Hooters revamps brand with marketing, menu upgradesHooters revamps brand with marketing, menu upgrades

Mark Brandau

Looking to lift the chain out of its doldrums as other “breastaurant” concepts step up the competition, Hooters’ new leadership team launched a brand refresh July 30 that upgrades the Atlanta-based casual-dining chain’s marketing, service and menu.


Called Hooters 2.0, the relaunch kicked off with a new ad campaign sporting the tagline “Feed the Dream,” positioning Hooters as a place to celebrate any day or occasion.


“People want any reason to engage or re-engage with the brand,” said chief executive Terry Marks, who came aboard with his executive team in late 2011. “It’s highly thought of, and our unaided awareness is among the best. But the food had not kept pace over time. We had real opportunities with the food and the Hooters Girls’ hospitality.”


The chain also has seen sales slip in the most recent year. Hooters generated domestic systemwide foodservice sales of $852 million for the year ended December 2011, a decline from $860 million in the preceding year, according to Nation’s Restaurant News’ Top 100 research. 



Wise guys for spokesmen


A new marketing campaign with more national reach will advertise the brand’s changes.


Hooters Girls will relinquish the spotlight in new commercials to two owl finger puppets, one angelic and one demonic, who perch on potential guests’ shoulders and act out their inner conflict for and against a trip to Hooters. The first two commercials in the campaign feature the owls arguing about whether two young males should ditch the scenes they’re currently involved in — a vegan dinner party and a water aerobics class for senior citizens — and instead head for Hooters.


Marks said the characters could be featured in such humorous spots on an ongoing basis.


“Those characters could play a role in all sorts of aspects of the brand,” he said. “They could advertise anything from what to order, to the role of the Hooters Girls, to whether it’s OK to come into Hooters. It takes the tension the brand has had over the years and has some fun with it.”


During this year’s football season, commercials will star commentator Jon Gruden, a Super Bowl-winning head coach and former Hooters employee.


Hooters’ leaders hope to put a lot of marketing dollars behind the owl characters by requiring franchisees’ marketing-fund contributions to skew toward more national broadcast buys than local-store marketing, Marks said.


“That will be a slow build over time,” he continued. “We’re not asking our operators for more money, but we’re recalibrating the spending so that we have more firepower behind the new advertising campaign.”


The reconfigured marketing fund also will devote resources to getting DirecTV’s Major League Baseball package in every Hooters in the United States, he added.


Marks also liked the ad campaign’s versatility and the owl characters’ ability to promote any new menu or service programs Hooters adopts as the Hooters 2.0 brand relaunch keeps rolling.


“The evolution of the menu and the brand will stop when consumers stop changing, which is never,” Marks said. “This isn’t an event that will come to some end point; it’s a constant evolution.”


Service efforts take flight


Hooters’ changes to its service and hospitality systems began at the corporate level, “where we went all the way back to sharpening our interviewing and hiring processes, as well as how we handle orientations with the Hooters Girls,” Marks said.


The chain will move toward a team service model in which servers not only will handle their own designated tables, but also help out elsewhere on the floor when needed. 


“It’s not very difficult to train, but change is change,” Marks said. “Now the idea is to take care of every table and every guest. The guest doesn’t understand why they’re not getting any attention when a server is right there. … Once we started training this way, our guest satisfaction metrics started to jump.”


Hooters will remodel 20 to 25 of its more than 430 stores annually over the next few years, and new builds will take the form of a more contemporary prototype, officials said.


Chief operating officer Sam Rothschild said improving the service of the Hooters Girls would defend the kind of unique guest experience Hooters can claim against competitors, even “breastaurant” rivals like Twin Peaks and Tilted Kilt. The brand also had to upgrade its audio-visual packages to keep pace with consumers’ expectations of a game-day destination.


“We’re more than a sports bar, but we should be able to compete head-to-head with anybody on the game-day occasion,” Marks said.


Menu gets a makeover


Rothschild said another key to getting repeat traffic would be menu innovation.


As a part of its menu revamp, Hooters looked for opportunities to upgrade ingredients and found a crucial one in its salad lineup. The chain moved from a base of head and romaine lettuce to a new spring mix and developed 30 salads in all.


“We launched the new salad lineup to increase trips, and that applies both to our core user and a light user who we’d like to make a medium user,” Marks said. “Even that core user needs to mix it up for lunch and dinner and have something lighter once in a while.”


Hooters wants to continue to own wings as a menu category, Marks added. The menu now has 20 new wing sauces, many of which originated in Hooters’ international locations.


“Some of the food and hospitality programs that were tested earliest just got implemented, but we’re always testing more new items,” Rothschild said. “You continue to build on successes, and the longer-term branding things will be working constantly.”


Rothschild said another big food opportunity in Hooters 2.0 would be shareable items, which ideally would play well with the chain’s target Millennial demographic “who are adventure seekers and like to share.”


“We’re looking hard at the appetizer category,” he said. “Wings are shareable, as well. We’ll look at different platters and combos to round out the menu.”


Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @Mark_from_NRN.