May 16, 2008
A six-unit chain just outside of Sheboygan comes up with a new chicken wing dipping sauce or a mix-in for an ice cream treat and we’re all over it like fingerprints on a touch screen. Oh the thrill of a luscious, and profitable, new love!
And yet, year after year, research reveals that the central culinary offering of the restaurant industry is the hamburger. Sure it’s a little long in the tooth and the nutrition thing has become a bit of a hassle, but in a world full of menu flirtations the industry inevitably comes home to its true love, a ground beef patty on a bun. Even an increasingly New Age McDonald’s has recently gotten back to basics with a Southern California test of a bodacious third-of-a-pound Angus beef burger, positioned as a premium item but also, if we’re going to be honest about it, really just the inevitable historical progression of the quarter-pounder.
Industry observers are certainly aware that Hardee’s, and its CKE Restaurants sister-chain Carl’s Jr., deserve much of the credit for the quick-serve cult of the Angus ‘bigger-is-better’burger. In what is cited internally as “The Revolution of 2003,” Hardee’s threw out the roast beef and the fried chicken on its menu and got into everyone’s grill with a premium burger menu and marketing focus, a tactic that most memorably featured Paris Hilton having illicit relations with both Carl’s Thickburger and Hardee’s Monsterburger. That the focus has worked financially is demonstrated by several years’ worth of extremely favorable quarterly-sales comparisons and a prodigious rise in the parent company’s stock price. But one wonders if the marketing has convinced anyone that Hardee’s or Carl’s Jr. now really makes a great hamburger.
Enter Citysearch, an internet-based service that solicits the opinions of both experts and average consumers to rate the various cultural, shopping, restaurant, etc., amenities of America’s major and notquite- so-major municipalities. Even though the internet is assuredly a bloggy deluge of opinion these days, it is hard to argue with an outfit that is part of the IAC/InterActive Corporation that includes the likes of Match.com and Ticketmaster, has been around for more than a decade, boasts more than 600,000 reviews in its annals, and is consulted by an average of 20 million people every month. Fortunately, for the sake of this column, its reviewers annually take on a ranking of the best hometown hamburgers.
It’s hardly surprising that in the 2006 listing of best burgers, selfstyled culinary meccas such as New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans fail to list a single national chain restaurant hamburger among their top tens. In the vast preponderance of the local lists, however, chain restaurants that feature hamburgers tend to do exceptionally well. In fact it would be hard to conclude anything other than the fact that Fuddruckers produces America’s most-popular hamburger, as it ranks in the top 10 of 24 cities’ best hamburger lists.
What is quite interesting from a marketing perspective is a comparison of the Citysearch best hamburger lists from 2003, the year that CKE changed its menu and marketing strategies, to the 2006 lists. In 2003, the 10 most-broadly popular quick-serve/fast-casual hamburgers came from, in order: Fuddruckers, Wendy’s, Johnny Rockets, Burger King, Steak n Shake, Back Yard Burgers, White Castle, Sonic, In-N-Out, and Fatburger. In 2006 the list reads: Fuddruckers, Hardee’s, Johnny Rockets, Carl’s Jr., In-N-Out, Backyard Burgers, Fatburger, Whataburger, Steak n Shake, and White Castle.
A host of observations are suggested by these lists, not the least of which is that the disappearance of Wendy’s and Burger King from the rankings indicate that the late Dave Thomas took the marketing mojo with him in the former case, and that the King has not ushered in quality burger-wise in the latter. It’s also interesting to note that the appearance of relatively small regional chains like Whataburger and White Castle says a lot more about regional tradition and local pride than absolute culinary quality. First and foremost, though, is the unavoidable conclusion that CKE Restaurant hamburgers are suddenly all that.
Delightfully, Hardee’s does not appear unduly impressed with its own perceived quality accomplishment. Chain spokesperson Jeff Mochal accepts the fact that there are likely some local mom-and-pop restaurants that turn out truly great hamburgers for which they do not receive broad credit. Four years of relentless media exposure to a highquality burger message is, Mochal admits, going to cause a lot of consumers to have Hardee’s as a top-of-mind choice during a survey process.
“For four years we’ve produced a deluge of burger commercials focusing on a high-quality burger,” Mochal says, “but the key is that our operational focus and the commitment to a good burger is sincere. There’s no 99-cent menu at Hardee’s. After four years we really are a good burger joint, and that’s a message people apparently agree with.”
Famed food writer Calvin Trillin once observed, “Anybody who doesn’t think the best hamburger in the world is in his home town is a sissy.” In an increasing number of towns from Tampa Bay, Florida, to Tuscon, Arizona, CKE restaurants are apparently serving those burgers and in the restaurant world, nothing lives happily ever after like well-regarded beef on a bun.
