.