Five Questions with Jimmy John’s

After its great "Customer Appreciation Day" promotion in which Chicagoland Jimmy John's offered sub sandwiches for just $1, I wrote to Jimmy John's and asked them to answer five questions about the promotion. The company graciously responded with the following answers:
  1. What were your goals for the promotion and was it a success? Can you give any specifics?
    The goal of our customer appreciation day was exactly that, to show appreciation to our customers. It¹s sharing the love and thanking our loyal JJ fans for keeping us in business for the past 27 years. Hell yea it was a success, did you see those lines?

  2. What type of preparation did you do ahead of time to run the promotion? (Staffing, food preparation, research about other food giveaway promotions, etc.). With last year's disastrous KFC free grilled chicken promotion, I'm highly impressed that you guys pulled off such an awesome food promotion across Chicagoland. You didn't run out of food and your lines moved quickly. How'd you do it?!?!
    Jimmy¹s passion is execution and logistics first and accounting is a close second. He has this so organized and dialed in for all the franchisees that all they have to do is follow Jimmy¹s detailed prep instructions and it flows beautifully. In addition to that, the entire corporate office and Guerrilla Marketing team was represented in 112 of 171 stores in the Chicago DMA, even our President James North was in one of the downtown units as a lead on the cash register. Jimmy is an operating s-o-b!

  3. What, if anything, surprised you about running the promotion?
    People wanting to purchase twenty of them for a buck and bitching at us when we said no. It was in the ad and the rules were clear. If we let people do that we would have run out.

  4. Jimmy John's obviously has a great social media presence. Will you please talk about how you go about merging the brand's social media marketing prowess with more traditional forms of media marketing (like radio)? Specifically, how did you use new and old media to make this promotion successful?
    Oh c¹mon, we can't tell you all our shiznit?

  5. Will there soon be additional Customer Appreciation Days in other cities around the country?
    You bet man, no doubt. But what there won¹t be is a 5 dollar foot long and when you order one it suddenly becomes $6.50 at the register!
Peace,
Jimmy John's

Add This to Your To-Do List
It's the same as last time: If you're running a promotion at your company, pay close attention to how Jimmy John's ran this promotion: Run it for a limited time, don't require coupons, keep customers engaged and relaxed while they wait, and make the customers pay something.

There's never a lack of ideas.

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