How the Five Guys Website Creates Buzz for their Fresh Burgers

Hello, I’m a marketing student at NYU. Join me as I explore through this blog the ins and outs of marketing, including digging deep on some of your favorite brands. You can read my intro post here, and my most recent post about Oreo’s excellent Super Bowl commercial here.

Five Guys doesn’t engage in traditional marketing. You won’t catch a commercial for them, hear a jingle on the radio, or pass by any Five Guys billboards. Instead, the fast casual burger joint has always been really good at creating organic buzz for their products, and with even just a quick glance at their website, it’s not hard to figure out how.

If there’s one thing Five Guys wants you to know, it’s that they put the quality of their food first. Their homepage boasts one thing right in the center, “Handcrafted burgers and fries since 1986.” The key word here: “handcrafted.” This isn’t some mass produced, created in some factory and then stored in a freezer fast-food fare. This is food, made by hand, with care. And, as indicated by the mention of 1986, they’ve been successfully doing this for a long time. Other than an ad for Five Guys offerings — such as merchandise, their app, delivery — on the side and an “order now” link, this is the only thing on the homepage.

Every step deeper into the website only backs up this mission statement further. The menu page, prominently located, begins by saying “Five Guys’ passion for food is shared with our fans, which is why we never compromise. Fresh ingredients hand-prepared that satisfy your craving.” So if you didn’t know yet that those burgers and fries are made fresh just for you, now you do. Only then, below this declaration, do they get down to the business of providing links to their menus. What’s really special, however, is the row of YouTube videos on the bottom of the page all about how Five Guys ingredients are sourced from their buns to their pickles to their potatoes. Each video gives a sense for the care that’s put into each and every item.

Because they’re not some impersonal brand, if you scroll down to the banner at the bottom of every page, there’s a link to “The Five Guys Story.” The handful of paragraphs mostly focus on the restaurant’s identity as a family business, and its explosive growth once it decided to franchise. The focus on family — on Jerry and Janie Murrell running the company with their five sons — is endearing and gives what is a massive chain a more personal feel. But what really gets my attention is three short, well spaced lines at the bottom, under the title “Five Guys Facts.” It states, “We only use fresh ground beef. We only use peanut oil. There are no freezers in Five Guys locations, just coolers.”

It’s that last sentence that blows my mind.

Everything about Five Guys, everything on their website so far, has screamed “fresh.” Yet, until I read this, I hadn’t thought about what that really means. Freezers are helpful tools, generally essential to any kitchen. They also degrade the quality of meat. Especially when stored for an extended period of time. Five Guys is trying to tell us just how far they go to make sure that the food they serve is the highest quality possible.

Now that I’m intrigued, I want to know more. So I click on the “Media Fact Sheet.” My big complaint about this link is that it takes me to a PDF, and away from the website, but I digress. The fact sheet mostly says the same thing as the story page, it also bothers to include various awards the company has won, but once again, scrolling just a little ways down to the “facts” section is where I learn another interesting tidbit about how the Murrell family keeps their food tasting so good.

“Our buns, Five Guys’ only proprietary item, are baked fresh at bakeries five days per week.”

This fast-casual chain isn’t even phoning in the bread! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I buy my hamburger buns at the butcher and keep them in my freezer for when I need to pull a couple out for dinner. And this company, which has over 1,700 locations worldwide (according to the fact sheet) bakes their buns from scratch and has them delivered to each location every day. Let’s let that sink in for a minute.

It’s not hard to see how the family-owned burger joint captured the hearts of food-lovers everywhere (just ask President Obama). Five Guys puts the quality of their food first, and all of their marketing (including a strong social media game — and a secret menu!!!), starting with their own website revolves around that. Fans flock to new Five Guys locations, not because some ad caught their eye, but because the company is genuinely great at generating word-of-mouth for their top-notch burgers and freshly baked buns. Has this blog post made you hungry? I know I am.