INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale of the thesis

Businesses today are aware of the important role of brand to its development, on
the grounds that they understand that consumers sentiments are often attracted by the
brands which have been shaped effectively and popular. In addition, obviously each
company, each product, each enterprise needs their own brands to position themselves
in the current competitive red ocean with numerous strong competitors. For the sake
of competing and attract customers, a brand conveys to consumers, shareholders,
stakeholders, society and the world at large all the values and attitudes embodied in a
product or service or company. Hence, the role of brand is important that needs a
good suitable brand-development strategy (BDS). Otherwise, Vietnam has very few
enterprises which can develop their brands efficiently due to the inefficient BDS. A
BDS is always a difficult task; requiring enterprises to invest plenty of time, efforts
and money to achieve the ultimate goal, which is trust and loyalties of customers.
Therefore, the research on greatest global brands is needed to help Vietnamese firms
can acquire experience in building and developing their own brands.
In addition, one of the identities that help people be distinct from one culture to
another is eating habits. People from different countries or regions have the different
way to enjoy food. However, local people usually change the way and type of food
they eat. As we can see, American and European people dine at Japanese, Chinese,
Vietnamese or Thai restaurants. In the meantime, Asian people enjoy their meals at
French or Italian restaurants. To be more specific, foreign restaurants are more
popular in Vietnam exceptionally fast food restaurants such as KFC, Subway,
McDonalds, Burger King, Lotteria, Jollibee and etc. Most Vietnamese people know
KFC and use its products every day. Therefore, conducting a research on KFCs BDS
can give readers the knowledge about this giant brand in Vietnam.
The third reason is that due to being a business student with desire to be a
successful entrepreneur in the future, we need to be good at economic knowledge.
Conducting this research will give me the good opportunity to access and comprehend
economic knowledge.
For these reason, I decide to undertake this research painstakingly about the BDS
of KFC in Vietnam. All above, hopefully, this research would like to help Vietnamese
students studies in the environment of international business.
2. Objectives
The main objective of the study is to examine the BDS of KFC in Vietnam
through its product, price, place, positioning, promotion strategies and its brand
culture; and come to conclusion that whether its BDS is successful or not. In this
study, brand-development strategy of KFC is the research problem that is needed to
be clarified based on some theoretical backgrounds. In addition, the study also
provides some recommendations about how to limit the drawbacks and improve
KFCs BDS in Vietnam.
To fulfill the given objectives, the study is required to solve some questions:
What is the brand-development strategy of KFC in Vietnamese market?
How KFC undertake its brand-development strategy?
Is KFCs brand-development strategy successful?
3. Methodology
The study utilizes desk research as the main method to gather information about
research problem from various sources: reference books, thesis, dictionaries, and
websites. Of all these sources, websites are utilized as main references. The research
problem concerns about a marketing strategy brand-development strategy of KFC,
so, some economic websites such as: ama.com (American Marketing Associations
website), brandvietnam.com, KFCvietnam.com.vn, KFC.com, yum.com,
businessdictionary.com, entrepreneur.com and other related websites.
4. Research design and scope
4.1 Scope of the study
Owing to the topic of this dissertation Brand-development strategy of KFC in
Vietnam, researcher would like to focus on analyzing six main steps to conduct a
good BDS of KFC in Vietnam.
4.2 Research design
Apart from this preamble, the study is structured of three more chapters.
First of all, the introduction is an overview of the thesis, which presents the
rationale, the purposes, the scope and design, and the methodology of the study.
Chapter I is the theoretical background of the research. It includes the
comprehensive theories about brand, BDS and evaluation method that directly related
to the research problem.
Chapter II provides the brief information about history of KFC and the its process
of building brand in Vietnam along with briefly analyzing the SWOT of KFC when
conducting BDS in Vietnam. However, the main part of this chapter is focusing on
analyzing KFCs current BDS in Vietnam by scrutinizing six main steps to build up a
strong BDS.
Chapter III gives some recommendations about how to improve the current BDS
of KFC in Vietnam.
Finally, the thesis concludes all of the analysis that mentioned in the previous
chapters.