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CASE STUDIES
SHONEY'S NORTH AMERICA
Shoney’s North America
Digital Campaign & Growth Strategy
A beloved regional restaurant brand. Fifty locations. A loyal customer base that looked forward to Burger Week every year. And a promotional strategy that hoped customers would happen to see a social media post at the right moment and remember which location was participating.
Shoney's had the product, the brand equity, and the customer enthusiasm to make Burger Week a significant revenue event across their franchise network. What they lacked was the digital infrastructure to connect all three effectively — a centralized hub where customers could discover the promotion, explore the menu, find their nearest participating location, and plan a visit before the window closed. The strategic opportunity was straightforward but consequential. A two-week promotional window is unforgiving — there's no time to course-correct once it opens. Building purpose-built digital infrastructure ahead of the campaign would either convert casual brand awareness into measurable foot traffic and same-store sales lift, or prove that the investment wasn't justified. Shoney's leadership committed to finding out definitively.
ROLE
I served as the strategic technology partner leading Shoney's Burger Week digital campaign platform — responsible for platform architecture, location mapping strategy, and the design of a promotional digital experience that could convert web traffic into restaurant visits across 50+ franchise locations within a defined two-week window.
STRATEGIC APPROARCH
The central strategic insight was that the discovery problem and the conversion problem were different challenges requiring different solutions within the same platform.
Discovery required a visually compelling, mobile-optimized promotional experience that could surface Burger Week to customers who were already interested in Shoney's but hadn't yet encountered the promotion — and give them an immediate reason to engage rather than scroll past.
Conversion required removing every friction point between customer interest and restaurant visit. Google Maps API integration with custom filtering was architected specifically to answer the one question that determined whether interest became foot traffic — "which participating location is closest to me right now and what are they serving?" The map feature became the platform's primary conversion mechanism, generating 40% of all user interactions — a behavioral signal that validated the location-first design strategy.
The two-week pre-launch window was a deliberate strategic decision rather than a timeline constraint — building anticipation and search visibility before the promotional window opened rather than launching simultaneously with the campaign and competing for attention in an already-crowded promotional moment.
OUTCOME
The purpose-built campaign platform delivered measurable impact across digital engagement and physical foot traffic simultaneously — within a two-week promotional window that left no margin for underperformance.
Web traffic increased 68%+ during the campaign period compared to the previous year — demonstrating that dedicated promotional infrastructure outperformed the generic social media approach it replaced.
The interactive location map generated 40% of all user interactions — confirming that customers weren't just browsing the promotion, they were actively using the platform to plan restaurant visits.
Foot traffic increased 22%+ across participating locations during the campaign window — a direct translation of digital engagement into same-store sales performance that validated the platform investment.
The campaign website was directly attributed to measurable sales across 50+ participating locations during the two-week promotional period — establishing the ROI case for dedicated digital infrastructure as a standard component of Shoney's seasonal promotional strategy going forward.
The engagement established a repeatable digital campaign framework for future Shoney's seasonal promotions — converting a one-time infrastructure investment into a scalable asset that compounds in value with each subsequent deployment across the franchise network.
