P.F. Chang's Redefines Brand and Increases Revenue with UGC

Food & Beverage

In just two weeks of using TrueLoyal, P.F. Chang’s was able to significantly improve the quality of the user-generated content shared on its website.

TrueLoyal helps P.F. Chang’s Increase Efficiency and Find the Best Quality Content

400

most effective posts identified out of over 11,000

140

posts sorted through a day

Increase P.F. Chang’s Revenue and Redefine the Brand in the Age of the Instagrammable Restaurant

P.F. Chang’s is a strong and well recognized brand, but this notoriety isn’t without its drawbacks. The restaurant’s decades as a sit down staple has also entrenched the image of the company, making it more of a known and less novel in the age of the “Instagrammable restaurant.” With the average customer visiting P.F. Chang’s only twice a year (for special occasions), this redefinition is critical for increasing brand loyalty and patronage. For Brian Best, Head of Interactive Engagement, Loyalty & eCommerce, this meant tackling a few difficult questions:

How do we use digital to increase patronage and subsequently revenue?
How does P.F. Chang’s redefine the conversation around the brand?
How can CGC (customer-generated content) drive traffic to the restaurant?
How can P.F. Chang’s track and report the attribution on that journey?

With these questions setting the tone for P.F. Chang’s marketing objectives, it became clear to Best that the focus had to be on the food and experience.

Leverage TrueLoyal’s User Generated Content Platform to Promote P.F. Chang’s Breadth of Offerings

P.F. Chang’s marketing leadership knew that the restaurant had to tap into customer testimonials and social media content in order to hit those revenue goals. But how?

The answer came from TrueLoyal, the platform that boosts brand engagement, increases customer loyalty, and drives business growth by humanizing marketing channels with authentic and trustworthy user-generated content.

Managing this effort has been Cecelia Romero, P.F. Chang’s Social Media Manager. Since she’s at the frontline of where the high performing customer content is created, it’s become increasingly important that she’s able to capture and leverage this social word of mouth.

Removing The Content Noise With UGC Machine Learning

As a relatively new user of the smart curation, Romero has already found value, saying:

“TrueLoyal’s machine learning for UGC has definitely made it a lot easier to find those quality pictures right off the bat. And it removed the noise.”

Romero’s mention of “noise” gets at the very problem that TrueLoyal machine learning was created to solve—one inherent to other forms of curation. In order to effectively capture and share customer-generated content that excites potential patrons, machine learning analyzes every post in a company’s TrueLoyal to extract the photos, videos, and posts that will connect with its audience.

The smart curation capabilities that this opens up have been a huge value-add to Romero’s workflow. Since P.F. Chang’s user-generated content can reach thousands of posts and photos per day, sifting through this content can be tedious and cut into time that could be spent elsewhere.

TrueLoyal machine learning was developed to combat this tedium and give users back time to be more productive. And with this power at her fingertips, Romero is able to get more specific, personalized, and effective than ever in her content queries.

“It’s good for when I’m looking for something specific like that use case where we didn’t have a photo of the new horse statue going up in our new restaurant. And so I just took the gamble thinking, ‘hey, maybe we’ll find something on TrueLoyal ’, and ended finding a photo the contractors had posted on Instagram. It was a great shot. The horse was on the truck. It was on the way to the store. It was clear. It was perfect. And so machine learning helped to narrow down what I’m looking for to the very user-generated content that we can use, get rights for, and repurpose.”

Cecelia Romero

Social Media Manager

I would say for people who are on leaner teams like me who don’t have a ton of resources to be going in and combing through thousands of posts that are coming in. TrueLoyal helps—from an efficiency standpoint—to choose the best content in a very quick, concise way.