On the menu of restaurant promotions, “free” is a hot item these days; chains of all types are whipping up giveaways to struggle against dwindling traffic. But free food can turn on you if you don’t get the recipe right, as KFC, Quizno’s and Carl’s Jr. have found out in recent months. Chief Marketer spoke to the man behind one of the year’s most successful free food promotions, Denny’s CMO Mark Chmiel, to find out what made the fast-casual chain’s post-Super Bowl Grand Slam Giveaway such a success.
CHIEF MARKETER: What’s the secret to giving away 2 million free sit-down meals nationally in eight hours?
MARK CHMIEL: First, we kept it simple and made the basic Grand Slam the offer. Second, we partnered with our ops people to put together an execution plan weeks in advance. For each unit, we did forecasting on how much pancake mix they’d need, how much syrup, how many eggs. Then we worked with our distribution centers to drop-ship to the stores, corporate and franchised.
CM: Denny’s has about 1,200 franchised units among its 2,500-store global chain. How important was it to get franchisees to buy in to the promotion?
CHMIEL: That’s been the flaw in many restaurant promotions. We held town hall meetings with our franchisee groups in 12 or 13 major market areas and heard their feedback. We enlisted them on our side early, as opposed to letting them worry about the promotion. And with that advance planning from ops, 99% of their questions were answered immediately.
CM: What about compensating franchisees for food given away in the promotion?
CHMIEL: We paid for the food at corporate. We said, “Guys, all we want you to do is ramp up your labor and get ready to offer consumers a fantastic experience.”
CM: Did you build in safeguards against a huge turnout?
CHMIEL: If lines got long and folks started complaining about having to get to work, we offered standees a Grand Slam coupon good for the next week. We also offered coupons to people not seated by 2 p.m. We went out of our way to make sure nobody was disappointed.
At the time we thought it was a simple promotion: Take care of your operations, your stores and the consumer, and give everybody a big party. Judging from the way other brands later mucked it up, maybe it wasn’t that simple.
CM: How did you leverage the Internet to promote this?
CHMIEL: We didn’t use an online coupon; we wanted it to be an open gift. But we did use social media like Facebook and Twitter to tell the story. That’s why the promotion happened on Tuesday morning rather than the day after the Super Bowl ad. We used Monday as our big PR day.
CM: Were you at all concerned that the promotion wouldn‘t take off?
CHMIEL: [Agency] J. Walter Thompson, where I worked in the mid-‘80s, did the first “video coupon” to drive Burger King trials, a TV spot telling people to come in and say, “Whopper beat the Big Mac” for a free hamburger. All over the country, they had lines out the door and across the street. So we were pretty confident this time.
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