How $5 Fridays Can Help Boost Brand Awareness and Franchisee Growth - Smoothie King (2024)

• Author:Smoothie King

• September 19, 2018

Every Friday, Smoothie King franchisees offer guests any medium-sized (32-ounce)smoothie of their choice for just $5and Meal Replacement Smoothies for $6. It’s just one of the ways we show how committed we are to helping our franchisees achieve their financial goals.

Smoothie King’s targeted discounting enables us to offer enticing promotions that bring in new guests while helping to boost franchisee growth. By focusing our discounts and promotional efforts on our loyalty program and ‘How Do You Friday?’ campaign, we’re able to generate significant national brand awareness that activates guest engagement at the local level.

Not only do $5 Fridays enhance franchisees’ top-line sales, but they also make a healthy and active lifestyle more affordable for our guests. Smoothie King’s Digital Content Manager Courtney Thees explains a little more about the promotion and how it’s an asset for our franchisees:

A Positive Impact on Awareness

“$5 Fridays were actually a promotion our franchisees came up with,” Courtney said. “Many of our juice bar franchise owners were doing some version of the promotion. After substantial research into how stores were participating in the promotion and which price points were most effective, we decided to roll out the promotion system-wide. We had noticed a largely positive impact for franchisees implementing it, and we knew it had the potential to help each location moving forward.”

Discounts and coupons can beeffective ways to build on the emotional engagementthat helps drive consumer loyalty, and $5 Fridays present just one way Smoothie King franchisees are able to market themselves to new guests, generate repeat business and continually build a loyal guest base.

“The promotion has definitely had an impact on awareness for our brand,” said Courtney. “It’s also just a really good talking point to sway a guest who is in the consideration stage but hasn’t made the leap to come visit us yet. The promotion can get them in the door, allows them to try our product, and, hopefully, they’ll like it so much that they’ll continue to visit us – and be willing to pay the regular price point later on.”

Additionally, the promotion conditions guests to buy a larger smoothie than they would normally – which can drive incremental revenue. The more frequently guests buy 32-ounce smoothies, the more likely they are to make it recurring habit – whether or not they get the discounted rate. So, the promotion can create a win/win situation for both guest and franchisee. Not only does the typical guest actually spend more during a promotion, they walk away feeling like they have gotten a great value.

Consistency is Key to Franchisee Growth

Aside from the positive side effects on brand awareness, another important driving factor behind implementing $5 Fridays on a national basis is to maintain consistency across locations. This is especially important for franchise brands, whose locations have different owners but should all be on the same page when it comes to quality assurance and consistent promotions.

“In order to provide the best guest experience possible, consistency is key,” Courtney said. “That’s what guests expect from businesses they frequent, and franchises are no exception. They shouldn’t be able to use a coupon at only one of our locations, or only benefit from a promotion at a certain store. So, even though some of our franchisees had already implemented the $5 Friday promotion, we recognized that it was important to bring it to every location – both to help promote franchisee growth and provide a great guest experience.”

Also, by making $5 Fridays a system-wide promotion, we can leverage all of Smoothie King’s marketing assets – from our online presence to national media advertisem*nts and PR – to build attention around the promotion. When we use our corporate marketing dollars across markets for a system-wide promotion, franchisees canbenefit from greater awareness than they would be able to generate alone.

This not only helps drive in-store and system-wide sales by bringing in new guests, these cohesive efforts also support individual stores to perform better to realize their goals. When we work together on a system-wide initiative, we’re able to foster synergy across the brand and give franchisees partners a great opportunity to leverage national promotional initiatives.

With promotional and marketing campaigns are at the heart of a restaurant’s success, we’re always looking for more ways to heighten awareness and excitement around the Smoothie King brand. $5 Fridays are just one way we’re able to do it, while continuing to provide better-for-you, affordable options to our guests.

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$862,839* is the average gross sales of the top 25% of all traditional franchised units in operation for the entire calendar year ending December 26, 2022. Of the 231 units included in the average gross sales for the top 25%, 82 units met or exceeded the average gross sales.

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