The buzz in QSR (Quick Service Retail) is all about customer experience. If you want feet in the door, food quality and value are important, but to keep them coming back there needs to be more. I believe A&W may be understanding this pretty well.

Yesterday I found myself in Windsor. With options scarce and the continental breakfast unappealing at my motel, I wandered over to a (relatively) new iteration of the A&W restaurant that was steps down the sidewalk from where I was staying. I had heard that breakfasts there were pretty decent, so I decided to give it a try. The service, food and value were all pleasantly surprising. All good things, but what really impressed me was the attention to detail in the design in the restaurant itself.

By design, I mean everything.. All the printed material, the digital displays, and even the consumables reinforced the current marketing drive that A&W is presenting on TV, radio and online. Dwell time had been taken into account for the portrait digital display in the dining area, exclusively reinforcing the quality taken with all the ingredients used in the food (no live TV, my personal peeve). During my breakfast, the message that I should be feeling good about the coffee I was drinking and the eggs (fresh cracked) that I was eating, was gently reinforced.

That may sound a bit much, but the take away here was the level of attention to detail and research that the marketing team has obviously put into this to make the customer experience as positive as possible. It would be interesting to see how this is affecting their sales numbers, but as a person to tends to see the mistakes and errors in digital execution, it was refreshing to see it all done so well.

-bj