Wendy’s and Their Wicked Social Media Game

*Final Project*

Wendy’s has stepped up their game in the last few years. In addition to creating a competitive advantage regarding their products such as promoting their never frozen meat, their online presence has created a positive buzz for the company. Unlike many competitors within the food industry space who use their social media unauthentically and unoriginally, Wendy’s continues to think outside the box in finding ideas that most engage their audience. Ultimately, Wendy’s has achieved social media success by having a strong understanding of their brand, and ensuring the same image is being presented continually among all platforms available.

The use of planned content versus canned content is the main way in which Wendy’s maintains a strong brand presence online. A great deal of time and effort is placed into creating tailored and authentic content that generates increased value for the company and its image overall. Key features of planned content include content being relevant, crafted, intentional, and unique (Hamza, 2017b). These features are kept in mind with many of Wendy’s social media stunts.

Social media platforms often promote negative feedback as commenters have the benefit of voicing their opinion with no interaction from the victim, creating a sense of protection from the commenter. However, Wendy’s used this idea to their advantage and took it further with their #PretzelLoveStories online campaign. This campaign includes a soap opera type video in which actors read out diners’ tweets about their new menu item. However, the goal of the video was to create content that was intentionally silly and ridiculous.

By crafting their content in this way, Wendy’s was able to avoid negative comments in purposefully creating bad content. Further, this generated a positive reaction from the audience, and spawned over 1800 comments and 11000 likes from viewers in its first week of release. Leveraging both positive and negative attributes of social media in addition to a unique campaign proved successful in this case (Tice, 2013).

Further, Wendy’s ensures that their content is not only planned, but that it is tailored to each medium they use. For example, the brand’s quirky and humorous image has most notably been exposed through Twitter, where the brand has most recently created strategy around responding to fans and competitors tweets in unique ways.

These tweets have proved successful because they uphold Wendy’s voice of being a “challenger with charm” (Shirastava, 2017). The use of sass, humour, and fun has proven successful for the brand in appealing to the Millennial generation.

This brand image is also matched on other platforms such as Instagram where entertaining captions are paired with images that make use of warm lighting, clear and purposeful cropping, and pleasing details of Wendy’s products. It is proven that “90% of all information transmitted to the brain is visual” (Hamza, 2017c), and thus attracting the audience and building a brand image through both text and visuals (“A Recipe”, 2015) will solidify the brand image. Therefore, Wendy’s understands that planned content must also be combined with respect for each medium in order to achieve the greatest success on each social media platform.

Wendy’s excels at using social media’s benefit of engagement. Social media allows for immediate interaction from a brand to their consumers, as well as consumer to the brand and consumer to other consumers. These interactions are paramount in generating and maintaining a healthy brand image and brand loyalty.

All platforms offer the ability to interact with an audience. Among all platforms, Wendy’s makes the most use of this element through interacting with super speed. Whether on Facebook or Twitter, all comments, whether good or bad, are responded to in a quick manner, relaying that feedback from customers is important to them and is a top priority. Further, comments made are all public and not hidden from other consumers. This allows for transparency, another factor consumers appreciate among brands. In addition, by tailoring responses to their target audience, creating non-threatening and inviting responses creates brand loyalty for all consumers that come into contact with the consumer-brand interactions (“A Recipe”, 2015). For example, when a consumer comes across the post shown below, Wendy’s response does not only delight the commenter, but all of those who have the option to read the conversation. This creates a larger brand reputation with less legwork involved.

Another example includes using social media to ask open-ended questions to their consumers. This makes consumers feel more emotionally attached to the brand in that their opinion is being heard, but also generates discussion among consumers for a perpetual conversation and buzz.

Wendy’s has also elevated the feature of engagement by creating loyalty in responding to questions and requests rather than customer service issues. While this may seem like bad practise, Wendy’s is still responding to their audience while making use of social media’s public forums. Creating content that is shareable and exciting is more enticing to a broader audience than formal, one-on-one dialogue. In fact 95% of Wendy’s tweets were in response to question and requests whereas only 5% are in response to customer service issues. This has proved successful for the brand, as the following Tweet for example was the second most re-tweeted post for that day (Shirastava, 2017).

While the response does not address a customer service issue, or really even relate to the brands service or products at all, it attracts their target audience in a positive way and makes the brand seem more human and accessible. This idea also takes from how content online goes viral. Bullas says that viral content is produced when it is genuine, interactive, compelling, and short, all of which this tweet encompasses. (Hamza, 2017a).

Lastly, Wendy’s ensures that their brand image is consistent among all platforms and always looks to continually push the envelope. Wendy’s Twiter roasting for example was not a one-time stunt. In fact, it has now become a key strategy for Wendy’s. This consistency creates buzz among consumers and engagement with the brands social media in reading new responses from the brand. The consumer now expects fresh content from Wendy’s periodically, and it is important that Wendy’s maintains their current level of engagement so as to keep and build their happy audience.

Wendy’s also looks to the future to provide hot, new content that always keeps people talking. In creating more personal and controversial content, this keeps consumers and competition on their toes, always interested in what Wendy’s has to say next. This idea however is often difficult to always succeed in.

For example, earlier this year, Wendy’s responded to a customer’s Tweet by posting a comedic Pepe the Frog meme, which has most recently become the symbol for white supremacy. Wendy’s in return received great backlash against the Tweet and deleted it.

While all content may not be a success, it is how a brand respond’s to the negativity that matters. Wendy’s used social media’s feature of immediacy to take down the post and then respond with another Tweet apologizing and explaining themselves (Shirastava, 2017). Owning up to their actions proved successful, and Wendy’s has been able to bounce back from this mishap. It is important to note that Wendy’s still looks to humour in enticing their audience. 43% of sharers on social media choose to share funny content, identifying that this genre is very palatable despite some risks involved in pleasing a large audience through comedy (Shirastava, 2017).

In conclusion, Wendy’s Social Media Manager says that their success comes from “having a strong sense of who our brand is and what we should sound like [which] ensures that we’ll come across consistent in our communications” (Shirastava, 2017). Creating a solid brand image, remaining consistent in exposing it to the consumer, and further crafting the content for each separate platform are key factors in Wendy’s social media strategy. Authentic planned content attracts consumers, while quick and constant engagement in addition to continuously thinking outside the box keeps consumers around and builds emotional and loyal relationships.

In addition, having a strong idea of a brand’s target audience aids in better curating online content and choosing what advertising strategies will work best. It is clear that Wendy’s is attracting Millennials, who are more engaged with digital technology and care more about previous generations regarding higher quality ingredients the ethics around their food.

So, are Wendy’s online tactics really successful in reality? While its 1.5 million Twitter followers may be considered a vanity metric, it proves that the audience for the brand is growing, and is not far behind other competitors who hold a stronger market share, such as McDonalds’ 3.3 million followers. It is also important to note that with individual tweets netting over 10000 shares and 30000 likes, Wendy’s audience is more engaged and loyal to the brand, which holds much more value than just numbers. Further, the financial value of the brand has grown from their efforts, with their campaigns such as the Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger for example increasing their stock price by 41% (Smith, 2015).

Wendy’s strategy really goes to show how important factors such as authenticity, engagement, and consistency are to consumers, and how a brand can leverage these factors now more than ever with the help of social media.

References

A Recipe for Quality Content: How Wendy’s is Killin’ It in Social Media Marketing. (2015, Dec. 8) Retrieved from https://tid.al/blog/wendys-social-content-strategy-quality-content/.

DeMers, J. (2017, Jan 17). What Your Business Should Know Before Imitating Wendy’s Twitter Feed. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/01/17/is-wendys-winning-or-losing-with-its-twitter-roasting-streak/#4cfbe121944c.

Hamza, K. (2017A, Jan 27). Week 3 [PowerPoint]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WITKoeQAETJvMrAORb7T2SSbODGUf7OZaUw0JrLNd6o/edit#slide=id.p.

Hamza, K. (2017B, Jan 27). Week 5 [PowerPoint]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WITKoeQAETJvMrAORb7T2SSbODGUf7OZaUw0JrLNd6o/edit#slide=id.p.

Hamza, K. (2017B, Mar 3). Week 7 [PowerPoint]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wiWIIsLTL645Npd7Caik7MewLsBX27prGhz3pGShO3w/edit#slide=id.p.

Shrivastava, T. (2017, Jan. 10). 5 Findings from Wendy’s Epic Week on Twitter. Retrieved from http://simplymeasured.com/blog/5-findings-from-wendys-epic-week-on-twitter/#sm.00001mhphnd97da611lklwastr7kb.

Smith, K. (2015, Oct. 6). Social Media for Restaurants: How Wendy’s Used Social to Increase Stock Price by 41%. Retrieved from https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/restaurants-millennials-how-wendys-used-social-to-increase-stock-price-by-41/.

Tice, C. (2013, Oct. 18). The Secret of Wendy’s Social Media Success: Massive Stupidity. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/caroltice/2013/10/28/wendys-social-media-success-secretmassive-stupidity/#376b3f19265e.