As of Spring 2012, the two core elements of Panera Bread Company’s strategy were to aggressively expand its market presence across North America and improve the quality of the dining experience it provided to customers. Panera Bread believes that success is dependent on “being better than the guys across the street”. They also wanted to make customers travel past other food establishment to dine at Panera Bread. Panera adopted a way for attracting and retaining customers called Concept Essence.
They believed that this would give them a competitive advantage over its competitors. Ways that they believe will give them a competitive advantage included having an appealing selection of handcrafted artisan breads, bagels, and pastry products at every location. Developing a menu that could bring in customers from breakfast through dinner hours that includes high quality food at good valued prices. They want customers to come into an inviting café and be treated with outstanding customer service to make the customers return again and again.
The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis reveal that Panera Bread is in an awesome situation in their market. They stand out as one of the best fast casual restaurants in the industry. Their strengths are the location of their stores being in heavily populated areas. They have food for all times of the day from breakfast through dinner. Their weaknesses include their dinner food options. I feel like Panera is a leader in customer’s choice for lunch but lacks at dinner time. Panera Bread’s opportunities are also in the dinner category. If they had better options for dinner at reasonable prices, they would be a bigger player in the fast casual dinner choices. Their threats are that there is so many other restaurants that Panera has to compete with.
Panera Bread’s primary value chain components are operations, inbound and outbound logistics, sales and marketing, and service. Their operations include their prime location choices, how their menu meets the customer preferences, and their franchising. Outbound and inbound logistics has an extensive bakery café supply chain that has to supply fresh dough for breads and bagels on a daily basis to almost all of its company-owned and franchised bakery-cafes. Sales and marketing at Panera Bread typically relied on customer telling their friends about their wonderful experience eating. They let their food do all the talking. Their final component is their excellent service they provide to their customers.
They want their service to be efficient, responsive, and accommodating. Panera Bread management needs to address their marketing issues. Having a favorable image is a huge advantage in the market and Panera Bread management needs to keep working to maintain a great image in the market. Also, Panera Bread should keep updating their menu by adding new items to keep customers returning and also inviting new customers. Panera Bread should be working on expansion to other countries. Panera is very successful in the United States and would be successful in other countries. They need to have a better plan to expand into other countries because that is a whole new market for them.
