Wendy's Wendys.com
Return to Burger King Spider-Man 3
From as far as I could Google, there's no presence for kids on the Wendy's site. Not even bothering with a web presence and using the internet to target adults instead can't be faulted, seeing what No. 1 and No. 2 in the sector have been able to accomplish. But the need for a BDA here is clear with a single, "Invite a friend to Wendy's."
Thinking about the deeper behavior of burger lovers, one asks why any adult would engage in this functionality when using the phone, email or yelling over cubicle walls will do. The answer is that these low-fi techniques beat out a web form because they include all the conversation around when to go, what to order, who will pick it up, and how much it will probably cost.
Branded Desktop Applications are perfect for creating closed networks to achieve tasks just like this. In short, it means a branded lunch organizer.
My brother-in-law manages a department of 50 people. Every day around 11:00 a.m., the lunch discussions begin. By noon, the order is placed. Every day they loose between 30-50 man hours trying to figure out the logistics of lunch.
So I asked the question, "Even if it was initially blocked by your firewall, would you petition IT to install a BDA on every machine in your department that: 1) Picks someone who will pick the food up 2) Allows people to place their order and create a master list on the pickers' desktop app that lists everyone's order (including taxes), and can be easily printed, and 3) launches a timer on everyone else's computer to let them know when that person is leaving to get lunch?"
The answer was immediate, "If it gives my department 1,500 man-hours a year we didn't have before, who would say no?"
These are just a few examples of what QSRs can do when you look a little deeper into the lives of your customers. BDAs give marketers the ability to provide true utility to the daily lives of their customer base in ways the web simply can't compete with.
The design equation also changes to deliver the physical experience to brands that live and die on physical experiences, from the shape of the box to the taste of the burger (taste-o-vision has not yet been realized in the BDA space).
Most important to brand managers and agencies alike are the seamless versioning and metrics BDAs deliver so well. Brands can see right down to individual mouse clicks for unique users without asking for any personal information. And when the Happy Meal changes from Shrek to Surf's Up, it does so without any interruption to the user experience.
So the question isn't when QSRs will abandon the browser in favor of a more meaningful, highly measurable BDA, but how will they get there?
Michael Leis is VP of Publishing Dynamics. Read full bio.