Quiznos Rebranding Lebanon Valley College Alexis Shriner, Collin Moore, Jeremiah Colon, Daniel Cronen DCOM 260 Introduction To be successful, a company must develop a strong brand identity that is recognizable, and is easily understood by the customer. Quiznos, once a wildly popular sub shop, has seen a rapid decline in success in the last couple of years. We believe that the reasoning in this decline is primarily due to Quiznos’s weak brand identity, and poor e-commerce presence. Their company website is poorly constructed, and does not afford the user a usable experience. The website is busy, non responsive, and features icons and links that float off of the page. The site promotes the company’s Youtube channel “Toasty TV” more than any product that they sell, and give no indications of the promotions that run through all of the platforms that their company is offered on. Quiznos’s already weak brand identity, combined with their poor e-commerce presence makes it difficult for them to be successful. We intend to research Quiznos, as well as their competitors to gather information on what makes companies in this market successful, and then apply those strategies to the Quiznos brand in an effort to bring a more modern, and successful brand identity to the company. Company Analysis Quiznos is a franchised fast food restaurant brand based in Denver, Colorado, which specializes in toasted submarine sandwiches. Quiznos is the second largest sub shop chain in North America, behind its largest competitor Subway. Once a thriving company, recently the restaurant experienced major profit losses across the country, and in March of 2014, Quiznos filed for bankruptcy, where they remained for four months. In December 2015, Quiznos attempted its own re-branding of its company and products with the introduction of Quiznos Grill. Quiznos Grill is a concept restaurant bassed off of the brand’s initial products. While reviews for the restaurant were high, the high prices were offsetting for customers, and the company remains trying to find a wide profit margin. Brand Identity Quiznos’s current brand identity, while recognizable, is detrimental to both the company’s efforts of attracting of new customers, as well as its brand identity and recognizability. The current Quiznos logo design features dark colors that don’t promote the feelings that most fast food companies, including its competitors, attempt to bring to their customers with their logos. There is also a lot of inconsistency in brand identity and recognizability between the regular Quiznos Sub Shops and the Quiznos Grill. The company uses two very different logos in the two shops, and other than the name Quiznos, share no common brand features. Below are some rough drafts of new logos for Quiznos. The green and yellow logo would be for the Quiznos main shops while the black grill would be primarily for their Quiznos Grill locations. Green and Yellow is a common color scheme to use in the fast food industry, because the colors promote the feeling of hunger and willingness to spend money. This is why many fast food chains, including the main competitor of Quiznos, Subway, use this color scheme in their design promotions. Both logos keep consistency and brand identity, and would be easily recognizable between the two stores. Analysis Quiznos.com We focused our analysis primarily on Quiznos’s online site, www.quiznos.com. Overall, the site does a poor job at advertising current promotions, features nomenclature that results in problems in route decision making as well as destination recognition, and poorly emphasizes the company’s brand identity. A large amount of negative observations on the Quiznos site were made. The navigation was too full, with most of the links being unimportant pages that can be placed as “quick links” at the bottom of the page. Quiznos prioritizes its video service, Toasty.Tv, too highly. Toasty.Tv is one of its main focuses, and is simply a large collection of Quiznos videos and commercials. Viewers don’t visit the websites to view commercials. Due to the website’s navigation layout being overburdened, another large sub-navigation menu is needed in order to reduce the cognitive load on the user. This requires too much input on the user’s end. Many pages on the Quiznos site, such as “Locations,” “Deals & Stuff,” “Franchises,” and “International,” all send the user to different webpages, meaning four other webpages are linked to in their main page. All information needs to be compiled into one page. The title “Deals & Stuff” in the navigation is too vague and should be more descriptive to let the user know what is contained on that page. That main navigation bar contains two separate pages, “Deals & Stuff” and “Gift Cards.” Both of these tabs link to the same page. Internet users have developed a mental model that by clicking the company’s logo on the page, the user can be sent back to the home page. However, on Quiznos site, the user is sent to the “Locations” page. In fact, the Quiznos page contains no home page at all. By creating a more successful web page, the business can collect a larger amount of recurring customers. Toasty TV Toasty TV is Quiznos’s Youtube Channel. The channel is the most featured item on the company’s website, and is primarily dedicated to posting zany promotional videos such as “Man Cocoon”. These videos have very little to do with the company and are more detrimental than not to the success of the brand. The emphasis that is put on this needs to be reduced extensively, if not eliminated completely. The emphasis should be put on promoting products that the company sells, in an effort to make revenue. The company would be much better off using the resources that it uses to promote “Toasty TV” to promote products and promotions that customers can use to buy their products. Quiznos Toasty Points App The Quiznos app was generally good enough to support the company’s purpose, but could have been executed better. The app currently advertises its initiative of adding points to the user's account by signing in with Facebook. The users want the points to get free products, and the company will get to contact the user through another means and nudge the user to visit their store again. While it is also a good idea to offer a free 4” sub for signing up in order to bring customers into the store, it is currently not advertised very well and is ineffective at attracting customers. Another positive note is that the Quiznos app allows its users to earn points for making purchases in-store, in an effort to attract more customers. We believe the Quiznos app could accommodate a few new additions in order to generate more profit. The app should support users being able to earn more points by following the brand on social media. This allows the company to extend their reach and increase brand recognition. If the app were to add more items available for the user to redeem their points on, the user would be more eager to earn points. The app should use images of their food, rather than drawings, in order to entice the viewer to eat their food. The Quiznos map should provide the user with an address and hours in order to decrease the kinematic load, increasing the probability of the viewer visiting the store. The app currently provides promotional codes for Quiznos members only. However, they are not advertised well. The app should provide more advertisement on this in order to convince a higher number of users to create a membership with the company. Quiznos Social Media Lastly, we analyzed Quiznos’s social media pages. We noticed that there was a high level of customer interaction and replies to customers’ posts. They post regularly, allowing the viewer to recall their posts daily. However, their Facebook page says that they are located in Denver, CO. While true that their headquarters is in Denver, this would appear to the user that they only have one location, when they are actually global. The page also does not include all information that could be included on their “About” page. Included on the about page is a mission statement. This is an opportunity for the company to convey to the users about their purpose and goals. Quiznos instead uses this opportunity to talk about subs and soups. Quiznos also has a Snapchat, but we see this as being unnecessary. There is no reason for Quiznos to have a Snapchat, as this is just an instance of a company believing they need an account, because everyone else does. Competitors and Opportunities for Expansion We identified Quiznos’s main competitors as being Subway, Blimpie, Firehouse Subs, and Jimmie Johns. Firehouse Subs currently offers catering, which we saw as being a great opportunity for expansion for Quiznos. This would expand business and allow Quiznos to compete with Firehouse Subs. Jimmie Johns currently offers a delivery service for its products, where users can order products off of their app, and have it delivered to them. This would be a phenomenal competitive advantage for Quiznos, against main rival Subway who does not deliver. Conclusion In order to find more success as a company, Quiznos will need to reevaluate some major aspects of its brand identity and e-commerce presence. While many of the aspects would need to be refined, the Quiznos brand identity and webpage would need the most severe re-building. The company lacks brand recognition and creates information overload on their platforms. Some of the displayed information will need to be cut or relocated.