An analysis of Johnny & Jugnu & Pandamic

I was the first one to experience the most authentic taste of Johnny&Jugnu before its launch in LUMS in AIESEC Conference back in 2015.

They were doing taste check on their burgers to check the response of the community and honestly the burgers were literally very yummy.

Initially, they were present in DHA where they were selling burgers on a small scale & their owner believed that their sauces are the only thing that makes their burgers special.

During these days, Mr. Axcuseme (write correct name) Talcum Powder ad was very viral & JOHNNY & JUGNU took the advantage of this man to create their Viral Campaign.

That cringe campaign instead sky-rocketed their sales and within a period of just six months, Johnny & Jugnu was the only name that I heard from the people living in DHA.

Their major target audience were students of different universities & schools mostly present in DHA including LGS, Beaconhouse, LUMS & LSE.

Students from these areas usually came to their branch in their free lessons during school & after school to have a budget & quality eatery. And since then JOHNNY & JUGNU has successfully turned itself into a brand.

Their selling-model is very unique compared to the mainstream restaurants in Lahore as JOHNNY & JUGNU deal only in takeaways and not in dine-in facility which helps them cut their operational costs in terms of profits.

There model matches exactly their customer that usually stop by on a Car and sit in their car to eat&wait for their order.

JOHNNY & JUGNU was the first ever restaurant in Lahore to use buzzer delivery where they use buzzers to notify their consumers about their order.

Since then brands like Johnny & Jugnu, Jaybees, Daily Deli and may other restaurants have become famous because of the proper understanding of their target market.

Most of the companies fail to acknowledge this fact and tend to use traditional tactics whereas restaurants like these have understood the customer behavior and knows what their customer wants.

If you see the history of McDonalds, Richard & Maurice were the first to acknowledge the fact that quality and speed are the only two things that are valued by your customer and hesitant to open other branches because of the fear of losing speed & quality served. And for most of the restaurants in Lahore it is also the core reason where most new brands fail when they are in search of money and loose quality while franchising.

Most of these restaurants including Johny & Jugnu have opened new branches in different areas and since then some of their quality has been compromised and it is not just because of their own mistakes but because now they are serving different types of customers with different behaviors which are certainly didn't getting along. In a nutshell, they are serving customers irrelevant to their Target Market...

However, Johnny & Jugnu is now in competition with the largest food chains like McDonalds, KFC & others.

One of the main reasons is due to localization & understanding of local market behavior. They picked a small segment of the overall market.

Now, Johnny & Jugnu is in direct competition in terms of Price with these brands and mostly people prefer JOHNNY & JUGNU compared to these Multinational chains because of the taste & quality. 

JOHNNY & JUGNU & other locals have set an example where people prefer local food compared to MNCs. Lahore is following this trend and it is good to see we are progressing.

The same scenario was in Karachi decades ago but now if you see, people in Karachi prefer local food more than international chains because young professionals have understood the need of market better than the previous ones.

But, the main ingredient that is missing in these local restaurants was the contingency plan, the plan in case things go wrong. This situation was realized by them in the light of Coronavirus.

If you are using any delivery service like Foodpanda or even stopping by any restaurant, Majority of them are closed but the ones that are open are only McDonalds & KFC. And, the main reason behind is the years of experience in the business and the ability to make prompt decisions.

They had a backup plan and now they are the Kings of Fast-food whereas rest of them are facing management issues, technical and non-technical issues and what not.

If you have seen the movie “Founder”, you’d have probably seen McDonalds didn’t use the Carhop service back in 1954 when majority of the restaurants were using it as a way to serve their customers. And the reason behind it were the number of issues faced by customers while they were ordering their food.

The main issues back then were time-taking deliveries, wrong orders, sanitization & packaging. Apart from these issues, all the other issues still remain after almost six decades which is very unfortunate for these restaurants that could not manage multiple orders at once.

They are using a technique that failed in 60s, ironically, the Naan Shop near my house is managing better than these local restaurants. One technique used in the movie was to only manage orders that sell the most like McDonalds started with 18 items and reduced to three because of the influx of orders.

Now to cope with this issue during Covid19 could be simply what a Naan shop does during Eid which is to  sell only Naan during Eid because of the influx of orders for Naan only and a few for Roti. And the second one is bulk orders to avoid time taking deliveries in Prime Time.

JOHNNY & JUGNU or any other restaurant can focus on limited products and having bulk orders during prime time to overcome this issue. However, we don’t know what strategy JOHNNY & JUGNU has in its mind but the reality is that they have experienced it and now they have to counter it to maintain their brand image.