• by Aaron Baar , April 5, 2010

Don't expect the catchy jingles (à la "$5 foot long") as Subway rolls out its breakfast offerings this week. But don't expect to escape the message either. 

"It's not a six-week burst of activity," says Tony Pace, CMO for Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust (the group that manages Subway's marketing). "We're working on a year-long plan."

Subway is marketing the new offerings along the theme "Build Your Better Breakfast." The idea plays upon Subway's longstanding proposition that each sandwich is customized as consumers choose the ingredients.

"The notion of being able to build your own [breakfast] sandwich is something that's not out there," Pace tells Marketing Daily. "Since we're sandwich guys, we're pretty confident we can do a pretty good breakfast sandwich." The blitz will begin with a pair of television commercials touting the availability of breakfast sandwiches in all of Subway's 25,000 locations in the United States.

One simple ad depicts people passing a yellow and green bullhorn to announce, in pieces, that breakfast sandwiches are available at Subway. A second ad shows a Subway employee heading to work and noticing a crowd of people getting increasingly larger as she approaches the store. The spot ends with longtime Subway spokesperson Jared Fogle at the front of the line (to whom the employee says, "I should have known you'd be first in line.")

Elsewhere, the company will be using social media and other Internet marketing (including branded wake-up calls from a variety of characters, such as a drill sergeant, loving mom and surfer dude) and blogger outreach to get the word out. (With egg whites and flatbreads as part of the offering, the company is also enlisting support from the nutritional community.)

The breakfast offerings may also make an appearance on later-season episodes of the NBC series "Chuck," which has featured the company prominently in past seasons through a branded entertainment deal, Pace says. "We're using some of the marketing equities we've developed to show we're on the breakfast game," Pace says of the approach. "We're confident in our abilities to get the word out. The next step is to get them through the door."

To that end, the company will be running heavy promotions for trial, mostly touting the theme of customization rather than price. "Price only goes so far," he says. "People definitely want deals, but they also want quality."

Despite the long-term effort on breakfast marketing, Subway will continue to promote its bread-and-butter offerings of sub sandwiches for lunch and dinner (meaning $5 foot longs aren't a thing of the past), Pace says. "We're able to fully support our core sandwiches and breakfast items as well," he says.