Coffee Talk

Happy Monday once again! We hope you had a wonderful weekend and are ready to take on the week with a bang, and to help you do so, let’s start your morning off with some Coffee Talk. So, what’s been happening in the marketing world as of late?

In the never ending cycle that sees companies rising and falling, there appear to be some big shake-ups in the business world.

The past few months have seen a mass exodus, as Mayer lost her chief accounting officer, chief marketing officer, chief development officer, a string of senior vice presidents and an alarming number of vice presidents from across the company in product, engineering, sales and human resources, with more defections to come.

Yes, that’s referring to former Google and current Yahoo CEO star, Marissa Mayer. After joining the company in 2012, she brought with her a much needed spark for the internet portal based company. Since then, her initiative to moved Yahoo forward in an environment dominated by social media and mobile apps has begun to stall.

Yahoo’s business model and service is outdated and the struggle to find footing in a new age has resulted in several senior officers exiting the company.

Infographic of Yahoo Senior Officers Exiting in 2015

On the other hand companies like Chicago (IL) based Avant are leading the charge and changing the way banks are lending money. Technically, the co-founders Albert “Al” Goldstein, John Sun, and Paul Zhang developed algorithms to help determine a customers line of credit.

What’s different about their process is a specially developed matrix used in configuring a recipient company’s loan.

Step 1 is easy: Scale. Any move the company makes has to be proportionate to complexity (that is, the more complex the move is, the larger it must be). Step 2: The move must extend the company’s brand and provide stellar customer experience. Step 3: Company leadership must understand the new initiative at its core. Step 4: The company must have the right resources to make the move worthwhile.

It is a strategy the brand seems to be practicing themselves, experiencing a growth to 750 employees on two continents since their inception in 2013; Avant started with three employees.

As McDonald’s continues to report exponential losses, they are also losing footing to chains like Five Guys, SmashBurger, and most prominently Shake Shack have offered stiff competition for a new breed of customer.

It is part of what is being referred to as a better burger revolution– “Fast-casual restaurants that crank up the quality on the old hamburger-and-fries concept, targeting savvy diners who care more about how their food tastes and, crucially, where it comes from.”– successes include Five Guys (over $1.3 billion in revenue last year from more than 1,200 locations), Smashburger ($270 million), and Habit Burger ($175 million).

Fast Company states that brands like Shake Shack are hitting the mark in a big way by,

At the center of Shake Shack’s mission is Danny Meyer’s philosophy of “enlightened hospitality.” In essence, it’s a set of priorities: the idea is to create a welcoming atmosphere first for employees, next for customers, and then for the outside community, suppliers, and, finally, investors. The notion echoes Johnson & Johnson’s 1943 mission statement, which espoused the same priorities and was at the time a groundbreaking corporate credo that led to decades of earnings and dividends growth.

That’s all the Coffee Talk for this week. We hope you’re energized and ready to get out there, and if you aren’t, just remember… Turkey Day is right around the corner.