Phil Friedman, chief executive of McAlister’s Deli, loved the results of last summer’s Free Tea Day, when the 300-unit fast-casual chain gave away more than 150,000 servings of its famous sweet tea.
Yet while the 15-percent year-over-year increase in that day’s sales made for a memorable promotion, Friedman said he hopes that the chain’s fans recall more than just the “free” part of the day.
“I don’t want McAlister’s to be known as where you get stuff for free, but when we do something, we want to make it special,” Friedman said. “You get in trouble when you make free part of your brand. [Then it becomes,] ‘So, why go there for everyday prices?’”
The key to Free Tea Day was emphasizing the product, not the price, Friedman said. Promotional materials positioned McAlister’s sweet tea as “the beverage of summer,” he added, and the 32-ounce size of the free drinks helped avoid the perception of dinky freebies. As a result, word of the promotion spread not only to the chain’s fans but also to new and lapsed users. More than 85 percent of customers coming in for free tea also purchased food, he added.
“It’s easy to say, ‘We need to get more traffic, so we’ll do free,’” he said. “There has to be more to it than using free. We used it for a very specific purpose: to support the beverage of summer. We used our icon because we want you to experience the total McAlister’s. To take something that’s a huge core and make it free, we wanted to dramatically reintroduce McAlister’s.”
The promotion also fired up the chain’s franchisees.
“This got the system rallied around an event,” Friedman said. “In a franchise system, it’s important to keep everybody motivated and participating. We knew we could build up to this event, retrain our staffs and … get franchisees and our managers excited, with the added value of almost a grand-opening level of excitement. We had a new energy, and it reinvigorated the system.”
The brand supported Free Tea Day with a multifaceted viral campaign developed with Jackson, Miss.-based The Ramey Agency. While McAlister’s had been an “incidental player” before in social media, Friedman said, the free-tea promotion gave it a platform to jump into the marketing technique. Two series of short videos leading up to the giveaway were advertised on McAlister’s website and Facebook page, and the chain sold “Tea Freak” T-shirts and donated the proceeds to Share Our Strength.
Getting started in social media gave McAlister’s another way to follow up on the promotion, Friedman added, as the legion of Tea Freaks keeps growing.
“We continued to build on the Tea Freaks and on the viral part of it,” he said. “On the ops side, we pointed out through our franchise consultants that when we have increased volume, we can handle it. We just had our owners’ meeting, and we continued the emphasis on great service.”
Though he admits he wouldn’t have considered such a massive giveaway even two years ago, Friedman said Free Tea Day proved the merit of adapting McAlister’s to the still challenging economy.
“We may do it again; we may not,” Friedman said. “It all depends on the environment next summer, but what was really exciting to me was that we put so much energy into it, and guests saw that. We proved ourselves in a tough time.”— [email protected]