Subway leads ranking of best-perceived restaurant brands

Chick-fil-A, Papa John's draw public ire

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Yet Chick-fil-A and Papa John’s experienced annual declines in their buzz scores in 2012 as widespread backlash resulted from separate incidents in which their leaders made unpopular comments.

Chick-fil-A president and chief operating officer Dan Cathy set off a social-media firestorm when he gave an interview on July 2 to the Baptist Press and said the brand was “guilty as charged” in supporting a traditional view of “biblical marriage,” meaning only between a man and a woman. Advocates for same-sex marriage advocated a boycott of Chick-fil-A, which prompted a counter-protest of supporters to hold a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” on Aug. 1, which set a single-day sales record for the chain.

Marzilli noted that while Chick-fil-A’s annual buzz score fell out of the top five in 2012, the fact that the brand’s sales held up indicates that the negative perceptions driving Chick-fil-A’s buzz score slide came mostly from people who probably already knew about the brand’s stance against same-sex marriage and did not eat there much.

“What’s tricky is that among the general population, it sticks with people for quite a while, but for Chick-fil-A’s business prospects, it’s a more nuanced story,” Marzilli said. “A lot of people who were upset weren’t already customers or may have been disinclined to do business with Chick-fil-A.”

Papa John’s, on the other hand, had a bad November, when founder and chief executive John Schnatter’s post-Election Day comments to a college in Florida were picked up nationally because they included one section in which Schnatter suggested franchisees likely would make many employees part-time staff to avoid covering them under mandates in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. A week later, a U.S. District Court judge certified a class-action lawsuit against Papa John’s  alleging the brand sent half a million unsolicited text messages.

“Papa John’s scores were hurt right around the election and the immediate aftermath, and the class-action lawsuit happened in the middle of that,” Marzilli said. “Those events definitely impacted the brand, not to the extremes of Chick-fil-A’s [perception hit], but enough to dislodge Papa John’s from the top five.”