The Dimness of Taco Bell’s

Border Lights
An analysis of a marketing failure using the 4A’s Framework

Anna Derby
BF504: Marketing Management
Spring 2010
3/22/2010
Introduction
In February 1995, Taco Bell introduced its Border Lights menu, which offered reduced-fat,
healthier versions of its traditional menu items. This moved was spurred in part by a report by the
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) that attacked fast food Tex-Mex cuisine as some as the
least healthy on the market, as well as by a growing demand in the US for healthier food (Martin, 1995).
The menu consisted of eight items – including tacos, burritos and a salad – that contained low fat
cheese, sour cream, and guacamole, lean beef and baked tortillas. The new menu was launched with
high-hopes – the company’s CEO foresaw it becoming a $5 billion business by the close of the 1990’s –
and considerable fanfare, but the new offerings failed to attract new customers (Collins, From Taco Bell,
a Healthier Option, 1995). Although sales of Border Lights items represented 26% of sales shortly after
the menu was launched, the total was down to 9% by the end of 1995, and same-store sales had fallen
by 4%. Fourteen months after the menu debuted, Taco Bell cut it to three items (Kramer, 1996) and by
1999, had scrapped the whole thing (Chou, 1999). The 4A framework can be used to analyze the failure
of Taco Bell’s attempt at selling healthier Mexican fast food with the Border Lights menu.

4A’s Analysis
Awareness
Brand
Although Taco Bell’s profits were beginning to drop at the time of the Border Lights launch, it was
a very successful and visible brand. In 1994, Taco Bell’s 4,800 restaurants generated $4.5 billion in sales
and represented 76% of the Mexican fast food industry in the US (Collins, From Taco Bell, a Healthier
Option, 1995). In addition to the thousands of restaurants, Taco Bell had expanded to 25,000 “points of
access,” in 1994, which included schools, sports arenas, airports, and supermarkets that sold make-at-
home taco kits (Martin, 1995). The Taco Bell brand was very well known in the 1990s, it was even
featured in the 1993 movie “Demolition Man” as the only restaurant to have survived “the Franchise
Wars.” (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2010)
Despite excellent brand awareness, the reputation and personality associated with Taco Bell was
based on youth, coolness and value. The core customer was young, on a limited budget, and much more
concerned with getting food that would be filling and would taste good than they were with nutrition.
The introduction of the Border Lights menu was an attempt to bring in new customers, those who were
looking for quick but healthy food, and to “move with [the company’s] customers as they age,”
according to a Taco Bell spokesperson (Coeyman, 1995). This brand image made it difficult for the
company to leverage its brand awareness to market its new menu. In fact, it may have made it more
difficult to get people to try its reduced-fat items, a point that will be addressed in the Acceptability
analysis.

Product
When Taco Bell launched the Border Lights menu, it backed the rollout with a $75 million
marketing campaign. The campaign was launched with two teaser spots that aired during the Super
Bowl. Reduced-fat tacos were advertised beginning in March, while reduced-fat burrito ads and the
Border Lights taco salad hit stores in April. Once the full menu was available, Taco Bell staged an
enormous promotional giveaway in which they handed out eight million products worth $20 million
(Bloomberg Business News, 1995). The company’s CEO realized that the bad taste of previous attempts
at healthier fast food by competitors could prevent people from even trying Border Lights items, and
wanted to lure them in with the giveaway (Wells, 1995). The marketing campaign was the most
expensive that Taco Bell had ever put behind a new product (Bloomberg Business News, 1995).
Although this massive, expensive marketing campaign raised awareness of the new product, many
analysts think that it actually hurt overall sales for Taco Bell. Because the campaign was aimed at an
audience outside of the company’s core customers, it may have actually confused and alienated some
customers. By choosing to market to older, health-conscious Americans, Taco Bell was in effect targeting
their core customer’s parents. This contradicted previous efforts to appeal to young people as a hip,
cool place.

Market Value Coverage

At first look, the MVC for Awareness would appear to be very high. However, the near universal
recognition of the Taco Bell brand may have actually worked against the Border Lights menu, as the
associated brand image was not in line with the healthier items being sold. Also, the colossal marketing
campaign behind the product launch may have created confusion among customers. This leads to an
estimate MVC of 50% for Awareness.

Acceptability

Functional
No matter how well a restaurant does at raising awareness for a product, the product will fail if it
does not taste good. There is evidence that the items on the Border Lights menu simply did not taste as
good as the full fat versions. Although Taco Bell tested the menu for three months before launching it
nationally (Collins, From Taco Bell, a Healthier Option, 1995), analysts such as Oppenheimer &
Company’s Roy Burry claimed that “with Border Lights, fast-food customers are saying that the taste
isn’t there. And the consumer will not sacrifice taste (Collins, Low-Fat Food: Feeding Frenzy For
Marketers, 1995).” In a review of low-fat fast food offerings, Consumer Reports stated that Taco Bell’s
nonfat sour cream was “dry and overly sour (Anonymous, 1997).” The fact that Mr. Burry specifies “fast-
food customers” in his analysis is important. Taco Bell had hoped to attract new customers with Border
Lights, but found that most of the sales were coming from existing customers switching their selections
(Kramer, 1996). It may be that the taste was acceptable to healthy eaters, but less so to those who were
used to fatty, cheesey, gooey fast food offerings. Shortly after the menu debuted, 26% of Taco Bell’s
sales came from its items, but that percentage had fallen to 9% by the end of the year (Kramer, 1996).
This may indicate success in raising awareness that led to a spike in people trying the menu, but poor
functional acceptability in the form of bad taste may have kept most customers from coming back for
more.

Psychological
Taco Bell faced a daunting task in creating psychological acceptability for its Border Lights menu.
Not only do most people not think of going to a fast food restaurant for lighter fare, the menu was
launched shortly after the release of a much publicized report from the Center for Science in the Public
Interest (CSPI) that singled out Mexican food as particularly fattening. This report got ‘”Nightline” – style
coverage,’ while a piece that CNBC was doing on the launch of Border Lights was cut to free up time for
extended coverage of the baseball strike. Although Taco Bell’s huge, expensive marketing campaign may
have been able to raise awareness of the newer, healthier options, it may have been more difficult to
combat the preexisting perceptions reinforced by the science-based arguments against fast food being
made in the news. As Michael Jacobson of the CSPI explained, “Fast-food companies have a real
challenge when they market healthy food. They have trained people who eat healthy foods not to go to
their restaurants (Kramer, 1996).”
Healthy eaters may not have been won over by the idea of Border Lights, and Taco Bell also
faced a problem with those who said that they wanted healthy food, but ended up going with traditional
Taco Bell offerings when the time came to order. In his article “Time and the Marketplace,” Daniel Reed
explains that many consumers want to make healthier choices when it comes to food and they will state
this on surveys, but the strength of this desire is indirectly proportionate to the length of time until
consumption. In other words, people want healthy food in theory, are likely to buy it in the grocery store
when planning for future meals, but when they walk up to the counter at a fast food restaurant, they
just want what tastes good (Reed, 2007). The chief nutritional officer for Yum! Brands, the parent
company of Taco Bell, says that consumers eat out when they want “indulgent foods they don’t cook at
home (Gay, 2005).” Reduced-fat burritos just did not appeal to people going to Taco Bell. Cathy Kapica,
McDonald’s director of nutrition, went so far as to say that her company stopped using the word
“healthy” in its advertising because research had shown that ‘the word "healthy” is a turnoff when
customers see it on a menu (Gay, 2005).’

Market Value Coverage

Taco Bell failed to create psychological acceptability for healthy food within its customer base
and failed to convince healthy-eaters that Taco Bell was an acceptable destination for dinner.
Additionally, it appears that the functional acceptability was low if the products did not taste good. Since
the menu items did sell some, representing 9% of total sales at the end of 1995, the estimated MVC
would be 9% for Acceptability.

Affordability
Ability to Pay
In the late 1980s, Taco Bell started a price war in the fast food industry and made its name with
a marketing campaign centered on value pricing. Although the Border Lights menu represented an
attempt to address health, an aspect other than price that was becoming more important to consumers,
Taco Bell did not abandon its value pricing. Initially, items were going to be sold for the same price as
regular items: 59 cents, 79 cents and 99 cents (Associated Press, 1995). When the menu was launched,
the items were priced at 10 cents more than the versions on the traditional menu, but this still left them
well within the price range of fast food customers (Martin, 1995).

Willingness to Pay
Although the ten cent surcharge on the Border Lights items would not have prevented most
from being able to purchase them, it may have been a turn-off to some customers. In addressing the
price disparity, one analyst quoted Andy Rooney, saying, “If you leave something out, how come I have
to pay more for it? (Martin, 1995)” It also was incongruous with the traditional Taco Bell value
proposition. Most Taco Bell customers went there because they wanted cheap food that would fill them
up. The extra ten cents may not have been much in absolute value, but it was a 13% increase in the price
of a 79 cent taco. It is likely that this small increase in price caused a larger decrease in the customers’
willingness to pay.
Market Value Coverage
The extremely low price of Taco Bell’s food meant that almost anyone was able to pay for the
Border Lights menu. However, an increase in the price may have decreased a customer’s willingness to
pay by a similar amount, leading to an estimated MVC of 87% for Affordability.

Accessibility

Availability
In 1995, at the time of the launch of the Border Lights menu, there were 4,800 Taco Bell
restaurants throughout the country. After a three-month testing period in Portland, Oregon, the menu
was launched at all Taco Bell locations, making the items readily available to millions of Americans. Taco
Bell’s core customer base was young people, specifically 18 - 24 year old males, which is a demographic
that may be more likely to eat late or at non-traditional meal times. Consequently, most Taco Bell
restaurants opened early and closed late, with some even open 24-hours a day, in order to achieve Taco
Bell’s goal: “to dominate the late night.” In the year before the Border Lights menu was introduced, Taco
Bell also began to expand into “points of access” beyond their restaurants, including carts and kiosks in
malls and movie theaters. (Cortez, 1993)

Convenience
The items on the Border Lights menu were replicas of traditional menu items, but with low- or
non-fat versions of components such as cheese, sour cream, and ground beef (Collins, From Taco Bell, a
Healthier Option, 1995). Therefore, each item took the same amount of time to make as the full-fat
version. However, the addition of new ingredients meant that restaurant workers had to be producing a
whole new set of products. One industry reporter claims that the addition of new ingredients was a
“logistics nightmare” that led to a massive slow-down in production behind the counters (Lansner,
1999). This does not indicate that the Border Lights menu items were themselves less convenient than
traditional menu items, rather that they made it more difficult for all items to be produced as quickly. A
VP at Taco Bell confirmed that the additional ingredients added “significant complexity to [the] system
(Kramer, 1996).” If this led to an increased wait time, this may have had a negative effect on the overall
convenience of Taco Bell restaurants for customers, which could have played a part in corporate
management deciding to give up on the menu.

Market Value Coverage

The appeal of fast food hinges on convenience and Taco Bell has positioned itself so that its
products are easily available to the American masses at all times. There may have been a slight impact
on the quickness of order fulfillment due to the introduction of the new ingredients necessary for the
Border Lights menu items. This led to an estimated MVC of 95% for Accessibility.

Conclusion
Total Market Value Coverage
When the scores for MVC based on each individual A are multiplied together, the estimated
overall MVC for the Border Lights menu is:

Overall MVC = Awareness × Acceptability × Affordability × Accessibility

= 50% × 9% × 87% × 95% = 𝟑. 𝟕%

Because of the multiplicative nature of the 4A’s, the good scores on Affordability and Accessibility
cannot compensate for the failure in Acceptability and the negative aspects of brand Awareness.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Many of the factors that led to the failure of the Border Lights menu would have been difficult
to change through marketing at the time. In the mid-1990’s, Americans were beginning to say that they
wanted healthier options, but this mindset had not become as pervasive as it is today. When eating at
Taco Bell, taste and price were simply more important than nutrition. McDonald’s had faced a similar
problem when it launched the McLean Deluxe in the early 1990’s. They found that people who came in
for a burger wanted a burger, not health food (Martin, 1995). This goes back to the quote from
McDonald’s that “healthy” was a turn-off for their customers. In the 2000’s, McDonald’s launched a
campaign to change this, embracing health and wellness as a corporate focus and aiming its marketing
messages at 'Balanced, Active Lifestyles,' including better food choices and increased exercise for
children (Bryan, 2005). McDonald’s was better able to do this because its customers include more
families than Taco Bell, who mostly cater to men 18 and over.
Taco Bell may have found greater success with reduced-fat versions of the take-home kits they
sold in grocery stores. Because consumers are more likely to choose healthy food when planning ahead,
they may have been more inclined to buy low-fat taco kits to use later than to buy a low-fat taco in a
restaurant. This also may have been attractive to the young men who had been regular customers and
now were cooking at home more as they got older. If the company was successful with the kits, this
could help increase the psychological acceptability of healthier food coming from Taco Bell, which could
then be used to launch healthier options in Taco Bell restaurants.
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Associated Press. (1995, February 9). Taco Bell turns out the Border Lights. Colorado Springs Gazette - Telegraph ,
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Bloomberg Business News. (1995, August 18). Still Waiting For The Border Lights Revolution Taco Bell's Latest Line
Is Not Such A Hot Seller. The Record , p. B2.

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a low-carb, multigrain bun. Yeah, right. Fortune , p. 134.

Bryan, T. (2005, October 17). Campaigns: McDonald's takes new step in effort to get kids active. PR Week US , p.
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