Community Efforts: Takin’ It to the Streets
Pollo Campero pounds the pavement to drive traffic to new stores.
By Christine Zimmerman, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 10/1/2006
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Pollo Campero is pretty comfortable in the Los Angeles area. The casual dine-in chicken chain has built a name for itself for the past 35 years, with 11 stores in Los Angeles County. But Adir Restaurants Corp., the master franchisor for Pollo Campero, knew it would have some educating to do to get people in the doors of a new store in San Bernadino, an hour away from its core market. Enter the Street Team.
Comprised of five people in Pollo Campero uniforms and the company mascot, Pollito, a 6-foot, smiling, bright-yellow chicken, the Street Team for the San Bernadino unit, which opened in February, was hired specifically to interest and inform the community about the restaurant. Besides talking with people on the streets, the team distributed fliers with menus to local businesses and residents. And it invited employees of local businesses to use two-piece meal coupons.
Not only did 750 people visit the new location to redeem their coupons, the Street Team has driven nearly 20 percent of traffic to the store to date. “We were conservative in our sales expectations for the new unit, but even still, sales have exceeded our goals,” says Vice President of Operations Andrew Hatzis. “That was a big surprise. Considering this was a market we were just stepping into, I feel the campaign contributed so much.”
One-Two Punch
According to Hatzis, the value of the Street Team was twofold: First, Pollo Campero was able to approach people around the new location. “It’s much easier for people to experience you when you’re in the neighborhood. You can point right over to the store,” he says. “It’s not so convenient if they have to drive to find you. People pass the store when they are shopping or working in the neighborhood.”
Second, the hands-on approach let Pollo Campero educate consumers in a nonthreatening way: by giving them a coupon. But Hatzis said it was more important to show consumers that the Guatemala-based chain is already successful in other areas and has been around long enough to fine-tune its product. “We wanted to give them something really compelling to make them try the product, sure, but that flier was also designed to give information,” he says. “It talked about our product, our 35th anniversary, the whole phenomenon of people waiting for seven hours to get chicken in our other stores.”
Pollo Campero targeted the general market for the opening of the San Bernadino restaurant, instead of just going after its core Hispanic market. “We saw a lot of potential lunchtime traffic from shoppers and a lot of lunchtime competition. So we kept the campaign general. The point was to take the mascot out and get people familiar with the logo,” says Monica Schoenhouse, director of marketing at Adir Restaurants, cautioning that education and communication are key to this type of campaign. “We didn’t just pass out the fliers or put them on windshields. We talked with people. That was the important part.”
Adir Restaurants hired the Street Team from a local agency that specializes in consumer marketing. “We don’t use our own employees because that’s not our core skill set,” says Hatzis. “They hire a crew that comes in for us to train. They are trained on where we came from, our history and our core product.”
Pollo Campero worked for weeks to build up excitement before opening day. Three weeks prior to the Feb. 7 opening, the chain had marketing in bus shelters, hinting at the “phenomenon” coming soon. The Street Team hit the pavement on the three weekends before the opening. A week before opening, the team canvassed the area around San Bernadino every day.
The chain also coordinated a radio campaign that gave away free lunch to winning offices—hand-delivered by the Street Team and Pollito. Pollito also took instant photos with consumers and gave away the logo-embossed pictures.
The marketing campaign for the San Bernadino location cost about $30,000, according to the company. “A mass mailing might have cost less,” Hatzis acknowledges. “But all of our pieces came together for a higher redemption. It was not hard to decide on this investment.”
After the store opened, Pollo Campero surveyed customers about how they heard about the restaurant. The No. 1 answer was, “word of mouth,” starting with the Street Team, according to Hatzis.
Schoenhouse says that typically when Pollo Campero opens a new store, the goal is to get people to come in and try the product. In the past, the company gave away boxes with which consumers could get a free leg of chicken. “We definitely proved we can give chicken away. But we need to prove people will buy it,” she says.
Training Day
The marketing effort to win over local merchants did more than make new friends and customers; it also provided a training ground for the San Bernadino Pollo Campero staff.
“With the [business-to-business] effort, we gave 1,500 coupons to local stores, like the Best Buy across the street. We invited them for a free meal. Now we know they will come back. And it also let our crew learn what it was like to serve 500 people,” Schoenhouse says.
She notes that the store fed local businesspeople, the fire department and healthcare workers from Loma Linda University Medical Center, for example. And many people wrote thank-you notes or just a welcome on their coupons.
Hatzis says the restaurant enjoyed a 40 percent redemption rate on the program for local businesses. And there was a fringe benefit: Consumers without coupons were lining up to see what was going on.
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