Theories of Strategy Food Shows Tell Us

Food Wars

My son has recently become interested in Japanese animation, perhaps because of his age. Japanese manga culture is a bit different from the cartoons we watched in our childhood. Anyway, that's not the point.

There is an anime translated into English as "Food Wars": Shokugeki no Soma. It tells the life of a boy named Soma Yukihira, who is very skillful in cooking, at a cooking school. But our hero Soma did such a thing in one episode that I thought, "Let this kid teach strategy at university".

Sir, these guys own a shabby restaurant in the shopping center. Since the boy is studying and his father is elsewhere, they come and ventilate it once in a while. On their last visit, they realized that the bazaar was bankrupt.

In the city, a new chicken takeaway opened at the train station. But their chicken is the best. Customers buy packets of chicken and take them home with them on their journeys.

Naturally, every company that enters the market takes the customers of the other company and consumes its market share. In our story, when the customers preferred the station area, the market went bankrupt.

Actually, the bazaar is used as a metaphor here. When a business loses its market share, it is not only itself that suffers. All the tradesmen who supply raw materials and intermediate products to the business, as well as those who provide catering and cleaning services to the company, are affected. Even worse, the economy starts to shrink in the market.

Our heroes say, "Let's make a better chicken than our competitor so that the market will revive".

There is nothing to this, it is a classic formulation of competitive strategy.

If your competitor launches a new product, an operator has four options.

Either you invest more in R&D or innovation to dethrone the leader during the embryo stage of the product.

Either you follow the leader in the youth phase to catch up with its quality.

Or you prepare operationally for price competition during the growth period.

Otherwise, if you want, you can continue with bad products up to a certain point and disappear from the market.

This is where our hero's strategy starts.

Our boy says, "Let's first go to the rival restaurant. Let's see the enemy. Let's eat his product. Let's find out the secret."

Because he knows that, as Michael Porter says, there can be no struggle without competition and competitor analysis.

They see that the competitor's chicken is great, the sauce is perfect.

First they try to match the same flavor to attack the competitor directly. In vain, it doesn't work, it can't work. They try again and again, but no, no. Because the competitor is consulted by a famous chef. In fact, that chef is our hero's teacher.

Soma realizes that he cannot win by imitating his competitor's products.

He thinks about his own strategic advantages, just like the design school of strategy and Alfred Chandler's (1977) famous SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis.

It thinks about it for a long time. He studies his customers. He looks at what kind of product I would want if I were a customer.

As he gets deeper into the subject, he realizes something. Customers actually want to eat a piece of chicken hot and warm.

The competitor's shop at the train station doesn't have the space for that. So he packs it to go. However, eating by hand is a tradition in Japan. In other words, our protagonist is actually mastering the social culture of the market.

The competitor mostly works with travelers and housewives. However, housewives want not only to shop but also to have a good time looking at the shop windows. Students pass by the bazaar until the evening. The bazaar is a place for them to socialize with their friends at lunchtime.

He wraps the chicken hot in a Korean crepe (this crepe is smaller than lavash, but the size of a medium taco) with lettuce and herbs. Even though the flavor of his chicken is not as good as his competitor's, people love it. The competitor loses 20% of its customer base on the third day.

Interestingly, a complementary market for chicken is also emerging in the market. People selling drinks and sweets appear.

Sometimes you can't be as good as your competitor. But there's a strategic advantage that you can be good at. I say find it.

Wok of Love

Another example is from Wok of love, a love and comedy series recently released on Netflix. 

Our hero is a golden boy who works in a restaurant with three Michelin stars on the terrace of a big hotel. In fact, according to the script, he is the real owner of these stars. However, he is fired by a small conspiracy.

So he gets greedy and rents the mafia restaurant opposite the hotel. His aim; to sink the hotel by attracting the restaurant's customers. Of course, things don't turn out that way.

At the end, they compete with the three-star restaurant over his shrimp dish. He plans to attract all customers by selling the restaurant's dish, which costs, let's say, 180 TL, for 18 TL.

At this point, you realize that our hero, who is a very good craftsman at heart, does not understand business management at all.

For one thing, it is a big mistake to think that a luxury restaurant and a shabby corner restaurant will have the same customer target audience.

Yes, it is possible to achieve fame, money and continuity with the target audience you position yourself with. Especially those who know, there are shabby garbage skewer kiosks, artisan restaurants, mussel sellers, kumrucular in Izmir. Even the most famous members of society and paper collectors eat side by side. But the aim of none of these is to sink a restaurant with three Michelin stars.

Competition is something else. You can't just blindly punch in the dark.

If you really want to take market share from a business, you need to know their target audience well. You have to know what their tastes and income levels are. Then you have to open a restaurant suitable for this target audience.

Then you need to develop a strategy of superiority that this target group will perceive. Sometimes you develop a strategic advantage over your competitor at all costs, but the customer cannot perceive the difference between your competitor's product and yours.

On the other hand, a target audience with a luxury taste often has a higher than standard income. You cannot compete with such an audience on the basis of price.

In addition, low prices usually damage your brand image with such an audience. In general, a discount can be perceived as a sacrifice in quality.

So, can a shabby business really compete with an upscale restaurant?

The answer is definitely yes. Businesses that do not compromise on quality despite the price always win in the long run. But then you have to wait for your competitor to make a mistake.

If a differentiation strategy is added to quality, this problem can be overcome in a short time. For example, a meat restaurant became famous in a short time with a cooking method that was not used in the market until then. The apprentices he trained started to open their own restaurants after a while. But all the products, including the side dishes served with the meat, represented the same school of thought. The names of these establishments have faded like fireflies, but the business in question still exists.

So, did our hero get his revenge? I continue to watch the series and we will see in the coming days.