Sonic CEO Clifford Hudson was very happy with the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal results, which were announced during Monday’s earnings conference call. Same-store sales checked in at 7.3% for the fiscal year, which marked the fifth consecutive year of positive same-store sales. What’s more, Hudson believes momentum is building as the company plans to ramp up its Integrated Customer Engagement (ICE) program.
“As we’re able to use our integrated customer engagement program, which we call ICE, we’ll be engaging the customer really in a differentiated fashion, different from what we’ve done historically, but also different from what our competition would do both on and off line,” Hudson explained, according to Seeking Alpha. “And our view is this is going to result not only in a larger customer base, but a more loyal customer base as we’re able to do that.”
A shift toward national media has helped propel Sonic in a positive direction.
“You see from ’12 to ’13 that’s when we shifted to the national media, a big, big impact on our success,” Hudson said. “We increased appreciably then beginning in ’13 our share of voice by shifting from local to more national television. And we continue to narrow the gap with some of the companies in much larger footprint. It's really important to make the point here that the reallocation we made in 2013 continues to drive the brand and ad awareness. Some people, I think, have the view that that was a one year one benefit deal, but the impact of it in month 13 after the first year, the month 13 was bigger than month one. The impact in month 25 was bigger than one or 13. We’ve seen continued growth in fiscal year ’14 and ’15 and the impact has been very positive in our business.”
Hudson is very proud of Sonic’s surge regarding ad awareness among its competitors.
“You can see that we’ve moved to the No. 2 spot in ad awareness amongst our competition,” he explained. “But when you think about the ranking, given the relatively smaller size of our marketing budget versus some of these larger competitors sometimes spending four and five times what we spend, this is quite exceptional, I think, in terms of our strategic placement of medium and the use of this creative. Our view is that this sustained investment in our brand and product awareness will play a big role in our confidence going forward to continue to gain market share, both as it relates to the share of voice, but more importantly the share of customers in our evolving landscape, in the expansion of our business.”