The “Where’s the beef?” campaign helped make 1984 one of Wendy’s International Inc.’s most successful years.
So as an encore the following year, the Dublin fast-food chain turned much of its marketing and management muscle away from hamburgers and toward getting the company into the breakfast market.
“We finished one of the greatest ad campaigns ever and didn’t run a national ad for burgers for years,” said longtime Wendy’s franchisee Gene Carlisle, whose Memphis, Tenn.-based Carlisle Corp. owns 96 Wendy’s restaurants.
The breakfast push turned into one of the company’s most notorious flops, done in by bad execution, an inconvenient menu and the distractions to restaurant operations and the company’s marketing. The breakfast menu was eliminated in a few short years, but Wendy’s executives insisted they learned valuable lessons that they’ll apply as they get ready to serve breakfast again.
Wendy’s told investors of its intentions to belly back up to the breakfast table last year, aiming for a cut of the $30 billion market for quick-service breakfast.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Wendy’s CEO Kerrii Anderson told Business First following a Feb. 5 investor conference at the company’s headquarters.
Anderson wasn’t merely echoing the adage about getting the day off to a healthy start. With projections of generating from $75 million to $95 million a year in receipts when the menu is fully rolled out, breakfast could become a key piece to the future health of the $2.4 billion Wendy’s.
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