
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

