They changed the chicken. That was the downfall.
A night time bite of an episode for you!
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SOURCES
Give a Little Nibble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXV9himkV0Y
Wendy Thomas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GVs00xkoiE
Mr. Wendy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQPikkQ5lns
Red Wig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIblkj0z7p0
https://www.complaintsboard.com/wendys-b100525
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/springfield-il/stephen-steve-khayyat-11451109
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
So let’s wrap up our concentrated looks at brands trying to stage a turnaround with some comfort food, and one of the places you can find that is at Wendy’s, the fast food burger restaurant that was briefly #2 behind McDonald’s before their long-time rival Burger King reclaimed that spot.
That is, if you exclude chicken and subs and pizza and other types of fast food, because I’m pretty sure Chick Fil-A and Jersey Mike’s and Domino’s Pizza are all putting some pretty serious pressure on burger joints anyhow.
But Wendy’s is a particularly interesting brand because they’ve had a long heritage of being different. Founded by Dave Thomas in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio to serve the same style of square hamburgers offered at Kewpee Hamburgers in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Dave famously named the chain after his fourth child, Melinda Lou “Wendy” Thomas, but it was he, not her, who served as the spokesperson for the brand for many years.
The chain went through a rapid expansion in the 1970s as it opened up 1000 stores and went international by its 10th anniversary. But to know the history of Wendy’s is to know about trial and error, because the brand started stagnating in the mid-1980s and tried various ways to reinvent itself.
One of the most interesting ideas they ever tried was to launch a salad-bar style buffet called the Superbar that they offered for about 10 years between 1988 and 1998. Another idea they launched in 1988 that did stick was their 99 cent value menu, which no other major chain was offering at the time.
Their menu’s always been a little eclectic with offerings like frosty desserts, baked potatoes and chili alongside their burgers. They’ve also tried at various times to be a primary destination for chicken, for deli sandwiches, for pulled pork and even Spongebob Squarpants crabby patties.
Which were, y’know, square burgers, but with a special sauce that was basically a peppery mayonnaise.
But here’s the thing about Wendy’s. If you ask people what the chain is known for, you’ll very rarely hear about the appeal of their square burgers, and that’s despite a very famous advertising campaign from 1984 where the elderly actress Clara Peller kept asking, “Where’s the Beef?”
Nope, you’ll hear about chili or baked potatoes or dipping Wendy’s French fries into a chocolate frosty. Not exactly
So it’s no surprise that Wendy’s is struggling. The question is, can they turn things around? I’d argue that before they do, they need to re-establish their brand identity.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
OK, so before we dig into Wendy’s as a brand, let’s first understand why I’d even talk about them in the first place, and that’s because they just hired a new CMO named Tariq Hassan who’s most famous for helping McDonald’s up its pop culture credentials with campaigns like adult Happy Meals and Grimace’s Birthday.
He’s coming in just as Wendy’s has endured a year and a half of same-store sales declines, with one of the worst quarters being earlier this year in Q2 as McDonald’s was enduring its mini-crisis with a CEO who didn’t seem to like eating his company’s food on camera and Burger King’s President was giving out his phone number and asking people to tell him what was wrong with the brand.
If you can’t compete in those circumstances, you really have a problem.
And Wendy’s does have a problem. A few years ago, they were looking really good because they were on fire, in part due to a smart social media campaign on Twitter that involved throwing shade at a lot of brands and responding to users with sarcastic replies.
Marketers were talking about how Wendy’s had found a modern new voice, and consumers were giving the brand a chance, which is why it was beating out Burger King for that coveted #2 spot in the fast food hierarchy.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. After that “Where’s the Beef?” ad campaign, Wendy’s positioned founder Dave Thomas as its spokesman, a job he did for years in over 800 spot commercials.
He wasn’t a runaway success, but he fared better than the campaign before him, which was called “Give a little nibble,” that did so badly when it aired in 1987 that Wendy’s fired its ad agency after it ran for seven weeks to an indifferent audience.
And, I mean, this commercial was BAD. The premise was supposed to be that you could tear off a small chunk of the beef and taste that it was good before you ate the sandwich, but then it had people tearing giant chunks off these absurdly large burgers and…
Who eats fast food like this? Wendy’s really was banking on this campaign to be their breakout appeal to consumers to turn around declining sales, but it was a total dud.
Dave Thomas, by contrast, went over well and grew far more popular as the commercials he starred in started playing up the humor and emphasizing quality. “The best burgers in the business” was a better tagline, and Wendy’s has sense stuck with that basic idea along with variations of, “You can eat great, even late.”
Wendy’s has also tried to play up the square hamburgers with lines like “It’s good to be square” and the more recent “Square’s the beef.” And they also tried to follow McDonald’s very casual “I’m lovin’ it” lead with taglines like “Uh-huh” and “We got you.”
But since Dave Thomas died in 2002 and 2004’s “Mr. Wendy” unofficial spokesman campaign didn’t really connect with consumers and the 2007 “Red Wig” campaign creeped people out, featuring cartoonish character in a red Wendy’s wig doing bizarre things. Wendy Thomas briefly stepped up as the spokesperson for the brand, but she doesn’t really look the part of the mascot portrayal of her younger self.
So the chain moved on to other ideas. And that’s where that sort of edgy, snarky social media voice helped them out for a bit to stand out during a time where McDonald’s was getting weaker thanks to pressure from other fast food chains like Chick-Fil-A and consumers were looking for alternatives to burgers.
But the problem is, edgy, snarky social media voices are only fun while people are paying attention to them, and the Burger King marketing team has always been good at provoking attention with similar stunts and McDonald’s, as we mentioned, really upped their game by tying all that social media attention to actual products they were trying to sell.
Wendy’s, on the other hand, has really struggled to have a distinct identity. And it’s pretty clear when you walk into a Wendy’s. The idea that this is a place where you go for “old-fashioned hamburgers” is still very prevalent, and the problem is that Wendy’s has not updated that experience enough to convince people otherwise.
Beyond a few fruit-flavored drinks, they don’t have anything exciting in terms of beverages.
Beyond promotional products like their collaboration with Spongebob or Netflix’s Wednesday show, one Oklahoma franchise’s idea has been to bring back the so-called secret menu item called the “T-Rex” which is a triple cheeseburger with triple the meat and cheese – so nine patties and nine slices of American cheese – along with a T-shirt if you can finish it, all for $29.99.
Wendy’s is also rolling out their Frosty Frights campaign next week. It’s targeted at kids and is one of their better ideas because it encourages them to collect Halloween-themed toys based on one of their most distinctive menu items – the Frosty – and at least offers something no other chain can.
As a kid who grew up collecting McDonald’s happy meal toys that looked like food but transformed into robots or creatures, I like the idea of Frosty toys for kids. But I don’t know how competitive it is during a time where kids can go over to McDonald’s right now and get a Hello Kitty dressed up like a Godzilla character.
McDonald’s really has its finger on the pulse of pop culture in a way Wendy’s does not.
But let’s talk about financials. Wendy’s has endured year after year of declines in its stock price, and it’s fallen around 65% over the last five years. They’re not profitable as a corporation and they’re reportedly closing down close to 300 franchise stores this year, leaving them with about 5,700 stores in the US.
Burger King has over 8,000 and McDonald’s has around 14,000.
And Burger King is succeeding due to its renewed emphasis on high quality while McDonald’s is really focused at the moment on communicating value.
Where does Wendy’s fit in? Beyond specific consumer preference, it really seems like their identity right now is to be the best alternative when you’re tired of those two choices but still want a fast food burger.
So, how does Wendy’s get itself out of this mess? I personally am skeptical that stunt marketing and collaborations are the right way to go, so I’m concerned that the returning CEO Bob Wright, fresh off reviving Potbelly Sandwiches, and the new CMO Tariq Hassan, who helped launch the Grimace Shake, may try to focus on the wrong things.
What Wendy’s needs right now is a commitment to something. Their brand has long been built around real people like Dave Thomas and his daughter Wendy, so I’d suggest that committing to authenticity might be their biggest strength. Real food. Real ingredients. Real flavor. Real classics that stand the test of time.
But Wendy’s has also got to up its quality. When they launched their Spongebob collaboration, they got dragged pretty heavily on social media for selling consumers burgers that didn’t seem that special along with shakes that tasted more like mango than pineapple.
People would post pictures of these gray, greasy, disgusting-looking burgers that didn’t reflect well on Wendy’s or the Spongebob tie-in.
That probably hurt them more than they realized, because they blew a big chance to bring in a younger consumer audience.
Their service model is also really outdated. Wendy’s is still largely counter service or drive-through.
Their mobile app stinks and the experience of buying food from them is absolutely horrible much of the time.
They have poor franchise standards for customer experience – just look at your local Wendy’s reviews online and you’ll see! – and Wendy’s is notorious for getting orders wrong because many locations don’t have screens that allow customers to see what they’re ordering.
Now, I know Wendy’s can be better, because 20 years ago when I was living in Springfield, IL, the best Wendy’s I’ve ever seen in operation was just a few steps away from where I worked.
The manager there, Steve Khayyat, was known for running an amazingly tight ship and he turned that Wendy’s into a place where the service standards were high, the quality was good and the food was fresh. He took care of customers and demanded the most from his staff, and he clearly loved what he was doing.
And you know, he was probably too good for Wendy’s. He’d run several fast food restaurants around town and would run others before he passed away in 2013.
But while he was at Wendy’s, and I’m not kidding about this, they had a sign up on the marquee board that said, “Come see Mr. Khayyat and his team,” and people in Springfield took it seriously because the man was that good at what he did. They were always busy.
That’s the sort of authenticity that drives repeat business. And I don’t know how Wendy’s can repeat that sort of performance, but I do know that if their new management team can make Wendy’s matter, it’s going to be because they can connect the dots between the modern desire for authenticity and connection with a restaurant founded by a guy who wanted to introduce his new city to a favorite style or burger from his hometown, who named the chain after his daughter and who insisted on offering an alternative to the same old, same old.
That story was what connected to people in the 1970s and explained the explosive growth of Wendy’s. And that story was that worked again in the 1990s when Dave Thomas returned as the spokesperson.
And I truly hope they can find that throughline again and make Wendy’s matter to people in this era. Because hey, I don’t eat meat myself, but I’m never gonna turn down a Frosty.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been the Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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