The largest quick-service burger brands have been working to tweak menus of late, especially surrounding kids’ offerings, with Burger King introducing its new BK Crown meal and promotions, and McDonald’s and Wendy’s adding more healthful items to kids’ meals.
According to recent data from market research firm YouGov BrandIndex, Burger King has increased its appeal to parents, but still has far to go before catching up with its main competitors, McDonald’s and Wendy’s.
New York-based BrandIndex’s latest study of proprietary “Impression Scores” among parents with children living at home found that Burger King’s average score over the three-week period from Nov. 5 to Nov. 25 — just as it introduced the rebranded BK Crown kids’ meal — increased. But not enough to catch up to its burger competitors, as well as brands that top the list with parents, like Subway.
BrandIndex calculates the Impression Score by polling more than 5,000 consumers each weekday and asking them, “Do you have a general positive or negative feeling about this brand?” The negative responses are subtracted from positive ones, giving each brand a score between negative 100 and positive 100. In this study, answers were collected from parents with children living at home and who had visited a quick-service restaurant in the past three months.
The top five performing quick-service restaurant chains were Subway, Wendy’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. Burger King was No. 10.
“Burger King isn’t failing with parents, but its general perceptions with consumers tell us they’re still behind McDonald’s and Wendy’s,” senior vice president Ted Marzilli said. “It’s up against some stiff competition and other heavy advertisers.”
Marzilli said Wendy’s, whose Impression Score trails only Subway’s, has a higher score than its quick-service rivals because of its reputation for food quality, similar to how Subway owns the healthful quick-service positioning over other sandwich chains. He added that McDonald’s and Wendy’s have a sizeable lead over Burger King in Impression Scores mainly because they have been advertising their quality-food brand attributes longer than Burger King, and have started making kids’ meal improvements earlier.
“McDonald’s has begun rolling out newer versions of their Happy Meals, but they always have other advertising going on,” Marzilli said. “That other advertising could be lifting all ships [in terms of perceptions], even with parents.”
While Wendy’s has not recently made any news specific to its kids’ meals, Marzilli said, the chain has had other positive press from increasing same-store sales, new products like the “W” cheeseburger, and one analyst’s projection that it soon could overtake Burger King for the second-largest market share in the U.S. burger segment.
“That all speaks to the overall positive trend at Wendy’s, and if sales are up, that’s got something to do with perceptions, so it’s not a surprise,” Marzilli said. “That [increase in Impression Scores] may be a general phenomenon and not a parent-specific phenomenon. But a little less than half of our total survey population is parents with kids at home.”
Marzilli added that time could compound Burger King’s positive momentum into larger gains.
For instance, he said, Burger King’s decision to join McDonald’s in selling kids’ meal toys separately in San Francisco to comply with that city’s Healthy Meal Legislation ordinance could help its perceptions among parents further.
“I don’t want to say it definitely will or won’t, but it’s a reasonable effort,” Marzilli said. “You could say it’s a ploy to get around the letter of the law or say it’s a reasonable compromise.”
It’s harder to predict how much further McDonald’s and Burger King can rise in terms of Impression Scores among parents, he said.
“If you look at folks on this list like Papa John’s or Pizza Hut, there’s no reason why McDonald’s and Burger King can’t get to that level,” Marzilli said. “Clearly, Burger King could be in the neighborhood of McDonald’s, but to get up around Wendy’s and Subway is probably a stretch. Those are the real outliers of this category.”
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @Mark_from_NRN
