Wendy’s Bids Farewell to Their Disappointing ‘W’ Cheeseburger Promotions

According to recent Q1 financial results, Wendy’s has admitted that it’s “W” Cheeseburger was a rather disappointing product launch.

The restaurant’s attempt to promote a ‘high quality’ burger with a price point that hovered a few dollars above their value menu proved to be a tough act to promote to its customers.

Wendy’s heart was in the right place, attempting to bridge the price gap between their My 99¢ Value Menu and the rest of their premium sandwiches. The development and marketing of the W cheeseburger was meant to help distribute the traffic of customers who seem to gravitate to the chain’s value menu. The mid-priced W cheeseburger ended up cannibalizing sales of other prominent burgers on the menu, resultingly skewing margins and leading to overall disappointing results.

CEO Emil Brolick thinks that gap is too wide, but according to a lesson learned from the promotion of the “W” burger, Wendy’s will no longer spend resources promoting the sandwich nationally. In fact, it will spend Q2 and Q3 of 2012 looking at changes that can be made in the 99¢ menu.

While same-store sales during Wendy’s first quarter were up 0.8%, they were overall below company expectations.

The W cheeseburger proved to give little incentive for customers to buy anything other than the burger. Apparently, diners who frequent the value menu don’t stray much beyond it.

Anyone get a chance to try the “W”? Will you miss it if they start phasing it out? Did you even know it existed?