Wendy's Twitter Battle

Wendy's is a classic American food restaurant that most people have been to or at least heard of in their lifetime. Being open since 1969, Wendy's has had to grow and change with the times in order to remain a profitable business. Their value proposition has always been uniqueness. Their patties are square, always fresh, and they have a lot of options other fast food restaurants don't offer such as chili, variety of salads, various lemonade flavors, and frostys. With more and more unique businesses popping up, Wendy's has to get extra creative with their marketing strategies. Alongside unique food options, they dove into social media.

Joining Twitter in 2009, Wendy's has built a strong and sassy media presence. To me, it seems like Wendy's hired the most social media fluent millennial(s) they could find and gave them free range over social media marketing. I couldn't find the exact tweet that started it, but while bantering with followers one day, Wendy's got into a rap/ roast battle over whether their beef was really served fresh or not. Tweeting roasts to fans and other restaurant chains like McDonald's and I-hop became a daily thing for Wendy's and it's still going strong. They'll roast anyone who continuously calls them out in the comments, questions the integrity of their beef's freshness, or provokes them in any other way. (Compilation of Wendy's roast's). As a marketing strategy, they worked really well for the most part because they completely nailed it with molding their brand to the platform. When they take out the corporation talk  and let real people run their page, they become much more transparent. By acting like real people on twitter, Wendy's hit the mark.  That being said, Wendy's got a little too real, and didn't do their research before posting a meme that made people outraged.


 Once upon a time, artists and children's book author Matt Furie created Pepe the frog as a part of his Myspace series called "Boys Club" in 2005. Fast forward ten or so years, Pepe becomes an infamous meme icon, especially among millennials. During the Hillary VS. Trump campaign, Pepe sadly got adopted as a symbol used by white supremacists. Hillary declared Pepe as a "racist hate symbol" despite people's efforts to save his image by posting wholesome Pepe memes.

Wendy's is using memes as a marketing strategy, so when a follower tweeted them asking "got any memes" they posted a picture of Pepe the frog dressed as Wendy, not knowing Pepe's original meaning had been destroyed. People began calling them racist and asked what was going on. Wendy's soon replied, putting on their corporation face again, apologizing that the person who posted it didn't know the meaning and the post was deleted.Wendy's did not seem to suffer from this too much however, because their online persona is still going strong and just last march they dropped an actual mixed tape dissing other fast food chains. Check it out  Here.

I think Wendy's is doing excellent for all the young people and heavy social media users out there because those are the ones that understand the language of Wendy's online persona. They are hitting the target market perfectly but like all trends, this one shall die too and Wendy's has definitely burned some bridges with people. Once this trend dies it might be hard getting some people to partner with them or take them seriously. If I was the marketing manager I would keep going with this. As far as marketing goes, what works is constantly changing so there's no time to think about what ifs. Even though the trend might die, the young people who eat at Wendy's now won't dislike Wendy's for their content later on. They hooked millennial as long terms consumers.

• What do you guys think?
• Where do you think Wendy's will go from here?

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