California Tortilla took a promotional page out of current events recently by inviting customers to “occupy” its 35 fast-casual restaurants — an occasion that sparked a banner day in terms of sales and traffic.
Putting the chain’s characteristically cheeky spin on the Occupy Wall Street movement, Rockville, Md.-based California Tortilla offered a free order of chips and queso to any patron who either brought in an “Occupy Cal Tort” sign to one of the restaurants or who said “Occupy Cal Tort” to the cashier on Oct. 26.
The brand also advertised through social media that it would donate 1 percent of the day’s gross sales to local food banks — a twist on Occupy Wall Street’s campaign against “the 1 percent” on behalf of protesters who collectively identify as “the 99 percent.”
News of Cal Tort’s campaign spread quickly, as Washington, D.C.-area media picked up the story and photos of the chain’s first protest sign, made on discarded cardboard, went viral to thousands of Cal Tort’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers, said marketing director Stacey Kane.
“That’s what you’re looking for when you’re a company with a small marketing budget,” Kane said. “You’re looking for something people will talk about — fodder for social media and that touch point for people in their offices to say, ‘Hey, did you hear what California Tortilla’s doing?’”
The promotion also provided a windfall for Cal Tort’s bottom line, she said. More than 2,700 customers redeemed the offer for free chips and queso, and 95 percent of those participants went on to spend more than Cal Tort’s average per-person check, Kane said. Same-store sales increased 17 percent compared with the same day a year earlier.
Overcoming problems
When Cal Tort put its promotion into action in mid-October, the chain already had planned to do a secret password day in its restaurants, as it had done for years. The Occupy Wall Street theme seemed topical and mostly harmless, Kane said.
But the night before Occupy Cal Tort was to commence, a violent clash between Occupy Oakland protesters and police in Northern California left several people injured and increased tensions in the conflict.
“At the time we decided to do it, there hadn’t been any violence in the Occupy demonstrations,” Kane said. “We probably wouldn’t have done it if there had been lots of violence the previous few weeks.”
Cal Tort carried on with the promotion and tried to defuse any criticism by focusing on the 1 percent and 99 percent’s shared love of queso. The chain’s social-media fans solved the few conflicts that arose, Kane said.
“One woman said on our Facebook page that we were being insensitive,” she said, “and before I had to say anything, our fans jumped to our defense and said that we always do promotions like this and to not take it too seriously.”
Cal Tort was not the only restaurant brand involved in Occupy-related events.
For instance, as they do before the grand opening of most new locations, fans of Chick-fil-A in Northridge, Calif., camped out the day before the Atlanta-based chain opened a unit there and gave out the customary year’s supply of free chicken to the first 100 guests in line. The Chick-fil-A fanatics erected a tent city in the parking lot and whimsically circulated “Occupy Chick-fil-A” signs.
In Washington, D.C., BLT Steak began offering two politically charged burgers. The 99% Burger, which sold for $9.99, was a 6-ounce beef patty on two slices of bread with a slice of American cheese. The 1% Sandwich, however, went for $58 and featured an 8-ounce Kobe beef burger, braised Kobe short rib, foie gras and gold leaf.
In at least one case, a restaurant did not acknowledge the Occupy movement, and bore the brunt of protesters’ frustration. A McDonald’s location near Zuccotti Park in New York, the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, was vandalized by a 27-year-old protestor Nov. 5, according to the New York Post. The protestor became angry when the restaurant refused to provide him with free food, and he tore a credit card reader from a cash register and threw it at the crew.
Smooth operations
Cal Tort, on the other hand, experienced “almost no pushback,” Kane said, because the operational considerations for the promotion were the same as all the secret-password days the brand has run over the years.
“We’re always irreverent, but this was a slight departure to take advantage of a current event,” Kane said. “Because we’re 35 locations and growing, and have a small team, we could move pretty nimbly. We didn’t have to pay for POP marketing in the stores, and the franchise community understands how to do a secret-password day because we’ve done it before. It was just a matter of informing them, and we had no customer complaints from an operational standpoint.”
Building the promotion around the news of the Occupy movement and tying it to a local-store cause-marketing initiative increased the return on investment, Kane said, because Cal Tort did not have time to make an expensive, slick production and still got a surge in sales and traffic, as well as good press and goodwill for helping area food banks.
“We’re going to give a couple thousand dollars away to a couple of food banks, and we’re proud of doing stuff like that,” Kane said. “My favorite part of this promotion was telling my marketing manager to find a cardboard box so we could make a protest sign. This was so much fun to do, internally.”
Contact Mark Brandau at mark.brandau@penton.com.
Follow him on Twitter at @Mark_from_NRN.
