• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 1, 2018

Carl’s Jr. is hosting its own social media “awards show” leading up to and during the Academy Awards on March 4.

The QSR’s awards — dubbed “The Thickies,” after the its signature Thickburgers — will recognize fans for exceptional tweets in a variety of categories, including Best Fan, Best Tweet, Best Food Review, Best Food Selfie and even Best Hater and Best Competitor.

While any tweets from the past year are eligible for consideration, Carl’s is encouraging fans to post something fresh this week.

The brand is promoting the effort with GIFs and engaging fans on its Twitter account all week. It will announce the winners on Oscars Sunday, in succession, in the same style as an awards show.

Prizes include trophies and $25 Carl’s Jr. gift cards.

Carl’s Jr. is the midst of a brand overhaul — as is Hardee’s, its sibling CKE Restaurant Holdings Inc. brand.

Carl’s Jr. launched “The Call of Carl’s” — its first solo national brand campaign, from its new agency, Havas, just this month.  

Since acquiring Hardee’s in 1997, CKE had been marketing it in tandem with Carl’s Jr.

Now, under new CEO Jason Marker and new CMO Jeff Jenkins, the company is seeking to establish clearly differentiated identities for the two regional brands, including different menu items and different marketing campaigns.

For years, the shared campaigns featured sparsely-clad females to appeal to the brands’ “young, hungry guys.” But those are now being replaced with more enlightened approaches designed to appeal to both sexes.

The changes started last spring, with an ad introducing a fictional “Carl Hardee Sr.” returning to the company and nixing the “hot chick” campaigns. And this past fall, before the marketing was separated, the two chains began running ads touting the quality and value of their food — specifically, the $5 All-Star Meals.

But the chains still have work ahead of them.

According to YouGov Brand Index, since dropping the babe ads last March, Carl’s Jr.’s perception among consumers hasn’t noticeably improved.

In fact, between August 2017 and the end of January 2018, the percentages of fast-food eaters who were aware of the brand and said that they would consider patronizing Carl’s Jr. the next time they visited a fast-food chain declined from 14% to 11%. In comparison, the average for the same question among the top QSR brands stood at 28% in January.

Carl Jr.’s ad awareness among fast food eaters has “seesawed in small increments” since the rebranding debuted nearly a year ago, YouGov reports. The biggest gains coincided with the second execution of the “Carl Hardee Sr.” last August, followed in September by the start of the “$5 All-Star Meals” campaign.

Those campaigns pushed ad awareness up from 13% of fast food eaters to 17% by the end of October 2017 — still far below the 29% awareness average for the QSR sector at the time.

In addition, with the exception of a six-week bump last summer, the 5% of fast food eaters who said that they’ve bought food at Carl’s Jr. in the last 30 days has remained flat since last March, the researcher reports.

YouGov’s tracking data show Hardee’s exhibiting quite similar patterns. For instance, on April 3, 2017, right after CKE announced the shift in its advertising approach, 16% of fast food eaters aware of the brand said they’d consider buying their next fast food meal at Hardee's. On February 20, 2018, the same indicator showed 15%. While it briefly rose to a high of 18% in late August and late October last year, that was still 10 to 12 percentage points below the top QSR sector’s average.