Pizza Patrón and Its International Expansion to Mexico

Pizza Patrón is a private company which was founded in 1986 in the United States of America, in Dallas, Texas. The president and founder of Pizza Patrón, Antonio Swad, started his business with only one pizza store but focused on quality, maintaining low prices and offering excellent service and so, by 1990, he owned a little pizza chain with four locations. One of the other things that distinguished him from other pizza store owners and which helped him to become successful was that he improved the relationship with Hispanic customers, by hiring Spanish speaking staff and eliminating language as a communication barrier. He became known as being Hispanic friendly and a very good employer for them.

In November 2002 Pizza Patrón began offering franchises and in August 2007 there already were 65 open pizza stores, 60 franchises and five owned by Antonio Swad. The pizza chain was renowned in the Hispanic community from America because of its low cost but high quality products, which were also to their taste, because they could buy for example Pizza Mexicana, Patrona or several Mexican drinks. No other pizza chain in America was so Hispanic friendly, especially when you think that the 90% of the employees at Pizza Patrón were also Mexican.

Thanks to these advantages and to the ingenious campaign “Pizza por Pesos” the chain had launched in 2007, what meant that you could also pay for your pizza with Mexican Pesos, it just made sense to think about expansion in Mexico. But the way to do it best had to be analyzed very carefully. Should the company keep its expansion strategy from the United States of America and offer franchises, should they acquire an existing companies or should they just build a corporate store themselves there?

Bibliography:

Pizza Patron Eyes Mexico, Guillermo Estrada et al., University of Texas at Dallas

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