Getting Creative with LTOs
Limited time offers are proving fertile grounds for new-media marketing.
California Tortilla is proud of its wacky marketing campaigns—most of which happen on a pretty small budget. When it came time to promote the Teriyaki Burrito LTO this summer, the marketing department stirred up some viral "pre-excitement" six weeks before it was to hit the stores.
" We put out a call on Twitter and Facebook for fans to send in fortune cookie messages that related to California Tortilla," explains Stacy Kane, director of marketing for the 40-unit Rockville, Maryland chain. "These were baked into fortune cookies that were handed out with every order of the Teriyaki Burrito." It created a lot of buzz—and buzz is the measure of an LTO’s success, she adds.
While the younger generation may be the most "socially active," plenty of older Americans are right in there with them. Pat & Oscar’s, a 19-location family-dining concept based in San Diego, recently introduced its Bangkok Chicken Chopped Salad on Facebook, asking participants to guess the ingredients from the posted photo.
"We embraced Facebook for its core audience—30- to 49-year-old females—which is the same as ours," says Nicole Abraham, director of marketing and brand management for Pat & Oscar’s, who was a bit surprised at Facebook’s demographics. So far, the response to the Bangkok Chicken Chopped Salad has been very positive, she reports.
Excerpted from Restaurant Business, September 2009
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