Denny’s Grand Slam Strikeout Promotion
Sorry my blog postings have come at odd times lately. Hopefully I will be back on schedule by Monday. I am not making any promises though, Kayla and I are babysitting all weekend for two little girls, one is 3 and the other is 8 months old. I love kids but I don’t have any and all the energy is more than I am used to!
Anyway, getting down to business, I know it is a bit late but I wanted to complain about Denny’s Super Bowl promotion. I had built up a number of blog postings so I didn’t get around to sharing my thoughts on this promotion until now. For those of you that don’t know, if there is anyone, Denny’s ran a commercial during the Super Bowl and as part of it they offered free Grand Slam breakfasts to users on the Tuesday following the big game. While I will admit the interactive nature of this promotion was pretty cool, it did get users into the restaurants. In fact Denny’s estimated that they gave away 2 million free breakfasts on Tuesday. My question is, how many customers did this promotion create? Will they get a return on their $5 million Super Bowl commercial or all those free meals? I don’t know if you have ever had a Denny’s Grand Slam but they’re really awful. Giving away your product is a fantastic strategy if your product is so great your customer can’t live without it after trying it. It tends to have the opposite effect if your product is substandard and the free offer doesn’t create future demand or even worse creates negative demand. Not only that but I would bet that a very large number of the customers getting a free meal had previously tried a Denny’s Grand Slam and were only there for free food. Even if a customer hadn’t tried a Grand Slam before, how could you expect them to have a positive experience in a restaurant overcrowded with people fighting for a free meal even if the food is better now than it was in years past as Denny’s claims?
Some may argue that the enormous amount of social media exposure they have gotten from this promotion is worth the money. To this too I must disagree. Sure they had 28 million views of their commercial but how many new paying customers did the commercial actually get? How many meals will they have to sell to re-coup the cost of the $5 million commercial and the 2 million free breakfasts? Sure they got a lot of publicity from blogs and news outlets but how much of it was negative? Even if this campaign did turn out to have a positive ROI I still think it was a failure. I would argue that all of the bad publicity and negative experiences in over-crowded Denny’s restaurants on Tuesday did more damage to the Denny’s brand than good. What if they lowered the price of their Grand Slam meal 2 or 3 dollars and promoted that? It wouldn’t require the major cash outlay but would get butts in seats in this tight economy. Even still, mine wouldn’t be one of them, I like my eggs to come from a chicken not recycled tires.
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Your mom is as bad as the grand slam!!