Wendy's During March Madness

     The recent chapter in the book we are reading is covering how to market with X or Twitter. One of the larger sections covers some success stories that brands and companies have had through marketing campaigns with X. One of the stories involved Wendy's, I immediately paid attention because everyone knows how Wendy's markets themselves. In case you do not know, Wendy's strategy is to be super unfiltered and kind of say whatever they want to generate publicity. This has proven to be very effective and something most people know Wendy's by. The coverage was about how they marketed March Madness, and with that right around the corner, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to talk about it.

    For a brief overview, Wendy's took advantage of X and the direct message system to create their own March Madness bracket through these direct messages. They provided step by step directions as to how to fill out the bracket and also provided fans with score updates and prize giveaways during the tournament. This generated a lot of publicity and caused many people to share their brackets and spread the word. Over 2 million messages were sent through this direct messaging system. They were the first company to set up a system like this and it worked well in their favor. Not only did they use this direct messaging system but also created an entire campaign around this for customers to build their own bracket. The fans who posted about their brackets helped gain over 8 million impressions for Wendy's X account.

    Wendy's was very smart for doing something like this. They were able to recognize just the buzz surrounding a time like March Madness and how many people pay attention to it and use that to make a profit. They used a larger platform like X, but also the platform in general that they have and are able to generate wealth but also publicity for themselves. They were able to create a campaign and this system to create more publicity for themselves and from the numbers I would say it worked well.