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Wendy's Touts Food Quality, Value In New Breakfast Push

Approaching the anniversary of its nationwide breakfast menu launch, Wendy’s is doubling down on food quality and value pricing in new creative to help boost morning restaurant traffic.

When Wendy’s launched breakfast on the back of broad advertising support last March 2, the focus of the messaging was on food quality—as seen in this image-laden spot.

Now the chain wants people to take a closer look at how its competitors prepare breakfast foods in the new “Wendy’s Takes On Bad Breakfast” campaign from the VML, Spark Foundry and Ketchum agencies.

In this 40-second spot, an office worker grouses about a breakfast sandwich from a coffee shop that was “soggy and stale. Turns out they were premade and frozen weeks ago.”

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Likewise, a woman working from home says her taste buds “were injured by the negligent behavior of a careless drive-through. They repeatedly served me folded eggs.”

“Rubbery bacon” comes under attack in spots like this one featuring another ranting office worker.

Besides food quality, what all the spots have in common is a ticker running at the bottom of the screen promoting two select breakfast sandwiches for $4.

In the company’s third fiscal quarter ended Sept. 27, the breakfast daypart contributed 6.5% of same-restaurant sales, according to Wendy’s CMO Carl Loredo.

“So it really is making a big difference in driving the business,” Loredo said in a virtual presentation this morning.

From July through September, visits to Wendy’s locations from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. rose to 5.5% of the overall proportion of daily visitors—compared to 3.7% during the same period of 2019, according to place-based data provider Placier.ai.

“While this still amounts to a much smaller slice of the daily mix than the lunch, early afternoon or dinner pushes, it still indicates a very strong reception of the new breakfast menu,” Placer.ai vice president of marketing Ethan Chernofsky tells Marketing Daily. “This is especially the case in a COVID environment, where brands oriented towards the breakfast time spot are seeing declines in morning visits.”

The Wendy’s breakfast menu aims to offer something for all tastes—ranging from the Baconator breakfast sandwich to a bacon, egg and Swiss cheese croissant, a honey butter chicken biscuit sandwich and cold-brew Frosty-ccino coffees in chocolate and vanilla.

Consumers ages 18-24 “skew more toward our Frosty-ccinos,” while for GenX, “it’s definitely the honey butter chicken biscuit,” Wendy’s vice president of culinary innovation John Li said during this morning’s presentation.

“The Baconator skews a little male 18-35,” and for diners ages 55+, it’s the croissant sandwich, “which actually kind of makes sense because that’s the generation that grew up eating the traditional Sunday brunch, like eggs Benedict.”

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