Panera Bread CEO, Ron Shaich, addressed the Richmond Heights, Missouri company's plans for a consumer loyalty marketing program during the company's Q1 2009 earnings conference call yesterday. Talking about Panera's connection with their customers, Shaich said:
"Let me now speak to a number of tests that are going on relative to our effort to use our scale to deepen our relationship, that is to say marketing with our customers. As we told you on our last call, we will be testing our first television advertising in three markets beginning in the early summer. We've also begun a pilot of a loyalty program in one market with 30 bakery-cafes and have received positive feedback from many of the 30,000 plus people who have enrolled in this test program.
"And as ever we intend to use operations as a means to build transactions. For us this means speed, this means accuracy and this means an improved customer experience to increase a long-term concept differentiation. As you well know, neither category management, nor product development, nor media, nor operations will single-handedly improve our transaction in the face of a weak consumer environment.
"But taken together, we're hopeful these initiatives will be strong enough to blunt much of the recession's impact and help us to meet our gross profit dollar targets by driving both transaction growth and gross profit per transaction growth."
Panera's loyalty strategy is similar to other nationwide restauranteurs and supports the claims of the loyalty marketing industry as to the effectiveness of such programs.
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