Quick-service restaurant advertisers who messaged exclusively on "price" found consumers less responsive to their messages than those who advertised to the "values" predicted to drive engagement and loyalty, according to survey results from Brand Keys, a research consultancy specializing in predictive loyalty and engagement metrics, and Ameritest, a provider of advertising research.
The data compares Brand Keys' January 2009 predictive measures of the QSR category with Ameritest's 2009 year-end summary of advertising testing across the category.
"We have tracked the QSR category for 14 years in the annual Customer Loyalty and Engagement Index," said Amy Shea, EVP and global director, Brand Keys, in a news release. "Every one of the 71 categories and 518 brands in the latest survey are feeling the impact of the economy. But every category feels that impact in specific ways."
QSRs ranked by Ameritest Performance Index include:
149 - Dairy Queen
130 - Sonic
119 - Chick-fil-A
118 - Jack in the Box
116 - Taco Bell
"It has been an easy 'out' to talk price when the R-word is on everybody's lips. But recession does not mean lowered expectations among consumers," Shea said. "The consumer still wants benefits, which means value for their dollar. And, as we saw when comparing our predictive metrics to Ameritest's annual sweep of category advertising testing, those values that showed up as most important at the beginning of the year, when advertised against, were the most successful for those advertisers."
Ameritest's syndicated research includes testing of more than 300 ads in more than 25,000 interviews. The findings from this research were compared to Brand Keys nation-wide research of QSR consumers at the start of 2009.
