Tonight in marketing class, we had a guest speaker named Jeffrey Ganssle, the CEO of DiPasqua Enterprises. Jeff is responsible for allocating the marketing budget for over 90 Subway franchise locations in the Greater Orlando area, and while he was very knowledgeable about things like profit margins and customer loyalty, Internet marketing (namely social media) was barely a blip on his radar. Out of a $500,000,000 annual marketing budget at the national level, Subway only spends 2.5% on Internet marketing, most of which goes towards the unremarkable; banner ads. Pretty risky for a higher quality brand that has historically done very poorly when competing on price (sans the highly successful $5 foot long sub, of course).
A quick search on Facebook revealed about eight different fan pages carrying the Subway branding, the largest of which has over one million fans. Here’s the shocker though: None of the fan pages were “official.” Rather, they were started by either franchise owners or random people. The situation on Twitter is similar. When I asked Jeff about this, his response was that some franchise owners are more comfortable than others.
What? The fan page for TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, numbers in the mere thousands, even though the Internet is their home turf. So how can a Facebook fan page with over a million fans (not to mention the other Subway pages with hundreds of thousands of fans), go so unnoticed by their corporate marketeers? We live in an age where customer interaction is oftentimes what defines a brand, and many traditionalists have trouble loosening the reigns. There’s a point though, where the “official” brand needs to step in and bring order to the conversation.
But wait… there’s more! When I asked Jeff how he would react should he have a Domino’s Pizza situation on his hands, he was laser focused on prevention and censorship. Probably the most laughable thing he said was that cell phones with cameras shouldn’t be allowed. I can’t remember the last time I saw a handset without a camera.
He later admitted that he, along with others in the QSR industry, were scared out of their minds over this happening to them. The truth is, these things are going to happen no matter how rock solid the preventative measures are, so it’s the brand’s response that truly matters. Domino’s did an outstanding job recovering from the disastrous YouTube video by (imagine this) posting a YouTube video of their own from the President of Domino’s USA, immediately addressing the situation head on. They took a beating on Twitter, but they responded swiftly and did a great job answering people’s questions. Overall, Domino’s is probably better off because of the whole situation (this is called the service recovery paradox).
I’ve seen a lot of traditional brands miss the boat, but Subway takes the double meat cheese steak on this one.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Ganssle is in fact the COO, and not the CEO.
5 comments ↓
At the very least they should be monitoring Twitter for complaints about their products… sounds like they will have to learn the hard way.
Seriously great article, Nick. It’s absolutely amazing to me that such a massive brand can have next-to-zero online presence. And that the person in charge of marketing, who should be pushing for just such a presence, is instead so flip about it.
I suppose he’s probably been doing what he does for a long time. Change is scary. Probably why he uses his Motorola 1000 ‘Autotelefon’ circa 1991.
[...] finally responded to our post about them the other day. So how’d they [...]
By the shear fact that no representative of Subway has commented on this post, which has been up for a few weeks, tells me that they are most likely either not doing any online brand monitoring (big mistake), or that they aren’t going to chime in (an even worse mistake).
Once again we see an example of a company that just doesn’t get it, which today is not only amazing, but also very dangerous.
-1 for Subway.
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