Chick-fil-A Traffic Down 45% Since Anti-Gay Fiasco

I was curious to track the long-term public reaction to Chick-fil-A's very public anti-gay marriage stance that came out back in July. My theoretical marketing mind reasoned that it would be a huge cause-based marketing advantage. The reasoning was simple: faced with a plethora of fast food alternatives, diners who shared Chick's position would flock (hah) to the chain in a show of support. This group, whose fast food budget was formerly apportioned across a wide array of alternatives, would vastly outnumber the boycotters, for whom Chick represented just a small part of their fast food spend.   

Turns out, according to our data, I was wrong. Very wrong. I looked at pageviews for Chick-fil-A on Urbanspoon and created a benchmark of weekly traffic from January 1^st through July 21^st. The graph below shows how weekly traffic compares to this benchmark – for example, for the week ending 7/28, traffic was up 394%. The massive demand spike, driven by the controversy and subsequent bungled social cover-up, quickly subsided and for the past 6 weeks, not a single week has outperformed the pre-controversy benchmark.  The average drop in pageviews is 45%. 

Now, it is highly possible that Urbanspoon users are not representative of the typical Chick-fil-A diner, but as far as we can tell, there are now fewer people who want to "Eat Mor Chikin." 

 

Source: http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog/104/Chick-fil-A-Traffic-Down-45-Since-Anti-Gay-Fiasco.html

sports bars best chicago bars for live music chicago prospect heights