Draft Position Paper

Tessa Karrington
Erika Rasmussen
Kayla Hall
Position Paper

As leader of the Quick-Service Restaurant industry, Burger Planet has served 52 billion customers and counting. Burger Planet has almost 9,000 franchises in every state and 17 countries. At the same time, in the past two years research has shown that sales to Burger Planet’s base customer, women in their 30s and 40s, have decreased.

Today more than ever, women are more conscious of their body image. In order to do maintain a healthy lifestyle and satisfy this desire, women often seek a healthier diet. According to helpguide.org, living a healthy lifestyle depends on eating plant-based foods and whole grains, while cutting back on protein and caffeine. Burger Planet’s current menu items do not meet these standards. In a Pew Research Center study, only 35 percent of women eat fast food weekly compared to 47 percent of men.

To affect women, we researched to find who influences women and how we can use that person to our advantage. We found that Opal Whitcomb, the talk show hostess of Opal Speaks, is known for her immense credibility with middle-aged women who followed her personal travails of striving to lose weight. With the help of Jayne Petersen, a fitness guru, Whitcomb was able to lose 75 pound. This was an accomplishment no other fitness guru was able to achieve with Whitcomb. Because Petersen’s success, women around the world now look to Petersen as a credible health icon. We believe that an affordable, but highly esteemed person like Petersen, or someone similar to Petersen, would be an ideal Burger Planets spokesperson.

According to this research, it is evident that we must appeal to middle-aged women. Incorporating a new line of healthy food and a trusted fitness icon as our spokesperson would be beneficial to Burger Planet. Doing this would increase sales and improve our image as a better option for eating out. Not only will this increase sales to our clientele of women, but it will also encourage women to bring their families to our restaurants.

We believe that our goal to become a healthy food option can be accomplished in two years. First, we need to establish a credible line of healthy food, followed by a trustworthy spokesperson. After applying these output objectives, the impact objectives that will follow include: increase awareness of our healthy menu and new spokesperson to 60 percent of women, cause 40 percent of women to view it as a healthy-option restaurant, and gain a 30 percent increase in women customers ages 30 to 50.

It is essential for Burger Planet to attract women. Besides the fact that women want healthy food for themselves, they also want healthy food for their families. If Burger Planet offers a new line of food including items with fewer calories and low-carb options, as well as utilizes a positive fitness icon as our spokesperson, we can improve our image as a healthy quick-service restaurant. Doing so will allow us to gain back our base customer and enhance our company as a whole.