Some advertising campaigns are timeless wins, and others The spongmonkeys were all over Quiznos advertising from February until August of the same year, says Adage , and if it feels like you were tortured by them for a lot longer than that, you're not alone. They were so maligned that some franchisees took to posting signage apologizing for them, and saying they had nothing to do with the weird, weird idea. In the first week, Quiznos' Denver headquarters got in the neighborhood of 30, phone calls from people wondering what the heck was going on, and when it came time to give them the ax, corporate said they'd done what they were supposed to: create buzz.
Unfortunately, it wasn't all good buzz. Entrepreneur says Quiznos marketing has been far from successful. The spongmonkeys were creepy and turned customers off, and in their attempts at making a sexually aggressive toaster oven hilarious once again fell short, and did more harm than good.
Sometimes, a sex scandal makes headlines for a bit and people move on. Other times, it does some serious damage — and that's definitely the case when it involves one of a company's senior executives, and a year-old girl.
In , Quiznos' senior VP of marketing was arrested after striking up a conversation with an online persona he thought was a year-old girl. It was actually a member of the Canon City, Colorado police department, and after a series of lewd conversations, they arranged to meet up.
It didn't go as he planned: Scott Lippitt was arrested on five felony charges, including internet luring, internet sexual exploitation of a child, and criminal attempt at sexual assault on a child. Soon after, Lippitt was fired , though his attorney claimed it was only because of the bad publicity. As if that wasn't enough to tarnish Quiznos' image even further, it also came out that he had been behind both the spongemonkeys ad campaign and an even more uncomfortable one that featured Baby Bob, an infant with an adult voice who hit on women.
Free food is great, but do you know what's not great? When companies are seen as not honoring their own coupons and free food promises. In , Quiznos tried to get some serious goodwill with free sandwiches. They offered up the no-strings-attached deal with hopes of getting people in their doors again, but it wasn't long before Consumerist was reporting that customers were getting denied their subs. Some locations didn't honor the coupons at all, others only accepted them if customers bought something else, and needless to say, people were not happy.
Consumerist did some more digging, and found that franchisees had a very good reason for not accepting the coupons: they weren't being compensated by corporate, and instead were expected to eat the cost of the "free" subs. A few days after the promotion started, an internal memo suggested they were going to start helping franchisees with the costs of the promotion, and at the time, they said they'd "had nearly , coupons printed the first day," and that's a ton of subs that could cripple already struggling franchises.
Quiznos promised to make it right, but that's not the kind of thing people forget. In the face of lawsuits, conflict, and all kinds of bad publicity, Quiznos has struggled on. She made some significant strides toward relieving pressure on the franchisees they had left, cutting the payments they were required to make to corporate and kick-starting a new loyalty program.
But too little, too late? Quiznos was bought in June by a private investment firm via Nation's Restaurant News , and even though they weren't suffering as badly as they had been in previous years, they had still closed stores in That might not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but remember — by this point, that was a quarter of their stores.
Restaurant Business blames Quiznos' fall on a combination of competition, a bad business plan, bad decisions, a nationwide recession, buyouts, bankruptcy, and bad press.
That's a lot for any chain to recover from, and Quiznos' fate is still very much up in the air — especially when other sub chains are only expanding. Since those buildings suddenly had less tenants and workers, Quiznos had to grapple with less business. The influx of fast-casual operators into the space also squeezed margins. Lintonsmith spearheaded Quiznos Toast Points mobile loyalty program and has been at the wheel for some recent menu innovations, including Toasty Tots.
Quiznos' CEO will remain in place, the company says. Finance June Danny Klein. Finance Quiznos. Business Advice.
Best Practices for Restaurant Text Marketers. Consumer Trends. He's one of the lawyers representing a group of current and former Quiznos franchisees who are suing the company.
The class-action lawsuit, which includes over members many former franchise owners , alleges that Quiznos forced its franchisees to pay too much for food and other supplies, Mr.
Dick says. A hearing is scheduled for early July, when an Ontario judge will hear motions by Quiznos and GFS to dismiss the case. The suit was first filed in , but was caught up in procedural wrangling as Quiznos and GFS challenged, and then appealed, the certification of the suit as a class action. Dick says the bankruptcy proceeding in the U. Quiznos has a particularly complicated corporate structure. The filing in Delaware specifically names 15 subsidiaries, called "associated entities," of Quiznos parent company, QCE Finance, that share in its debt.
And there are several more "associated entities" that do not have the same liabilities. Contributing to the company's inability to pay down this debt is the fact that the fees, or royalties, franchisees pay the company have already been used to secure previous loans. Dick, that's what led to allegations of a price-fixing scheme. That forced the company to find other revenue streams, including "the sale of franchises or the sale of food," Mr.
The company pursued a similar strategy in the U. She says franchisees were forced to pay "markups of up to 50 per cent," which meant "it was very hard to a make a profit. Sparks says. The remainder was distributed to franchisees in the form of discounts and debt forgiveness.
Despite the suit, little has changed for Quiznos franchisees.
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