New décor, on-trend food options and a fresh marketing approach that has resulted in viral tweets and secret menu items have all contributed to Arby’s gaining new social currency and newfound popularity.
“We’re back in the conversation again,” said Paul Brown, who joined Arby’s Restaurant Group Inc. as its chief executive in May 2013. “We’re reinvigorating and repositioning the Arby’s brand by really going back to the core root of what the brand was.”
Currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, Arby’s has always positioned itself as different from the rest. It was founded in Boardman, Ohio, in 1964 by Leroy and Forrest Raffel as an alternative to other quick-service restaurants. Instead of hamburgers it sold roast beef. Instead of French fries it sold potato chips, which later were replaced by potato cakes — its curly fries weren’t introduced until 1988. Other quick-service restaurants had chocolate and vanilla shakes; the Raffels combined chocolate with coffee and the signature Jamocha shake was born.
Brown said he and his team are now clarifying their vision of the brand.
“Internally, we’ve been calling that ‘deli-inspired delicious,’” Brown said, which involves high-quality, freshly sliced meat in unique combinations that would be hard to replicate at home.
He’s also working to shore up its position as a chain that competes with both quick-service and fast-casual restaurants.
“We win against QSR by having a better product and higher-level service and versus fast casual by having comparable products at greater value and much more convenience,” he said.
That repositioning is currently underway. “We are at various degrees of implementation of those areas,” he said.
Meat-centric innovation
Arby’s has rolled out an array of non-roast-beef meat specials since Brown took the chain’s helm in a move to make it clear that they have “a lot more than roast beef.” It is something that has been true since Arby’s introduced its Market Fresh deli line in 2001. Brown indicated its new positioning will inspire “everything from the design to the food.”
By making innovations that are “adjacent to roast beef,” Arby’s has a “broader aperture on the business,” Brown said.
Those innovations have included the rebranding of a medium rare USDA Choice cut of beef first introduced in 2011 as Angus prime rib.
“Using that term carried with it a very different view of the quality, and we were underselling it by not telling what it was,” said Brown, who rechristened it as steak and introduced sandwiches such as the Angus Philly — a play on Philly cheesesteaks — and a Three Cheese & Bacon sandwich made with Swiss and Cheddar cheeses, Parmesan-peppercorn ranch sauce and thick-cut pepper bacon, as well as the sliced steak. Through the end of the year, Arby’s is highlighting those items, along with a new Montreal Steak and Portabella sandwich, which features seasoned steak with portobello mushrooms, caramelized onions, aged Swiss cheese and garlic aïoli on a sub roll.
Arby’s has long been in the barbecue market with its barbecue-like Arby’s sauce and its longstanding Arby-Q sandwich. But in 2013, it tried to evoke a more premium product and a more authentic feel with its Smokehouse Brisket sandwich, which Brown said remains the most successful new product in the brand’s history.
Earlier this year, the company said the Smokehouse Brisket LTO lifted same-store sales by more than 12 percent during the sandwich’s promotion in fall 2013.
Arby’s also went ethnic in September, offering a gyro sandwich made with roast beef or turkey, Greek seasonings, lettuce, tomato, red onion and tzatziki sauce, served on pita bread.
“It was very, very successful, and not something Arby’s would have been historically known for,” Brown said.
That followed one of Arby’s best marketing coups, with the August LTO of three Mega Meat Stacks. The Triple Stack had turkey, roast beef, pepper bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on a honey wheat bun. The Club Stack was ham, turkey, Swiss cheese, pepper bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on a harvest wheat bun. The Reuben Super Stack was corned beef, turkey, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing on marble rye.
Marketing for the 21st century
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All three of the Mega Meat Stacks were intended to show the variety of meat Arby’s had on offer, and they were marketed around the tagline “We have the meats,” and the hashtag #meatcraft.
Part of that marketing was a “meat mountain,” showing all the types of meat available at Arby’s stacked on top of each other. Some guests inferred that the meat mountain was the name of an actual sandwich, so Arby’s decided to offer it as a $10 off-the-menu option. It was a sensation.
The sandwich got more than 100 placements in major media such as Good Morning America and Late Night with David Letterman.
“ON CNBC Squawk Box, the team talked about Arby’s for six minutes one morning,” Brown said. “They ended up going off on how much they loved Arby’s and wished there were more in New York. Normally, private companies don’t get six minutes of airtime on Squawk Box.”
Arby’s reports that the Meat Mountain was mentioned 4,537 times in social media, for a total of 46,570,926 impressions.
Additionally the chain sold an average of 3,400 Meat Mountain sandwiches each day for six weeks at its nearly 3,200 domestic locations.
Arby’s doesn’t release same-store-sales figures, although Brown said it plans to start doing so next year to attract franchisees. “We’re in growth mode now … We need to put some numbers out there,” he said, but he told NRN that sales are up “dramatically year-over-year.”
Arby’s has had other social media successes this year, perhaps most notably during the Grammy Awards, when vocalist Pharrell accepted multiple awards wearing a distinctive hat that resembled Arby’s logo.
Arby’s tweeted from its official @Arbys account, “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs.”
Pharrell retweeted it, as did more than 78,000 other people.
Being part of American pop culture isn’t always a positive thing, however. On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart has had a running gag in which he brings up Arby’s anytime something disgusting or unpalatable comes up.
“The stuff he does is funny,” Brown said. “After we’d been mentioned several times, we catered his team and got very positive feedback and a lot of mentions on that. Now we’re kind of having fun with each other.
“The main thing is that we’re in the conversation,” he added, noting that marketing is the cumulative impact of all conversation about the brand. “Not everything that’s mentioned is positive, but that wouldn’t seem real. People are talking about Arby’s a lot more than they were a year ago, which is great.”
New prototypes for new spaces
Arby’s initiated a remodeling program earlier this year to go with its repositioning, and although just around 30 remodels will be completed this year, Brown said the results so far have been dramatic.
“We’re seeing a range of 15-percent to almost 20-percent uplift [in sales] post-remodel,” he said.
“It lights up very differently at night, it comes with an upgraded signage package. The building conveys a sense of quality that the historic buildings didn’t,” he said, noting that they took cues from fast-casual restaurant designs, including subway tiles and darker wood tones. Wi-Fi, communal tables and mobile device charging stations also have been installed, and Brown said there are some signs that customers are spending more time in the restaurants.
Prototypes with smaller footprints also have been developed. Instead of the standard 2,400-square-foot to 3,000-square-foot units on three-quarter acre lots, 2,000-square-foot designs with a drive thru and 54 seats on half-acre lots have been designed and are anticipated to be able to handle the same traffic volume.
Additionally, even smaller 1,500-square-foot to 1,800-square-foot prototypes have been developed for urban areas, along with a new production line in which sandwiches are made in front of customers, as they are at Subway and Chipotle restaurants.
Brown said the “menu of venues” allows franchisees the flexibility to go where Arby’s wouldn’t fit before.
“The process we went through [in designing the new prototypes] was looking at a lot of deli concepts. We spent a lot of time in New York, at Eataly and Chelsea Market and other places. You see a lot of white subway tiles and uses of wood. When you see our lighting fixtures you’ll definitely think of those kinds of places,” Brown said, adding that company-owned versions of all three new formats would be open by early January.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
