Popeyes put a chicken sandwich on the menu on August 12. Chick-fil-A subtweeted it before the week was out. Wendy's piled in, because Wendy's always piles in. Today, fifteen days later, the sandwich is sold out nationwide, and every social team in America is drawing the wrong conclusion from it.
I have watched the conclusion get drawn in real time. Two different clients asked me this month, unprompted, whether we should be spicier on Twitter.
Which is exactly the problem.
Here is what actually happened. Popeyes built a sandwich that was noticeably better than the thing sitting next to it on the menu, priced it under four dollars, and put it in more than two thousand restaurants at once. People bought it, told their friends, and drove to a second location when the first one ran out. The tweets sat on top of that like frosting sits on top of a cake somebody else baked.
The reply did not sell the sandwich. The sandwich sold the sandwich, and the reply took the credit because the reply is the part you can screenshot for a deck.
Three things get lost when this becomes the lesson.
One, the Wendy's voice is not a tactic, it is a multi-year investment in a small team with real latitude and a legal department with an unusual tolerance for risk. You cannot buy the fifth year in the first quarter. Most brands attempting it are doing a Wendy's impression through three approval layers, and it reads exactly that way.
Two, the genre is zero sum in a way nobody plans for. Every brand fight has a loser, and the loser is usually whoever swung second and landed soft. I have never once seen that contingency written into a social calendar.
Three, the measurement is dishonest. Impressions on a dunk are not the same species of number as a person standing in a parking lot at eight at night for a sandwich. I have sat in the rooms where those two numbers get pasted onto the same slide, and I have watched nobody in the room ask which one moved.
If you want the Popeyes outcome, make the sandwich. If you want the Wendy's voice, hire people you trust and then leave them alone for four years. What you cannot do is skip both and post through it.
The tweets sat on top of that like frosting sits on top of a cake somebody else baked.
Truffles has no opinion about chicken sandwiches. Barnaby has a strong one, which he expresses by sitting on the keyboard every time I try to write about them. Between the two of them, he may be the only reasonable participant in this entire discourse.