Posted on 05/20/2002 10:04:07 AM PDT by geaux
WENDY'S INTERNATIONAL has had a corporate change of heart. After removing its founder, Dave Thomas, from all its advertising and marketing efforts after his death in January, it will now put him back into its campaigns beginning next month.
Wendy's executives had thought consumers would consider it unseemly or exploitive to continue running ads that featured the avuncular founder.
But after witnessing the intense bond consumers still had with Mr. Thomas even after his death, Wendy's will introduce television commercials promoting its low-priced "Super Value Menu" in which an announcer will describe items like cheeseburgers and salads as being "prepared Dave's way."
By the time the commercials, from the longtime Wendy's agency, Bates USA in New York, start appearing next month, the 5,700 Wendy's restaurants in the United States and Canada plan to have hanging in their dining rooms posters showing a smiling Mr. Thomas wielding a spatula, as if poised to flip a burger. The posters will carry the headline "We'll always do it Dave's way," and declare, "Our name is Wendy's, but we will always be Dave's place."
Owners of the Wendy's restaurants will also soon be sent decor kits that include vintage ads, photographs and posters devoted to Mr. Thomas's career, the adoption charities he supported and the company's history. Displaying the materials will be up to the individual franchisees.
"We had stated we had no intention of continuing to use Dave in our advertising," said Don Calhoon, executive vice president for marketing at Wendy's International in Dublin, Ohio. "But I don't think we had all the answers in January.
"I've got to tell you, after we saw the response to his passing, I changed my mind," he added, citing examples like "hundreds of telephone calls" from customers "who said they were paying tribute to Dave by coming into the stores."
Indeed, the company reported this month that such visits may have contributed to a 10 percent increase in revenue in the first quarter and a 12 percent increase in net income. Same-store sales at company-owned Wendy's — stores open at least a year, a closely-watched gauge of retail health — rose 5.6 percent.
The about-face by Mr. Calhoon and other executives at Wendy's, the third-largest hamburger chain, is indicative of the difficulties marketers face when executives or celebrities who represent a product, like Kentucky Fried Chicken or Orville Redenbacher popcorn, pass on.
"The danger is trying to recreate someone who is in fact gone," said Ron Paul, president at Technomic in Chicago, a restaurant consulting company. "The worst you can do is try to bring back the person," he added. "But you can remind the public the heritage continues, as long as it's tasteful."
Clive Chajet, a corporate identity and brand consultant, was more cautionary.
"Some people think dead men can sell hamburgers," said Mr. Chajet, chairman at Chajet Consultancy in New York. "If Dave Thomas's personality is key to the appealing image of the Wendy's brand, I can't imagine there aren't ways to benefit from that through means other than his persona. Couldn't they find a member of the family who is alive and with us who may be able to represent the continuity?"
The example the experts offer of what not to do when a so-called "spokes-C.E.O." dies is Kentucky Fried Chicken, now the KFC division of Tricon Global Restaurants, which floundered after the death of its founder, Col. Harland Sanders, in 1980.
For years, KFC veered from celebrating Sanders to forgetting him and back again. There were bizarre commercials using film made to look old, in which an actor impersonated Sanders. Other spots used an animated character created to look and sound like him that was more evocative of the Warner Brothers cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn.
"If you bring your founder back as a cartoon character, you've destroyed his legacy, which is potentially very powerful," said David Martin, president at Interbrand in New York, a brand identity consultant owned by the Omnicom Group. "You have to play the card with reverence and respect."
Mr. Calhoon said that Wendy's has decided that while it may be "O.K. to refer to Dave now, we will not show him, or make him into a cartoon figure.
"It's a challenge," Mr. Calhoon acknowledged. "The question was, `Who's the replacement for Dave?' and the answer that became clear over many years was that the only replacement was the Wendy's brand itself.
"Saying our food is `prepared Dave's way' is language we've never used before, but it's a wonderful connection to bringing him into the advertising, in the context of food and the food experience at Wendy's," Mr. Calhoon said. "We'll do some more of that as we go forward."
For 13 years, Mr. Thomas played a central role in peddling Wendy's meals, appearing in more than 800 humorous commercials by Bates, part of the Bates Worldwide division of the Cordiant Communications Group. He was invariably dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and a red tie and typically delivered his lines with a bemusedly self-effacing attitude.
Mr. Thomas's identity as the public face of the company was the longest-running and perhaps most successful effort of its kind. Wendy's achieved record sales in recent years and surveys showed consumers came to associate Wendy's fare with Mr. Thomas and vice versa, giving the food high scores on attributes like quality, taste and value.
"When you have a charismatic leader like that, the effects of his leadership continue on," said Michael Megalli, a partner at Group 1066 in New York, a corporate identity consultant. "Dave Thomas was much more real, more of an everyman, than Col. Sanders.
"Even so, it made sense to take him out of the ads right after he died, out of respect," Mr. Megalli said. "It made him more real, too, as if to say, `This really is a man, and he did die.' "
Wendy's had Bates create ads in early January that paid tribute to Mr. Thomas, then re-edited previous campaigns to remove his face or voice. Those ran until last month, when a campaign carrying the theme "It's better here" was introduced, presenting the Wendy's headquarters city of Dublin, Ohio as a friendly, folksy town in the same way the Thomas campaigns presented him as a friendly, folksy fast-food mogul.
"The idea of `It's better here' is that Dublin is where Dave chose to do business, and it represents his values," Mr. Calhoon said. "Customers in focus groups tell us it's believable, it's real, it's authentic, and our sales continue to go north."
Wendy's "will continue to think about and look for ways to honor and remember Dave," Mr. Calhoon said. One proposal, he added, calls for "an annual celebration of Dave's life, maybe on his birthday, maybe during National Adoption Month, in which everybody in the restaurants wears short-sleeved white shirts and red ties."
In any case, I miss ol' Dave. He was a real mensch.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.