QR Cat Diverts Applebee’s Lunchers, Drives Traffic

One of casual dining chain Applebee’s largest franchisees has seen strong traffic growth in recent months with a 14-minute lunchtime guarantee. And one of the most popular parts of that campaign is a talking cat at each table—courtesy of a clever QR code—that helps keep diners entertained before the food comes.

The cat is part of a three-sided tabletop tent and features a 2D code where its mouth should be. Diners can open any of the most popular code-scan apps on their smartphones, scan the code, and immediately be taken to an animated video of the lower half of the cat’s face. By holding their phone up to the tabletop, they can watch as the cat banters for two minutes about the Applebee’s menu (“Is fish on the menu? No??”) and pranks on fellow patrons (“How about some fresh litter? I’m starting to think outside the box, if you know what I mean.”)

Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions, the agency that came up with both the 14-minutes-or-free lunch guarantee and the tabletop QR campaign, reports that since the campaign began in June, Applebee’s franchisee Thomas & King has reported almost a 10% increase in lunch traffic over the period before the launch, and a 4.9% rise in total lunch sales.

While those increases are probably due to the broad campaign around the service guarantee, Christy Hiler, chief strategy officer for Cornett, says the TableCat QR portion of the campaign has seen a very high level of activation– 30,000 in the first months, and 65,000 to date– indicating its popularity with the public.

The TableCat QR promotion and the 14-minute lunch guarantee are both currently running in all 89 restaurants operated in seven markets in Ohio, Kentucky and Arizona by Thomas & King, the third largest franchisee in the Applebee’s chain.

Hiler says the campaign was conceived to combat a falloff in weekday lunch traffic at the casual dining category generally, due largely to the perception that table service will eat up too much time. “We really started seeing lunch take a hit back around 2005-2006, when the Qdobas, the Chipotles and the Paneras gave birth to that whole new segment [of “quick-casual” restaurants],” Hiler says. “We know from research that people still want to sit down and be served at lunch. But we also know that they want to be in and out in about 30 minutes. That 30 minutes is what we’re pushing for, and the 14 minute guarantee is how we’re getting there.”

First promotions of the 14-minute guarantee involved a long-form YouTube video of office workers rapping about the fast service which was cut down and used in short form as pre-roll video advertising on sites such as Pandora.com. Cornett also bought mobile display inventory both on ad networks and in pre-app positions.

Compared to the expandable dinner daypart, targeting restaurant lunch sales involves a narrow four-hour window in the day, Hiler says. “We know where our target audience is during those four hours. They’re online, reading the news, or listening to radio. So we did some traditional radio as well, during morning drive time. But a huge amount of our support has been digital.”

In-store, the 14-minute messaging continued with the TableCat tabletop scans, for which Cornett created the QR codes in-house. Actually, users also have the option to scan another code and get a talking human face. But the TableCat scans have outperformed by a large margin. Hiler speculates that the animated cat, which also figured in the rap video, is the breakout star of this campaign because people love cat videos on YouTube and feel the urge to share it with their friends.

“The idea was to get people in the restaurants to engage with the campaign,” says Hiler. “They’re sitting there, a captive audience, and if you look around a restaurant any time you go out to lunch you’ll see that they’re all on the phone.”

And Cornett and Thomas & King decided that what that audience wanted was to be diverted. “We wanted the campaign message to be interwoven, but ultimately we just wanted tom entertain them,” Hiler says. “We wanted to give them good feelings about the campaign and to make the time go faster.” In addition, by offering entertainment as a reward, the TableCat campaign sidesteps any other benefits consumers might expect for the trouble of opening an app and scanning a code—such as a rebate, which would have undercut the rationale for the whole 14-minute guarantee campaign.

Hiler credits Thomas & King for taking as much care executing the TableCat promotion as they have with the overall lunch guarantee, which entailed both menu and operational changes. “They were able to really communicate with their staff and get their buy-in,” she says . “Everyone knew how [the TableCat promotion] worked, so that if people had questions, they could walk them through it.”

That support is still an important factor in using QR codes. Although they’re deployed in many places, consumers report a rising level of frustration at not getting codes to work —whether that’s the fault of the code, the scanning app, or the mobile network they’re using.

“We designed the code so it could be read by all the most popular scanning apps,” Hiler says. “And right below it is the URL for the cat on our YouTube channel. So worst case scenario, if you can’t figure out the scan, you can just type in the URL and watch the video that way.”

That YouTube channel currently shows 35,000 views for the basic TableCat video, compared to about 15,00 for the “rap” video explaining the lunch guarantee. But Cornett has also created some follow-on videos featuring the cat commenting on timely topics of the day, including clips giving a cats’s eye view of the latest iPhone and the new Facebook timeline, and a short video users can send out to invite their coworkers to an Applebee’s lunch.

The TableCat videos also appear as a tab on the Facebook page for Applebee’s 14-minute lunch, currently with almost 6,000 likes.

Both the lunch guarantee and the TableCat QR code tactic are open-ended and may continue for a while, Hiler says. If success like the 10% increase in lunch traffic continues, they could also be picked up by other portions of the Applebee’s chain.

But she points to one problem with enhancing the TableCat QR in-house promotion with additional video clips. “We haven’t yet figured out how to indicate to guests that the content behind the QR code is different from what they’ve seen before,” she says.