Sam Walton once said, and I am paraphrasing, ‘When you get confused go to the store, the customer has all the answers and the money.’ Hard to argue with that. We have an addendum to that which is proved brilliantly by the Business Week article The Accidental Hero. Our addition is this – ‘the store operator has lots of answers too’. The operator has instincts honed by daily interaction with customers that cloistered execs rarely hold, no matter how long they’ve been with a company. When our firm works with restaurant accounts we always spend time with their best franchisees. These folks are the field generals and they KNOW what is happening on the ground.
So back to the BW piece, which focuses on a Florida based Subway franchisee named Stuart Frankel. In order to lift sagging sales he tweaked his pricing to 5 bucks for a footlong. In the article he quips, “I like round numbers.” So do real people Stuart. You knew that though because you spend lots of time with them. Enough with the decimal points already…
As the national coverage of this story would indicate, Stuarts tweak trickled up to the brass in corporate and it is now a system wide promotion at Subway with national TV spots and mountains of collateral behind it. It’s literally become a 3.8 billion dollar idea. Pardon the decimal point.