Restaurants boost customer engagement with gaming appsRestaurants boost customer engagement with gaming apps

Zoës Kitchen wanted to create an app that would be part of customers' daily routines.

Gamification is anything but child’s play for restaurant marketers looking to differentiate their brands and expand their marketing reach.

A growing number of companies are introducing arcade-style games for smartphones and tablets to better engage customers, enhance the dining-out experience and educate consumers about their brands.

Among them, Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill in September 2013 released “The Scarecrow.” The game, set in a dystopian city overrun by factory farming, asks users to help the scarecrow create the kind of sustainable food production embodied in the fast-casual chain’s “Food With Integrity” brand message by transporting confined animals to open pastures or serving minimally processed food to customers.

Domino’s Pizza also introduced its “Pizza Hero” app, which lets users build a virtual pizza, and Bojangles’ “Bo Time” app includes Digital Cornhole, which simulates the popular bean bag game for tailgating.

“The key with applications is it has to be honest,” said Scott Nelowet, founder of Jacksonville, Fla.-based French Fry Heaven, which has an app designed to teach customers about the fry combinations available at the 17-unit chain. “This generation [Millennials] can smell corporate nonsense. I want you to play it and have a good time, and if you happen to learn something about us, that’s great. But the enjoyment has to be the primary objective of the game.”

RELATED
• Study: Restaurant strategies differ for smartphone, tablet apps
• Chains get closer to consumers with integrated social, local mobile platforms
• More restaurant marketing news

Making ‘LIFE’ a game

Birmingham, Ala.-based Zoës Kitchen wanted its app to be a big enough part of customers’ daily routines that it would not be forgotten, so the nearly 100-unit chain asked focus groups of guests what made them continually use their favorite apps.

“Could the app offer something different and of more benefit?” said Rachel Phillips-Luther, vice president of marketing for Zoës Kitchen. “Our first step was to home in on women with families, our core customer, to understand what brand elements could make their way onto the app so that it wasn’t a download-and-delete.”

Zoës discovered that consumers most wanted “regular and frequent shared love,” Phillips-Luther said, and the brand wrapped that into a gaming message of living a Mediterranean lifestyle by doing things that appeal to their holistic selves. The chain’s “LIFE” app — which encompasses life goals, inspiration, food and enjoyment — is built around identifying a life goal, such as “giving back,” and giving app users a checklist of things to do to achieve that end, such as volunteering or doing a charity walk.

The app also rewards customers with rotating freebies whenever they upload a picture of a Zoës receipt for a purchase of at least $7.

“[With the app’s setup] we are investing in our customers as people,” she said. “The randomization of rewards … became the key driver. Every time you visit Zoës, you’ll be curious about what you get, like pulling the lever on a slot machine. That’s been driving the repeat use the most.”

The rewards change and rotate with each campaign, as do the self-improvement checklists, keeping the app interesting and keeping users coming back, Phillips-Luther said.

Phillips-Luther also views the app as a mobile-loyalty platform that does not lock users into a points-based system. The app produces a short guest survey that can be filled out quickly after a user uploads a receipt.

“One of the key challenges was getting enough data points [for guest satisfaction],” Phillips-Luther said. “I wanted to get that data more readily, and the app was the perfect place to do that. I can get completed surveys at the completion of every receipt upload, and that alone made this investment-neutral to me.”

A version of the app also has been crucial to Zoës online-training system, she added.

“Awarding our team members points for completing training modules has created energy and participation that has been a real advantage,” she said.

Educating the masses

Blimpie's app has encouraged nearly 38 percent of users to opt in to its email club.

(Continued from page 1)

Nelowet of French Fry Heaven had worked with gamified apps in his prior career as an educator, so when he started the brand in Florida in 2011, he used a smartphone game as a way to teach people about his French fry menu.

“We were losing a lot of customer time going through the education piece, walking them through the menu,” Nelowet said. “But when you’re dealing with a high-volume business, you can’t afford that slowdown.”

In the French Fry Heaven game, tablet and smartphone users match food ingredients to different characters to learn about the concept’s flavor combinations. Moving garlic and Parmesan icons over to an Italian-looking character teaches players about the garlic-Parmesan fries, for example.

“You need to teach people how they learn, and Millennials learn through games,” Nelowet said. “If I ask a ‘Madden’ gamer about the NFL, her level of knowledge is massive. And they add to their knowledge every year by playing, which in turn makes them knowledgeable fans.”

Subs on the ‘Run’

In September, the nearly 1,000-unit Blimpie sandwich chain launched Blimpie Run, a game in which mascot Del E. Fresh runs through cities across America to collect fresh ingredients for a Blimpie sub.

Through the first four months of the app’s run, 37.9 percent of people who played the game opted in to Blimpie’s email club, the brand disclosed. The chain, one of 15 owned by Kahala Franchising LLC, offered a drawing for free subs for a year as an incentive to download and play the game.

“It’s not just about, ‘Here’s our product, so go buy it,’ because that doesn’t work in social media at all,” said Steve Evans, the chain’s vice president of marketing. “We wanted to give people something unique. There are a million free game apps out there, but ours has an incentive to continue to play, not just because it’s so entertaining, but because you also get more entries into a monthly drawing for free subs for a year.”

Matt Gallagher, director of digital and interactive marketing for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Kahala, said the Blimpie Run app was designed to offer utility, longevity and social sharing. Merely bundling together the features of a mobile website — location finders, digital menus, perhaps an ordering platform — and giving users the hard sell does not appeal to today’s smartphone users, especially Millennials, he said.

The app has to be fun, Gallagher said. That allows Blimpie to market to users in more subtle ways once they opt to enter an email address to earn incentives. For instance, they can see their name on a leaderboard, enter the free-subs sweepstakes or share their scores on Facebook.

“We can target our messages to game users so that they are most relevant to them,” Gallagher said. “There are subtle reminders throughout the game. We’re excited that people realized the hook and signed up.”

Eventually, Blimpie will layer in more functionality to drive more traffic into restaurants, such as with mobile coupons accessible only in the Blimpie Run game, Evans said. Over the course of 2014, the app also will lead a rebranding strategy for Blimpie’s 50th anniversary, which also includes new trade dress, some new unit designs, new menu items, and technology upgrades at the point of sale to enable mobile ordering and mobile loyalty.

“With any older brand it’s important to maintain relevance, especially with the higher-frequency user of QSR,” Evans said. “We wanted this app to allow people to engage with the brand when and where they wanted.”

Going long with game apps

(Continued from page 2)

McAlister’s Deli also got a branding boost when it partnered with Raycom Sports and the Atlantic Coast Conference, or ACC, to sponsor a mobile app for college football fans. The McAlister’s ACC Football Challenge let users play as their favorite ACC team and kick virtual field goals for points on a national leaderboard, as well as a sweepstake for a free trip to the ACC Championship Game at the end of the football season.

The Ridgeland, Miss.-based fast-casual chain, with more than 320 units, put its logo on the virtual football field within the game as its placement, which was not intrusive, said president and chief executive Frank Paci. He added that McAlister’s footprint throughout the Southeast, where most of the conference’s colleges are located, made sense with the brand’s local marketing plans.

McAlister's Deli's app targets college football fans.

“I’m not sure that this would have just jumped out as an opportunity to me, but seeing the interaction and how much gaming is out there, I think there’s an opportunity people might be missing,” Paci said. “It was easy to see ACC football and McAlister’s were a great fit. In this app, McAlister’s ‘tees up’ the football to call out its sweet tea, so it was natural and didn’t feel forced.”

Over the course of the college football season, the McAlister’s ACC Challenge app received more than 24 million views on TV in 19 million households, in addition to thousands of social media impressions that resulted from the ACC posting about it on its Twitter and Facebook profiles.

More than 200,000 people downloaded the game, resulting in more than 3 million plays, Paci said.

“There are markets with no McAlister’s that saw this app and promotion, and this may help us sell some franchises in new [ACC] territories like Pittsburgh or Syracuse [N.Y.],” Paci said. “It’s not as efficient as if we had stores in all those markets, but we were certainly heavily penetrated in the Carolinas, Georgia and Tallahassee, Fla.”

Partnering with the athletic conference as the app’s sponsor did represent an incremental marketing investment for McAlister’s, Paci said, though franchisees opted to contribute some of their local-marketing funds to the effort. Of the 200,000 people to download the app, more than 8,000 opted in to McAlister’s e-club, for a “fairly high” conversion rate of 4 percent, he said.

“Certainly this raised our brand awareness, but it’s tough to do a return on investment on things like this,” Paci said. “It got us access to properties where we would have paid significantly more had we not done this package, and we don’t spend a huge amount on marketing to begin with.”

McAlister’s might renew the partnership with the ACC, Paci said, which potentially could became even more advantageous if the conference’s teams have another good run like Florida State’s undefeated national-championship season or Clemson’s win over Ohio State in the Orange Bowl.

“If Duke raises its profile in football, and with Louisville joining next year, the conference could start rivaling the SEC, and we think we’re on the ground floor of that,” Paci said.

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