Ruby Tuesday Brand LoyaltyRuby Tuesday officials want to win back brand loyalty from women between the ages of 25 and 40, who have young families.

During the company’s fiscal first-quarter conference call on Jan. 7, Ruby Tuesday CEO J.J. Buettgen discussed the brand’s customer engagement strategy.

“We’re keenly focused on targeting women ages 25 to 40 with young families and on winning back their business,” Buettgen said, according to Seeking Alpha. “We believe the current Ruby Tuesday offers her a new and enhanced menu with the variety and value she wants, while letting her feel good about the decision to take her family to dine with us.”

To win this targeted customer segment back, Buettgen discussed strategic initiatives.

“Our first priority is to communicate more effectively through our new marketing strategy,” he said. “In the past, our media was focused on national cable television with digital and social media representing only 3% of our spending. While cable television provided us a national presence, social and digital media enables us to more effectively and efficiently reach our target consumer with a variety of messages that are specifically designed for her, and therefore more relevant to her. As of November, we have allocated 100% of our advertising dollars to digital and social media, leveraging platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and online video.”

Ruby Tuesday’s second priority is to deliver culinary innovation and value in its food offering through the core menu and through meaningful improvement of its Garden Bar, Buettgen noted. After rigorously testing a wide array of new and improved menu items, Ruby Tuesday launched a new menu in early November.

“Our new menu includes higher quality in ingredients like Half-Pound Burgers, Brioche buns, a better tasting chicken recipe that significantly improved the range of entrees and salads, fresh salmon that’s hand cut in our restaurants, along with more visibly appealing food presentations,” Buettgen said. “We’ve added almost a dozen net new menu items and enhanced the quality of many others, which taken together make up about 50% of what our guests order. These new and improved menu items are already receiving higher guest satisfaction scores. A few of the new signature dishes we’ve created are our new Double Decker Chicken, Two seven-ounce fresh chicken breasts, grilled and layered with loads of roasted baby bella mushrooms and shaved Asiago cheese, or our new grilled chicken and crab cake combo.”

The new menu improved the food quality and variety and simplified many company recipes and procedures, Buettgen said.Ruby Tuesday Brand Loyalty

“We believe these recipe and procedure changes will improve the accuracy, consistency, and throughput of our kitchens, allowing us to better serve our guests,” he explained. “We continue to believe that our Garden Bar sets us apart from our competition and that is the key differentiator for our brand. Importantly, we know that approximately half of our guests utilize the Garden Bar when they dine with us, and two thirds of those customers add the Garden Bar to upgrade their meal while one third uses it as their main entree.”

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