ABSTRACT

Recent years the fast food restaurant industry in the Umuahia metropolis of Nigeria has witnessed a tremendous rise in the number of new restaurants. This is as a result of changing new life style coupled with the increase in urbanization. The study evaluates the marketing strategies that have been employed by the competing firms in order to sustain growth and profitability. This study evaluates monetary strategies and adopted a descriptive design. For convenient sake, out of total number of 85 medium sized fast food firms in Umuahia metropolis, 20 was selected for the study and out of 478 operators, 105 was chosen for study. A total number of 384 fast food customers were chosen for study using Topman's formula. Data collection was both structured and unstructured questionnaire. The data were analyzed using Chi-square and Z-test. The test for Chi-square was used for hypothesis 1 and Pearson product moment correlation coefficient was used for hypothesis 2 while Z-test was used for hypothesis 3. The finding shows that a comprehensive customer research enhances sustainability and profitability of the fast food business. Secondly, advertising is an effective strategy in promoting fast food business. Thirdly, it can also be concluded that the strategy for sustainable growth could be not just by enhancing the roles of personal selling and public relations, but by the use of effective customer relationship management. The major implication for the fast food operators in the Umuahia metropolis is that they should put more emphasis on conducting, analysis and implementing the results from a comprehensive customer research. This is to enable them have a proper knowledge of the needs and wants of the customers and accordingly satisfy them. In addition, the operators should try and accord more impetus to their customer relationship management by ensuring that a customer receives accurate information and has a consistent and stiff experience every time he/she interacts with the company.