Nikita Arora's Blog

I am really intrigued by Jack’s recent blog post on “Braille Burgers”. It highlights how a restaurant chain in South Africa called Wimpy, made itself extremely differentiated (in the hard-to-differentiate food industry) by introducing 15 types of ‘Braille burgers’, using sesame seeds to spell out different messages in braille for its visually impaired customers. (For example- 100% pure beef burger made for you.) The Metropolitan Republic agency, who came up with this brilliant idea claimed to reach 800,000 visually impaired people through this campaign.

As we are all aware that the marketing campaigns led by the companies in the food and beverage industry generally tend to focus on the differentiation aspects like quality, prices, health facts (for example-low fat, high protein, energy etc). But since each one of them is trying to differentiate on more or less the same facts, they aren’t really successful in establishing  a niche, and continue to experience similar growth patterns. However, some elite companies, with a big market share and bigger marketing budget tend to get celebrities to endorse their products, and thus are able to maintain high market share.

But by adopting the ‘braille burgers’ strategy, Wimpy’s has established a very unique differentiation strategy (at an international level), a strategy that just doesn’t help it maintain its current market share, but increase it manifold. Although the marketing campaign specifically aims at the visually impaired customers, and is extremely time-consuming (the video below illustrates how each sesame seed is carefully placed on the bun to represent the braille alphabet), both the apparent shortcomings actually are to Wimpy’s advantage. Firstly, the emotional appeal of the campaign is enough to draw attention from all other customer segments to Wimpy because it simply depicts how much it cares for its customers. It sends out positive vibes of communal harmony and philanthropy to the customers, and studies show that people tend to associate themselves with companies addressing a social cause by being their loyal customers. Secondly, it would have been cost inefficient if Wimpy’s decided to write a message on each and every bun. But since the proportion of visually impaired customers is minuscule compared to the non-visually impaired customers, it all works in the favor of Wimpy.

All in all, this marketing campaign is, and will be remembered as one of the marketing masterpieces in the history because of the innovation and out-of-the-box thinking applied in harnessing customer markets not just domestically, but all around the world!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YAchE0-o-o ; http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-13/news/30622551_1_braille-sesame-seeds-burgers )