‘Without conflict, there is no good story’: Wendy’s Kurt Kane on challenger strategy
When we interviewed Kurt Kane his office in Columbus, Ohio it was a brisk January morning; ‘It is colder round here’, Kane remarked, ‘than a McDonald’s freezer’. This is the story of how America’s third largest hamburger chain found its feisty underdog spirit again. Not by saying something new – Wendy’s had been talking about ‘fresh never frozen’ for years, though consumers hadn’t been hearing it – but by dialling up the volume around that key difference in an entertaining new way. As debate in the marketing community swirls around the value of social media, Wendy’s has become a powerful illustration of what is possible as an underdog if you have something different to say, and an internal culture with the freedom and imagination to push the possibilities of an emerging idea until it really gets people talking. And if you do it with a smile, of course.
Has Wendy’s always been a feisty underdog?
Wendy’s was founded in 1969 by Dave Thomas, and it was really founded to be able to provide a very differentiated experience versus the big players that existed in the category, which were McDonald’s and Burger King. One of the things that Dave always said was that he owed McDonald’s a tremendous debt of gratitude because they gave him something to look good against. That’s the gift Dave gave us. He gave us the ability to continue to challenge against the category. The perspective was never just Wendy’s is better than McDonald’s or Burger King, it was always Wendy’s advocating for our customers and communicating that they deserved better than they might be getting from everybody else.
One of the things you have become particularly celebrated for is the frozen versus fresh story over the last two years. What is the truth of how that started and how it grew?
We did a lot of research about the simple differences about our brand, and one truth that is very real is that Wendy’s is the only brand in the top seven hamburger brands here in the States that uses fresh never frozen beef on every hamburger every day. Nobody else does it. McDonald’s pretends to do it but they don’t. We’ve been saying we use fresh never frozen beef for a long time, but people hadn’t been hearing it because it was always part of another message. And so, we got laser-focused on communicating that through our traditional broadcast work and we also made it a very specific point on social media to start educating people about fresh never frozen. So, this guy named Thuggy-D challenged us on social media that it wasn’t possible to do fresh never frozen beef. And our first response was very straightforward, but he kept challenging and kept challenging, and we finally said, “you don’t have to get upset just because you forgot refrigerators existed there for a second”. And then, all of a sudden, the damn broke and everybody engaged and poor Thuggy-D had to delete his account because everybody came to Wendy’s side and it just exploded. So when it started it had nothing to do with McDonald’s; it had everything to do with us.
Do you think McDonald’s starting to do fresh in some of their offer was a response to the pinch that they were feeling from the public about what you were saying?
I think they had to - and it’s always nice when you can make the giant blink. But I think it’s a giant strategic mistake for them to try and follow Wendy’s: I just think they have felt tremendous pressure to do so.
It feels like you’ve got feistier in the way that you’re communicating this message.
For us, we take our food very seriously but we like to have a great time with what we do. And I think for us, we just really wanted to make sure people are crystal clear that there is a significant difference between the food they get at Wendy’s and that they get elsewhere. I think as you look at the world of social media and the way people engage, in particular on Twitter, which is what we’ve really been the most celebrated for, that level of authenticity, that level of directness, is something that people respond very well to. We always have to do it with a smile at the same point. We’re not mean-spirited, we’re not hostile. But we really push hard to make sure that they understand that there really is a choice out there that they’re making, and sometimes it takes being very direct to be able to get that point across.
Is this attitude much closer to the original DNA of Dave Thomas and how he started?
We went through an exercise where our entire marketing leadership group here went back and studied pretty much every ad that Wendy’s ever made and said, when were we at our best, when were we off-course, when did consumers respond the best, and what overall was the them to the story that really kept people connected? Where was the tension in that story and what was the source of conflict in that story? For us, without conflict, there is no good story, so we’re constantly looking to be able to keep that tension alive. Because without that creative tension, then there’s nothing interesting. For the history of the brand, at our best was when we were jousting against the corporate behemoths that are out there not really doing their job well enough to be able to advocate for their customers. So that’s the mantle that we’ve picked back up and that’s the fuel behind our social media strategy and behind the majority of communication strategies.
Clearly, the nature of communication, has evolved to be less subtle and more explicit, but how has it changed the way you think about the media mix?
I think the power of social media for us is that it can level a very unlevel playing field when it comes to media spending and media dollars. McDonald’s is significantly larger than us so the reality is they are always going to be in an advantaged traditional media position where they can always buy more media. That’s just the way it is. Social media, you have to earn, and particularly engagement, so when you think of how far and wide our social media communications have travelled, it doesn’t take a big investment for that to happen. It takes being clever and being confident and being pointed and engaging. So you have to earn those impressions and those impressions are a lot more valuable than just a typical 30-second television spot. For us, I think it’s really changed our perspective from saying, when’s our TV ad going to break, to what do we want to say this week, what do we want people talking about?
And how does all of that effect, if it’s more weekly if not daily, the culture of how you make decisions?
I get asked a lot how many layers of approval does a typical tweet have, how many people need to see it, how many people need to review it before we tweet something. And my answer’s very direct, it’s zero. We have a fully-empowered team who has access to our accounts, and does out community management and our community engagement. But that said, it doesn’t mean that there’s not discipline, and it doesn’t mean we’re not doing our work upfront, because we meet all the time as a team to talk about our brand voice, our brand tone, what are the key things that we want to communicate to people, how do we feel about the work that’s been done over the past few weeks, what are optimistic about, what’s happening, culturally? For me, I think the mistake people make is to try and review work as it’s going out the door, rather than being plan-ful about it. But our team I trust implicitly because they know the brand as well as anybody. And culturally, it’s allowed us to move very quickly as well. And you have to, that’s just the way social media works. A perfect example was, on National Frozen Food Day, McDonald’s decided to come out and reinforce their announcement that on some hamburgers in restaurants they were going to be trying fresh beef. So within 30 minutes, our entire team had met, talked through it and decided to come out and congratulate them and celebrate all the frozen things that would be sticking around at McDonald’s. And it became one of the biggest social media posts for us of the year. But that all happened literally in 30 minutes in a hotel conference room, in the middle of another meeting, because we were that ready.
Tell us about the Spotify We Beefin’ mixtape. How did that start and what did that grow into?
Wendy’s mixtape, We Beefin’.
It was a really fun one. It started because we got into a back-and-forth Twitter battle with Wingstop where they came out and tried to do a little bit of a rap battle with the Wendy’s Twitter handle, and our team smoked their team. And many people commented, said, Wendy’s you guys are so good that you should put out an album, you should drop a mixtape — and everyone was joking, they didn’t think we’d actually do it, and then the team secretly went to work and put together our own mixtape with five tracks on it and brought it to life. Once we actually dropped the mixtape, we didn’t put any media dollars behind it but the thing blew up overnight, and we had four of the top five tracks on the Spotify Global 50, the Global Viral 50. We were one of the most downloaded things out there, people were streaming it like crazy. And the best part was everybody in the hip-hop community kept saying how good it was. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but it’s the best hip-hop album of the year is probably Wendy’s We Beefin, at that time. And it went off to Cannes and we walked away with seven lions and three golds. Honestly, if you’d have asked me a year ago were we planning to do a mixtape and try and take over the hip-hop community with Wendy’s We Beefin’, I would have said I have no idea what you’re talking about. So it’s just one of those things that organically happened. We had a ton of fun with it, got an amazing amount of media out of it. For the very low cost of being able to throw together the mixtape and have some fun with it, we got literally tens and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of media out of it, for what cost us probably $50,000 to go make it in a recording studio.
How is the business doing as a result of all of this? To what degree are you able to correlate all of this with your business upturn?
It’s always a hot debate on social media specifically and what are the ROIs you get after it. For me, the most important metrics are what are we seeing in terms of overall sales growth, and are restaurants more profitable? We’ve had over five years of consecutive same-restaurant sales growth and really, importantly, on top of that our brand, all our internal metrics related to brand health, continue to grow in terms of relevance, differentiation, quality perception. Our large hamburger business continues to grow, so collectively it’s been very healthy for us to be more direct and more competitive and more overt. People are engaging with us in a big way. Younger consumers are coming back to the brand. So there’s a lot that has been very good for the brand in really having this challenger mindset really come back to the surface.
Do you think culturally, at the moment, that the world’s starting to distrust big?
I think everybody roots for the underdog and that’s one of the unique gifts that the Wendy’s brand has, that they’ve always viewed it as a bit of the underdog, because that’s how we were born. So even as we got larger and larger over time, the more we’ve held on to that underdog status, the more consumers have helped support us and continued to advocate for us. I do think right now there’s a bit of a cultural moment where people continue to celebrate the underdog and champion them. I think the biggest issue is they just don’t trust the big, giant corporations, and McDonald’s happens to be the poster child for one of those. And, quite honestly, a lot of those corporations have earned that lack of trust, and I think McDonald’s is a good example of that too. They made a lot of decisions with their food and things that I don’t think they should be terribly proud of, and that’s why we consistently go after them on it, because they could be better; they should be better and they’ve chosen not to be. And I think our customers really appreciate that we’ve taken a different path.