How telling the right brand story drove 5X increase in sales and 800 new locations for Firehouse Subs

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, and you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Today we are joined by a guest, Doug, who has been a fractional CMO and marketing leader for over 15 years. Welcome to the show, Doug. Thanks, Eric.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Thanks for having me Pleasure to be here today.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Great to have you here. Maybe you can just share a little bit about your background. I know you've had a lot of great experience leading marketing teams.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Sure, so I'll keep this brief because we want this to be a good, brief, concise podcast for your audience. As Eric mentioned, I've been in the well CMO for the last 15 years, spent my time growing helping grow firehouse subs in Peterpea, usa, but prior to that I had experienced a lot of other restaurants, and for the last four years I've been a fractional CMO at Chief Outsiders, where I've helped other restaurants, as well as some home service brands, to learn about different aspects of marketing because, as it turns out, a lot of what we do at marketing is transferable from industry to industry.

Speaker 3: 1:51

Absolutely. Firehouse subs is one of my favorites. There's one right near my office, and my colleagues and I often go there. So, doug, why don't you tell us a story about some of the best marketing you had in a very, very long tenure at Firehouse Subs?

Speaker 2: 2:08

Well, thank you. I'm going to go back to one of my faves Now. When I was at Firehouse Subs, when I first got there, they had an ad campaign, an ad agency, some things were going. I was the only marketing person in the marketing department, which was kind of strange for a group that had about 230-some restaurants, and as the co-founders brought me into the fold, if you will, and told me stories about firefighters and the camaraderie that firefighters have in the firehouse, I started learning a lot more about Firehouse Subs and also what goes on in a firehouse, because both the co-founding brothers, chris and Robin Sorensen, spend time on the fire force in Jacksonville, florida. Their father spent 43 years on the fire department, so the family is rooted deep in fire departments, which is why they called their restaurant Firehouse Subs. Well, the interesting thing is the camaraderie and what goes on in a firehouse. One of the things firefighters do is they go to grocery stores and they buy food and they take it back to the firehouse and they make the food, and if you've ever seen a fire truck in the parking lot at a grocery store somewhere, that's exactly what they're doing. Now, the thing with firefighters is they're going to cook the food and the people that eat the food better like it. Because if the people that eat the food don't like the food, they're going to take a lot of crap literally from jabbing and jibing and everything else on. Hey, you guys stink, you're bad cooks, whatever. And that's part of what goes on in a firehouse when the guys are waiting around for that call for that bell to ring, to go to a you know, put out a fire. So all this was premise to. The co-founder said. This is why we're using our current ad platform. That's our actual call to action. Our unique selling probability whatever you want to call it is cause firefighters know good food. So to them, firefighters knew good food because they knew if they didn't produce good food in the firehouse, the other firefighters would give them crap for having produced poor food. But in reality, as an outsider coming in when I was new at the brand, I just didn't understand it from the bridge perspective, like how do consumers know that? What's going on? We started asking questions and it was interesting because other people had the same questions. If I talked to them more, if you knew the story, it made sense. But not everybody, like you, couldn't tell that story in advertising very well.

Speaker 3: 4:13

And their sales were kind of soft because people they didn't get it is what you're saying they didn't get the backstory you just explained, right.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Correct Because they were actually using some very high production value black and white TV commercials and that's a different ads going, but it just didn't. It wasn't resonating with their consumers. So we asked some questions, some things happened and this was a group ever I mean the CEO and I worked together on this very closely, got a lot of direction, helped from the founders, and this one was not just a dug deal, which also made this fun, where it was easy to do some of the best work in my life up to that point because it was in such a collaborative environment. But we ended up hiring a new agency, had a great creative guy and we started a new campaign with a brand proposition where our way beats their way. It originally started as our way beats some way, but we didn't want to shake the 800-pound gorilla. But our way beats that way and our way beats their way can mean a lot of things. The way we prepare the sub is better. The way we serve you the sub is better. They have a firehouse as a fast, casual environment where you walk in your order of the food at the counter, that's delivered to you at the table, et cetera. Things like that. So our way beats whoever their way is, and we took that unique selling proposition actually as a tagline, along with more that we'd put in the ads, started out with humor et cetera. You know, first we fine-tuned that and then we turned on the average. We hit pretty heavy at a radio campaign. It was before digital was as big as it is today and sales moved up. And so, if I kind of move fast forward from when I started, when I ended, in about 10 years we went from 230-some locations to over a thousand. So there was a four-time increase in locations at a 5.1x in total sales growth in the US, puerto Rico and Canada with an average of 19.4% average annual sales increases over 10 years. And all that was because we found the right brand proposition, we had the right strategy. So we didn't do any random acts of marketing. That's what we call marketing tactics that people do that do not make any essentially no ladder up to some kind of a strategy. So we put a strategy in place. We tactically executed it. The restaurants, the franchisees, did a great job serving subs and Firehouse Subs grew in that 11-year period to over a thousand locations.

Speaker 3: 6:21

Wow, that is pretty remarkable, growing from 230 locations to over a thousand and 5x the sales. It just goes to show how powerful it is to have the right story, the right message that really does connect with people, that they get it and they're like yeah, that's what I want for lunch or dinner. That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 6:44

Well, I touched on random acts of marketing. It's the chief outsiders. We have a process we call the growth gears. Growth Gear 1 is about insights. Growth Gear 2 is strategy. Growth Gear 3 is the tactics, and a lot of companies tend to want to do the tactics first, which is what Firehouse was doing at the time. That's like the ready shoot aim approach and we definitely prefer the ready aim shoot approach and that's where the growth gears works really well and why RanaMax and marketing are not good for your brand if you don't have the strategy in the top line things figured out and who you really are, what you really do for your customers to make them happy.

Speaker 3: 7:18

And let me ask you, in the 10 years that you were there and putting this process in place, what would you say was the hardest part about it? Because marketing isn't easy. A lot of people are like, oh, it's easier, just create some commercials. Was it convincing other people within Firehouse that that had to be the message? Was it refining it over time? What was hard about it?

Speaker 2: 7:41

So the hardest part initially would have been convincing the franchisees to spend their money on it. Now this is actually another part of the story that's somewhat important that I left out in an abbreviated version. But Firehouse Subs had a certain percent of sales that franchisees had to spend or put into their co-op to buy these ads and things the radio in particular, because before digital and 2% of their sales volumes annual sales volume for location were not enough to do much damage. So we did some testing. I led some testing in the home market in December of the year. That before we started all the things in September of the following year we got people to get on the radio program and go on with the RWA, b-sterway etc. Made it very important to ask the franchisees to double their spend. So they had to spend 2% of their sales and advertising and at one point we got 86% of the franchisees to spend 4%. It was that doubling their spend to get behind the ads that we'd come up with, based on the right brand proposition and unique selling position that made things really start to click, so that the hardest part was that. But we had some progressive franchisees that jumped on the bandwagon pretty quickly and that got a lot of others to follow, but that was the hard part.

Speaker 3: 8:49

Yeah. So to get the impact or the result of 5X in sales growth over that long period of time, the company had to, and the franchisees had to, get comfortable with doubling their investment in marketing. That takes a lot of convincing, I'm sure, over time. We're sort of just covering it very quickly here, but marketing investment is one of the convincing people to invest more is one of the hardest things.

Speaker 2: 9:11

Very. But if you do test marketing and provide the right metrics and show that sales increased, that'd be in a fairly easy sell at some point. But there certainly were those that were not into it at all and it took a lot of arm twisting, if you will. Makes sense.

Speaker 3: 9:25

All right, doug Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for sharing this inspiring story. As we like to say here, marketing may never be easy, but it should always be fun, so we hope this story inspires all of you a little bit.

Speaker 1: 9:42

You've been listening to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our passion is to bring you the marketing rock stars who share stories about the best marketing they've done, how it delivered and how they handled all the challenges that go along with it. And we do it all in 10 minutes. We only ask two things. First, visit the RemarkableMarketingio website for more great insights. Second, this podcast has been brought to you by the Next Generation Social Networking app, workverse. You can download and use the Workverse app for free to build your professional brand, become a paid expert advisor and discover the best business events to attend. Download the Workverse app today. See you next time on the Remarkable Marketing Podcast.