gourmet burger meat
Photo Cred: Pexels

Welcome to Brand Wars… a fun look at the serious issue of brands in South Africa.

 

The world of marketing is fiercely competitive. While creative advertising might be entertaining, comparative advertising, one of the most aggressive forms of marketing, is a whole new ball game altogether.

The ‘Brand Wars’ concept does just that. It takes South African brands and compares them head to head to give consumers a comparative opinion.

We have to say upfront that we were NOT PAID by any of the brands involved… we just wanted to see which brand came out tops.

And for the first episode we decided to look at the market leaders in the ‘Takeaway Burger‘ section in South Africa… we’ve called it ‘Burger Wars’.

“We use real people to place real orders and compare the results to see how they compare in value, taste, quality, brand perception and a few other cool areas as well.”

The team took 7 South African Burger brands and put them to the test with a blind tasting. Over 30 different South African consumers had to rate the burgers from presentation to value for money and ultimately the top of the list.

The results are all listed below:

Value for money

We wanted to know how a standard menu item Cheese Burger and Chips combo compared in terms of price.

So we ordered a single Cheese Burger (or nearest standard menu equivalent) and regular fries and compared the values of the order. We then took the average weight of the order, and ranked that too.

Both scores were totalled to arrive at the overall Value rankings.

Tastiest Burger in Town

We wanted to know who was the top of the taste ladder, so had a sampling team blind taste all orders and score them against each other.

We made sure they voted blind, made sure they were all regular burger eaters, and made sure none of them were Banting!

We ordered standard menu item Cheese Burger and Chips. and the meals were tasted and scored as a combination.

Best Product Presentation

We wanted to know how the brands matched up in terms of serving presentation.

We asked the testers to rate the visual appeal of the product presented based on garnish, sauce and firmness of the buns, and fries.

Then we asked the panel to rate the comparison between a published menu item visual and the actual product presented.

Brand Experience

We asked each order taker to rate the in-store experience from beginning to end.

This included individual ratings of touch-points such as the store atmosphere, staff representation and uniforms, in-store merchandising and order taking procedure. We included a note on if orders were taken as-is, or of staff attempted to up-sell to a larger size meal.

Finally we timed the order from the time we walked into the store, to the time we left the doors. (All orders were placed within 5 minutes of each other over a lunch time).

Overall Winner

So we took the combined scores from our #brandwars panels on Taste, Presentation, Brand Experience and Value for Money and did some number crunching to arrive at our result for the overall, best Take-Away burger experience in town right now.

Congratulations to all brands involved, and we look forward to seeing how the playing field changes the next time we pit brands against each other in the next edition of #brandwars.

Comment below and let us know which brands would you like to see go head to head next.


Sources: Brand Wars
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About the Author

Brent Lindeque is the founder and editor in charge at Good Things Guy.

Recognised as one of the Mail and Guardian’s Top 200 Young South African’s as well as a Primedia LeadSA Hero, Brent is a change maker, thought leader, radio host, foodie, vlogger, writer and all round good guy.

1 comment

  1. I agree that Burger King has the best burgers. Pity we have to travel more than 20km to the nearest branch.

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