I Must Know You to Grow You Popeyes

5 Lessons We Learned From Popeyes Viral Success And How You Can Utilize It To Grow Your Business

This article is not another review of who has the best craven sandwich. Because we already know the answer to that, but nosotros'll save that debate for another time.

We're dissecting if the $65 million in free printing plus the one,000,000+ social media mentions, posts and retweets were worth what comes with unexpected viral success. People are even buying chicken sandwiches on eBay for thousands of dollars. In other words, Popeyes has accomplished something merely very few brands could without any national advertizement campaign or celebrity sponsorship.

Simply not every brand is ready for viral success. Doesn't matter how big they are. If their processes are not in identify to prepare the brand for hundreds of thousands of people to walk through their doors, yous volition end up losing big time.

Retrieve about information technology this manner, imagine you lot have a regular online t-shirt shop, and Oprah or Kylie Jenner tells everyone that they purchase something from your website and their followers should back up y'all. That would be millions of hits to your website within minutes and it will 100% crash! If you don't have the processes or engineering in place to go your site back up within minutes, you will lose millions of dollars and your reputation.

That scenario is what's happening with Popeyes. They didn't expect this viral boom, and information technology acquired their employees to work double overtime, lines to stretch around the cake, and some locations to run out of chicken sandwiches entirely. Information technology also caused inconsistency in their product and created thousands of frustrated customers.

I visited multiple locations and noticed that 80% of people that bought the sandwiches were people that already supported the make, maybe not all at the same time but were all expected customers. Only about 10 – 20% of people that visited were first-fourth dimension customers, and one-half of those will probably never return.

They could have prevented this past having the marketing, purchasing, and operations team worked together immediately when they signaled that this was going viral. Even though no-one tin can predict what will go viral, with the right social media tools tracking the right metrics, you can catch it earlier it blows upwardly.

So let's start at the start. On August 12th, 2019, Popeyes officially released their new Chicken Sandwich.

On August 19th, Chick-Fil-A tweeted "Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the ♥ for the original." A shot at Popeyes new craven sandwich that is also made of Chicken, Brioche Bun, and Pickles.

Then Wendy's with their 3.3 million followers started the biggest chicken state of war of 2019 with i tweet "Y'all out here fighting about which of these fools has the second-best chicken sandwich."

When Wendy's took a shot at Popeyes, that is the exact moment I knew this would create a viral conversation on anybody'south feed. This is the verbal moment the marketing, purchasing, and operation departments should have paid attention.

Running a social media marketing visitor for over ten years, and working in marketing for more than xv years, I've worked with some of the biggest franchises in the world. I've seen my share of viral campaigns. So my marketing senses immediately kicked in, and I couldn't stop thinking of all the things they should have been doing behind the scenes.

Let'due south break it down.

Marketing:

Their marketing team should take been paying attention. The moment people started creating craven sandwich memes, and Popeyes Twitter started blowing upward with retweets they should accept brought the operations team in the chat.

This was very noticeable because earlier the craven sandwich proclamation, they never received more than 1000 retweets an average on any given posts. After Chick-fil-a and Wendy's joined the conversation, those mentions significantly increased. That was the outset signal of the chicken sandwich going viral.

Operations:

After the Operations team got notified of what was happening on social media, they should have put a plan in place to actuate or create the processes that would assist the locations prepare for the attending that quickly moved from social media to the restaurants.

From increasing staff, ordering products to the procedures needed to handle a large crowd. For example, I visited multiple locations ii weeks afterwards the release, and in that location were all the same 8 or so employees working within and no-one outside. In dissimilarity, on any given twenty-four hours, Chick-fil-a has double that corporeality of people working.

I besides notice that the line at Popeyes was the same length at Chick-fil-a every day. Even so, while y'all would only expect 10 minutes at Chick-fil-a, y'all waited an hr or longer at Popeyes. If the proper procedures and processes were in place, then the experience would exist more favorable.

In a crazy social media way, those long lines were similar pouring fuel on an already blazing burn down. Because FOMO drives people. Now when the operations team noticed the long lines, they should have brought the purchasing squad in the chat.

Purchasing:

The purchasing team should take already been on sentinel from when the social media mentions grew essentially. Then should accept been planning how to get more products to the restaurants when the lines started forming at the local restaurants.

It's also of import to annotation that Popeyes is a chicken chain, so they should have enough of chicken in stock plus influential ownership power with their nutrient distributors to hands become all the ingredients they need to make the craven sandwiches.

Nosotros tin can't overlook that the effect with the product might fifty-fifty get deeper than just not having craven. These items might be proprietary to Popeyes and therefore might require additional evolution.

If they use standard premium stock chicken and practice the coating with breading and unique toppings at the eating house level, then this would not exist a difficult result to solve with emergency deliveries and calls to their distributors. However, if the chicken is pre-breaded, and so that is not just the benefactor, but a manufacturing issue.

Even though those are some of the things that should accept been done to weather this viral moment, I besides know that there are things that if not planned correctly could also exist a roadblock in coming together need.

Supply & Demand:

Running out of chicken sandwiches might have worked temporarily in their favor, just that probably happened past mistake. If you understand how restaurants get their products from their food distribution partners to the restaurants, y'all'll know that Popeyes was perchance at the mercy of the distributors.

The distributors probably didn't accept enough supplies, or if they go their products like their craven directly from a farm, they probably have to wait weeks to get the quantity needed to supply their restaurants. This is also why vendor relationships are essential in franchising and business organisation in general.

Labor is hard:

Hiring dozens of new employees at the same time is no piece of cake feat. Hiring is also timely and costly for franchises. In add-on to hiring, they would need to sufficiently train those employees, and that as well requires manpower and time.

Company Culture:

To operate like a Chick-fil-a, that has to be baked into your entire visitor civilisation. I've seen the same auto lines that Popeyes is now experiencing every day at Chick-fil-a, but their culture was built to operate at that capacity. From how the staff engages with their customers to accept orders in the drive-thru or inside the restaurants. That takes a lot of training and planning, and Popeyes was simply non built that mode.

Conclusion

Even with all the things that they had total control of, there were many things they had no power to control. This is a bang-up learning experience for Popeyes and any other franchise business that might terminate upwards with viral success.

1. Start from now, look at your marketing strategies and technologies, are they plenty to help you arrive front of a situation like this before it spreads like wildfire?

2. What about your vendor relationships? If you're a $1 million client to them, will they put a $500 million customer on concur to help y'all meet the demands that would essentially help to serve your customers better?

three. Most importantly, your company processes. Exercise you have well-defined procedures that tin can accost customer service, production direction, and human resources that your brand tin can easily activate and deploy across multiple locations and departments?

4. I did adore what Popeyes did afterward running out of chicken sandwiches. They started driving everyone to download their app if they wanted to keep in touch when chicken sandwiches are dorsum in stock. That was a genius move! Kudos to their marketing team for putting that in play.

At present they have hundreds of thousands of app downloads. What they practise with the data will exist important. Will they use information technology to better understand how their customers engage with them that would essentially aid them to be better prepared for another viral moment?

5. We can't deny the fact that even with all the failures, missed opportunities, this was an overall win for the local franchisees. Without no additional spend except for food toll, they received a lot of new customers that resulted in the loftier volume of sales that will undoubtedly accept a positive touch on their rest sheet. Now they tin can hire more people in their local communities, and that in my book is a win.

Special Thank you to Reid Notle, Vice President of Brand Strategy at Ballard Brands, Omar Hawthorne, Director, Franchise Development & Community Affairs at Golden Krust Caribbean area Restaurant and Shayla Moore Director of Marketing and Communications at Foam, Inc. for their contribution.

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Sociallybuzz launched in 2009 based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is a Social Media Management, Advertising, and Reputation Direction Visitor. Nosotros exist to help businesses abound using social media, data, and advertising.

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