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PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans

Drive-thru SurPRIZE Campaign

Founded in 1978, PJ’s Coffee has over 130 operating stores and serves a wide variety of hot, iced, and frozen coffee beverages.

Overview & Objectives

Bond Moroch has worked with PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans for years focusing on public relations strategies for the brand, as well as new store openings nationwide with PJ’s franchisees. In 2021, Bond worked with PJ’s corporate to develop marketing initiatives that could be implemented across the system to help increase awareness and boost sales for not only New Orleans stores, but stores across the country. With an increase in franchise locations featuring drive thrus, Bond leveraged National Drive-thru Day to develop a promotional campaign to drive traffic and sales to these specific franchise stores.

Approach

Bond concepted “Drive-thru SurPRIZE,” a one-day promotion on National Drive-thru Day to encourage customers to purchase products at their local drive thru PJ’s location, nearly 60 drive thru locations nationwide. Bond worked with PJ’s corporate on the logistics of the promotion and how operationally it could be deployed systemwide, as well as on a mix of marketing initiatives to build awareness for the promotion.

Ideation

Bond developed the idea for “Drive-thru SurPRIZE,” a simple promotion that could be easily implemented across 60 stores. On National Drive-Thru Day, at participating PJ’s Coffee drive-thru locations, patrons would be selected at random and surprised with a giveaway, including PJ’s gift cards and promotional items. A few customers would be selected for a grand prize, a PJ’s gift basket valued at over $300. A total of over $3,500 in prizes were distributed nationwide.

Marketing Execution

Our campaign included the following initiatives to promote the campaign:

Public Relations: Bond drafted a news release and distributed to key markets with multiple PJ’s drive-thru locations, including New Orleans, cities across Louisiana, and Dallas, TX, as well as franchise trade publications.

Franchise Marketing Kits: Bond developed franchise marketing “kits” that were distributed to each participating franchisee to help with individual marketing efforts. The kit included a template press release for distribution in each market by the store operator; a promotional calendar of marketing recommendations to be executed leading up to National Drive-thru Day; and a PR and marketing guide for tips and tools on how to distribute the release and build relationships with influencers.

Promotional materials: PJ’s corporate provided a series of graphics for franchisees that could be used in-store and on individual franchise store social channels.

Results & Impact

The promotion was an unqualified success. Bond secured nearly 1 million media impressions among print, broadcast, and online coverage in local, statewide and franchise media, as well as meaningful exposure by social media influencers who visited PJ’s stores on National Drive-thru Day.

In terms of sales, we compared data on National Drive-thru Day in July 2021 to same day sales in 2019 (did not compare to sales in 2020 due to impact of COVID-19 in summer 2020).

Stores across the system saw an average increase in sales by 59% with some locations seeing upwards of a 159% increase in sales. Of note, the franchise location in Bossier City, where we garnered media coverage in the local paper, saw a 110% increase in sales compared to same day sales in 2019.

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