Restaurant executives get the hint on complexity

Restaurant chains’ drive for more customers took them in a lot of directions in recent years. They explored all kinds of partnerships. They sold items that have little to do with restaurant food, like socks and trinkets.

They pushed new discounts, unleashed new menu items and product lines and introduced more limited-time offers than ever, for three years in a row.

But more industry executives are starting to question whether they are doing too much.

Simplification efforts

On Wednesday, for instance, Jack in the Box’s interim CEO, Mark King, told analysts that the company has reduced the number of promotions per marketing window from three to two, largely to reduce complexity.

He noted that, during road shows, “I heard very clearly we need fewer distractions and greater consistency to ensure teams can execute the brand’s initiatives.”

King’s comments came a week after McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski lamented his chain’s apparent over-marketing. The company introduced a series of initiatives last quarter, including a big, new burger, new beverages, new value offers, and two major marketing partnerships, with the Netflix program K-Pop Demon Hunters and the FIFA World Cup.

“If you just put yourself in the shoes of a restaurant manager, beyond the day-to-day stuff, that’s a lot of things to be throwing at a restaurant,” Kempczinski said.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that some of the marketing partnerships, in particular, just didn’t work, as noted by my colleague Alicia Kelso. We can add one more example, in fact, to Kelso’s list: Jack in the Box’s partnership with the YouTube program Hot Ones. Apparently, the menu offerings that were part of that deal were too spicy for the chain’s customers.

But, as Kempczinski noted, restaurant chains have been throwing a lot at their restaurant managers and workers, and not just marketing partnerships. They’ve just done a lot, all in the name of traffic.

Value war impact

The value war they are currently fighting is the most intense in decades, with little evidence that it’s actually working to improve traffic and the industry’s reputation for pricing.

Restaurant chains also set records in each of the past three years for the number of limited-time offers.

Yet, as my Technomic colleague David Henkes noted recently, there is at least some evidence that the pace of such offers has slowed this year.

Restaurants have needed all this marketing, of course, because customers aren’t visiting all that often. But in the process, they’ve made their operations more complex for restaurant teams, which is taking away from service inside the actual restaurants. And all those efforts all at once can muddy the marketing message and reduce its effectiveness.

There is nothing wrong with limited-time offers or value deals or marketing partnerships or new menu platforms. But when they don’t work, it stresses teams for nothing, and then chains are digging themselves out of a hole.

Simplification, King said, will “allow us to focus on what matters most, and I think part of our challenge in the past was we had so many things to execute we really didn’t do a good job on anything. The whole idea of simplification isn’t to eliminate, it’s to focus, and we think the results of that should be positive.”