CHALLENGES

QDOBA is the second-largest brand in the rapidly growing and highly competitive Mexican fast-casual category. It is outpaced by the category leader Chipotle in revenue and locations.

When Cogniscient Media won the business, QDOBA was facing several Media challenges:

+ Limited analytics, insights, measurement or reporting into what media channels were/were not working and the ROI on media spend

+ Media KPIs were not focused on measuring sales and in-store foot traffic

+ No sophistication in Media budget allocation and market prioritization was typically based on previous year’s allocation

SOLUTION 

Before developing specific tactics to address both Brand and Marketing challenges, we first prescribed a roadmap for QDOBA.

RESULTS

Through our roadmap, we were able to achieve the following results in just one year of our partnership with QDOBA:

+ Over $10M in incremental, trackable revenue generated by Paid Search in just one fiscal year

+ Outpaced Cost-Per-Incremental Store visit vs. fast casual QSR benchmark

+ Achieved 3x same store sales increase for Fast Casual QSR category benchmarks

In re-tiering of markets, markets with lower awareness demonstrated higher ROAS against awareness/interest building tactics like social as consumers continue to be exposed to QDOBA messaging