(Michael)
For intelligent marketing, I have long been an advocate of open books. Open Books is a movement encouraging businesses to let everyone know the intimate details of their financial statements in order to build buyer trust, employee esprit and community support.
Now I have to advocate for Open
Calories. In an era when people worldwide are concerned about weight, it is a positive marketing value to let customers know, easily, the caloric content of the food.
One restaurant is a member of the Open Calorie Community in good standing ... Subway Sandwiches. Every menu and every wall list has on public display the calories of the items, including the calories of the variety of available dressings.
The greatest benefit for me, as a
traveler, is that I can easily control my caloric intake by going to Subway. Otherwise
I have to guess, and in the world of calories an objective guess is
hard to come by. (“That bowl of chili is 400 Kcal... no, it's 500 Kcal.”)
Subway is a fascinating business. One-hundred percent franchise, with the franchise owned by a small privately-held company (Doctors Associates Inc.). That means that, as I travel, I see a Subway fit into every imaginable size space, always with the same graphics and a nearly identical menu. The owners are always local people who can often get premium pedestrian traffic locations.
How does the anti-globalization clan deal with this global entity, nearly 24,000 outlets worldwide, bigger than McDonald's in the U.S.... each owned by a small proprietor? They seem to have ignored Subway because it isn't traded on a stock exchange.
The owners of Doctors Associates collect franchise fees, making them much richer than the Krocs. Someday they will probably go public and join the small multi-billionaires club.
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