For the fifth consecutive quarter, BJ’s Restaurants has recorded positive same-store sales−a key metric for restaurants and positive indicator of customer loyalty. As a result, it’s not hard to believe that BJ’s Restaurants owes considerable gratitude to its very loyal customers.
“Our loyalty guest database continues to grow impressively, with steady growth in the percent of transactions coming from our loyalty guests as well as the growth in the number of transactions per loyalty guest,” BJ’s Restaurants CEO Greg Trojan said during the company’s Oct. 22 third-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “Our loyalty program is proving to be agile, very effective, and a powerful weapon to drive full brand building from promotions like our Free Pizookie Day, where it stimulates trial of pizza and other offerings in newer markets. In fact, during the third quarter, we had a Free Pizookie Day, which was entirely launched and promoted using loyalty, social, and digital assets. And it proved to be a highly successful one-day promotion as we served over 4x our normal number of signature desserts than normal driving a big double-digit comp sales day.”
What’s more, BJ’s Restaurants prides itself on listening to its customers.
“We recently completed a thorough menu item survey in our restaurants with the help of a third-party agency,” Trojan explained. “It showed meaningful improvement in the scores of our food quality and value versus two years ago, the last time we undertook this study. And although we saw improvements in nearly every menu category, the larger gains came from pizza, burgers and enlightened entrées, which as you know have been the focus of much of our culinary attention over the past two years.”
Continually improving the uniqueness in the quality of its food and beverage offerings is core to the company’s long-term strategy.
“These fabulous new menu items have given our marketing team a lot to talk about and they have been effectively improving our brand messaging, leveraging our expanding loyalty database, and refining our media mix over time,” Trojan added. “Our new Craft Matters marketing positioning has created an excellent messaging platform to accentuate our quality story for our food, our beer, and for everything we do in our restaurants.”