Little Caesars Bounces Success

A restaurant brand is an invitation to a platform of food, flavor, and fun according to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.  For Little Caesars this year’s NCAA basketball tournament proved to be an invaluable platform for new electricity to drive brand trial and adoption.

Little Caesar Enterprises. store visits spike on April 2 thanks to the pizza brand’s unexpected “If Crazy Happens” promotion, according to consumer analytics firm Sense360. That right Little Caesars offered a free $5 “Hot-N-Ready” lunch combo if a No. 16-seed team were to upset a No. 1-seed team during the NCAA’s annual March Madness college basketball tournament.

And “Crazy Happened,” A Little Caesars company spokesperson said. .

Eli Portnoy, CEO and co-founder of Los Angeles-based Sense 360  said “Amazingly, this unprecedented event occurred when the University of Maryland Baltimore County beat the University of Virginia,” Sense 360 aggregates anonymous data from more than 100 million yearly restaurant visits and more than 300,000 yearly survey responses. The data is gathered daily according to Sense 360.

Little Caesars made good on its promise, offering the free pizza combos to anyone visiting between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on April 2. “This huge promotion caused their Brand Draw to spike from 5 percent over the past 365 days all the way to 11 percent during this promotion, which would place them in our Top 10 for that day,” Portnoy said.

Portnoy said Sense360’s “Brand Draw” metric looks at the percent of market share that a brand attracts within half a mile of each of locations. “This metric normalizes the playing field for a brand with 400 locations vs 4,000 locations,” he said, “as it just looks determines how often guests choose a brand versus all other competitors when they are within striking distance.” 

According to Sense360 data, the traffic lift was substantial. 

“The pizza chain generated a 154 percent lift in visits during the promotion while grabbing 2.95 percent of all LSR [limited-service restaurant] visits,” Portnoy said. “The promotion also did a nice job bringing in new and lapsed guests, with over 52 percent of visitors during the promotion being either new or lapsed.” 

Are you trapped doing what you have always done and doing it the same way?  Interested in learning how www.FoodserviceSolutions.us can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization?  Email us at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit:  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us for more information.