TIM HORTONS

Executive Summary

            Tim Hortons is one of popular fast food restaurant chains that has specialization in offering high quality coffee products and donuts. The organization decided to have strong online presence and developed Twitter and Facebook page in order to make sure significant brand awareness. However, the organization is also focused on different community welfare activities and faces strong competition from its existing rivals, such as KFC, McDonalds, and Starbucks. The organization also tried to offer high quality customer service through integrating advanced technological applications.

Overview of the Business

            Tim Hortons can be referred as one of the popular multinational fast food restaurant chains based in Canada. The mission of the management of Tim Hortons is to offer high quality coffee products as well as doughnuts. On the other hand, the major goal of the organization is to contribute to the community involvement practices to become one of the sustainable organizations within the global fast food restaurant chain industry.

            The organization was established in Hamilton in the year 1964 by a hockey player. However, the organization has attained huge popularity among the target customers due to its offering of high quality fast food products, coffee products, and doughnuts. Recently, the organization was acquired by Burger King in the year 2016 (Buist, 2003). The management of Tim Hortons used to follow a franchisee business model and earned huge success as well as popularity. Apart from this, there are different initiatives, such as community welfare involvement, online business operation activities, unique sponsorship model have been practices by the management of Tim Hortons.

            In terms of value proposition and positioning, the management of Tim Hortons used to offer high quality, valuable, trendy, differentiated, and well-acknowledged products at economic price level. The organizational management has expertly implicated cost leadership strategy to offer high quality products at cost-based economic price by reducing overall business operation cost. The products or services of Tim Hortons are positioned as high quality but economic priced products. According to such positioning statement, it can be identified and stated that the target customers of the particular organization will receive high quality but differentiated fast food products including high quality coffee products as well as doughnuts at competitive price comparing to other market players due to the adoption and execution of the cost leadership business level strategy in business operation process.

Competitors Analysis

            Tim Hortons used to operate within the global fast food restaurant chain industry. The organization is saturated as well as highly competitive due to the presence of different leading rivals, such as McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, Burger King, Barista etc. Porter’s Five Force analysis (Teece, 2010) will be carried out below in order to find out and assess the competitive forces, important success factors, and important driving factors of the particular industry.

Porter’s Five Force Analysis

            It is an important external micro environmental strategic analytical tool, which may help the management of Tim Hortons to determine the important competitive factors for the business operation process of the organization.

Buyers’ Power

            The bargaining power of the consumers is quite high for the firms within the fast food restaurant chain industry as the consumers have different options to choose in case they are unhappy with the pricing or quality of the products of a brand.

Suppliers’ Power

            The bargaining power of industry’s suppliers are quite low for the organizations within the fast food restaurant chain industry as the organizations within the industry can find cost effective as well as efficient supply chain networking options due to availability of sufficient suppliers within the industry (West, 2015).

Degree of Industry Rivalry

            Degree of industry rivalry is high for the organizations within the global fast food restaurant chain industry due to presence of leading organizations within the industry, such as McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, Burger King, Tim Hortons etc (Lamb, 2012). Most importantly, these organizations are constantly trying to implement unique strategies in business operation process to be competitive.

New Entrants’ Threat

            Threat of new organizations is quite low for the established existing industry players due to high entry cost, high legal entry barriers, and lack of developed stakeholder support. These difficulties will stop the new players to grab the market shares of the existing players initially (Wong, 2010).

Substitutes’ Threat

            Substitute’s threat is quite high for the organizations within the global fast food restaurant chain industry as the social demand for the high quality food products is significantly increasing and these are the substitute products of the fast food products (Naidoo, 2012).

            It is highly transparent from above assessment that bargaining power, degree of industry rivalry and substitutes’ threats are high for Tim Hortons. On the other hand, bargaining power of suppliers and threat of the new entrants are low for Tim Hortons.

            There are different types of direct and indirect competitors of Tim Hortons, which are trying to satisfy the needs of target customers. Starbucks and Barista can be considered as the direct competitors of Tim Hortons as all of these three organizations are operating within same industry with similar types of products and services. Alternatively, McDonalds and KFC are the indirect competitors as recently Tim Hortons has been acquired by Burger King (Boone, 2012).

            McDonalds has better competitive advantages among all the industry players in terms of service delivery process. Recently, the organizational management of KFC has faced several challenges regarding service delivery process. Therefore, it can be stated that McDonalds is the major achiever for better service delivery and KFC is highly criticized for inadequate service delivery.

Customer Service Strategy

            Tim Hortons always takes care of the needs and expectation level of the target customers. Moreover, they also focus on high quality on line service delivery process. Therefore, the organizational management of Tim Horton is highly concerned with satisfactory customer service delivery process, which is impressive.

The customer service strategy of Tim Horton is highly documented on the popular online social media networking platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.

            The service culture and customer focus of Tim Hortons would be analyzed through online customer feedback process. Moreover, the store executives can collect feedback from the customers, who visit their stores. The organizational executives as well as management are highly customer friendly as they always take care of quality of food items and comfort level of the visiting customers.

            The organizational management highly focuses on community children welfare activities apart from the quality control aspects. Apart from this, the organizational leaders also have focused on giving reward to the regular customers.

            The online presence of Tim Hortons significantly augments its service delivery process as it has presence of Facebook and Twitter pages and the services or products are regularly getting updated on the pages. The online community is satisfied with the quality of product and service delivery process, but the community members need more sustainability in the business operation process. The organizational management uses ICT and advanced data management tool (Naidoo, 2010) to deliver services to the customers and other clients. This is highly impressive. The service will be significantly improved if the organizational management considers aggressive turn-around timing, decentralization, and stakeholder integration in the decision making and strategy implication process.