Yeah, The Wings Are Kick-A$$, But So Is The Marketing Strategy Behind Them
When people hear the name Hooters, they generally think of the restaurant’s waitresses and world-famous wings. Many people also believe the chain caters mostly to Baby Boomer-aged men. This was a misconception CMO Carl Sweat wanted to change
When people hear the name Hooters, they generally think of the restaurant’s waitresses and world-famous wings. Many people also believe the chain caters mostly to Baby Boomer-aged men.
This was a misconception that Carl Sweat wanted to change when he took over as the company’s CMO in 2015, tasked with leading the iconic wing destination’s marketing, public relations, and brand management initiatives.
He quickly set about making Hooters a name that everyone could associate with—especially Millennials—and the restaurant has seen the gap in its male/female customer ratio close. Plus more younger people are coming in than ever before.
Having held executive roles with Starbucks and Coca-Cola before taking the job, Sweat has proven experience in developing and guiding world-famous consumer brands. By aligning Hooters with NASCAR, partnering with DraftKings on fantasy football, and running a social media campaign aimed at couples and Millennials, Sweat has reinvigorated the brand and made Hooters a place for all.
How did he do it? Read on.
CMO.com: Let’s start with the NASCAR sponsorship agreement. What was the genesis of that?
When we started talking to people and did some quant research, a lot of attitude and insight was mapped against what we already had brand equity in, which was NASCAR. [Hooters had been in NASCAR back in the mid-’90s.] It became really clear that if we could reach out not only to this traditional audience that have been following NASCAR for a while but a younger audience who are also beginning to become more interested in the sport, [we could] begin to use that as something that we could own as a primary equity.
CMO.com: How did you get back in?
Sweat: We put our toe in the water back in the fall. We took a flyer on a one-race deal where we did sort of an honorary tip of the hat back to Alan Kulwicki and the Hooters car that he ran.
It was a throwback race over in Darlington, S.C., where all the cars had these ’80s and ’90s paint ups. The consumer response was enormous. Not only did we see it in the numbers on the social side but in the overall customers.
We had some insight locally to a driver whose dad was a legend here in Georgia and nationally within the sport. We knew the young man—Chase Elliot—was probably going to be a star in the sport and were fortunate enough to find common ground. I think Chase is an amazing ambassador for the brand, loves the brand, and he has pictures of his birthdays his mom shared with us when he was growing up coming into Hooters.
We don’t have enormous budgets, so the degree to which we could pick something like the NFL and really get out there and compete with a number of other brands in that space probably wouldn’t be pragmatic anyway, but we actually have equity in this sport, and that’s what really has made it a really powerful part of our marketing arsenal so far.
CMO.com: You’ve been running a “Hooters Makes You Happy” campaign. What are some of the results you’ve seen from this so far?
Sweat: “Hooters Makes You Happy” has been a tagline for years and years here, so it’s something that we’ll nestle a number of different initiatives under.
The recent commercials that we shot, we used NASCAR fans, we used language within the fan base and within the customer base so it’s not exactly what you would traditionally think of as Madison Avenue advertising and script writing. You have a lot of people who were just passionate about the sport that we brought to life. And we used phrases like “kick ass wings,” which normally we hadn’t gone that far. We really wanted to have a little bit more attitude coming through that spoke to this audience.
Certainly, it still falls under “Hooters Makes You Happy” because we’re doing that as an outgrowth of the strategy we learned from the customer, that’s what makes them happy, not having to worry about a lot of things, being able to check things at the door, not having to worry about being politically correct, and knowing that they always have a home.
CMO.com: What are some of the hot topic issues that are in your space right now? What trends are you seeing?
Sweat: On the macro front, there’s no doubt that casual dining continues to be in a stressful situation. The advent of fast casual has certainly been a headwind for the business, not just ours, for everyone. We’ve typically outperformed the casual dining space, the category, but still we want to see more overt growth.
CMO.com: How do you make that happen?
Sweat: We’re expanding our footprint, so we’re continuing to add more locations, both corporate as well as our franchise stores. We own well more than half of the locations here in the U.S., all the global stores are franchised, and about 40% of the U.S. stores are franchised. So we have both a brand responsibility but also a franchise management responsibility.
I think one of the things we were late to discover that we’ve been working on quite diligently over the past year or so and making a lot of headway is the space in food-to-go, whether it be delivery or takeout. It’s an underleveraged opportunity for us, but it links back to our consumer insight.
CMO.com: How are you utilizing digital channels? How big is social to the Hooters brand?
Sweat: It’s huge—not only the footprint, but the level of engagement. Our engagement scores are high both on Facebook and Instagram. We were late to the game, I guess, with Snapchat. … It’s the engagement, though, that really sets us apart. Our fan base wants to know what’s going on. They want to hear from the girls. [Now] they’re accessible; they are on Facebook, both on the national page as well as on their local pages. So that sense of authenticity is pretty darn high.
CMO.com: What’s an out-of-the-box marketing idea you’ve had at Hooters?
Sweat: When I first got here in 2015, the promotional schedule was pretty set for the first part of the year, and we had a Valentine’s promotion at the time: “Treat Your Sweetheart.” It didn’t do anything. It didn’t drive business at all. When you looked at it, it just didn’t speak to what the brand really should be speaking to.
When we started planning for the next year, we wanted some insight around Millennials. When you’re in that age space, you’re not just dating or you’re not just having a relationship with one person in terms of whether that’s your girlfriend, your boyfriend, it doesn’t matter. You actually tend to be dating your friend’s significant others as well in an odd way because you’re spending so much time together.
What we learned was when there’s a breakup, one of several reactions can happen within the social set of one of the people who have been broken up with. Either there’s a little remorse, people supporting that person, or there tends to be a bit of catharsis where the friends actually share what they really thought about the person who they’ve been having to spend so much time with.
So out of that came this idea called “Shred Your Ex,” where if you bring in a photo of your ex and shred it, we’d give you a bogo offer basically. We created a digital platform and enabled people to do that digitally and have some fun with it. People answered a few questions about the breakup: How did the person break up with you? Was it in person? Was it over the phone? Was it a text? Or was it just fading away?
Depending on how you answered those questions at the end when you uploaded your photo, you were given the option that was recommended based on the answers to the questions. It was either burn, shred, or bury that photo. So you would basically play that out and then you would get a certificate obviously to come in and drive some traffic.
That first year we did it, our sales were higher on Valentine’s Day than they were on Super Bowl Sunday, which was quite amazing, and this year we actually topped last year’s numbers.