Ruby Tuesday's Explosive Stunt

How do you reach people and make them come in to your restaurant?

There are a variety of things you can do: launch a new specials, come out with advertising, start a word of mouth marketing campaign, improve your service...............or you could blow your restaurant up.....err someone else's restaurant.



Ruby Tuesday has been desperately trying to launch a turn around strategy for their dying brand for over a year. First there were the new commercials, then a new menu, followed by a very enticing new tag line - 'Simple Fresh American Dining', finally the grand finale was the redesign of all of their locations.

About a week ago I got an email blast from Ruby Tuesday telling me that they were going to blow up their last "old" restaurant and that it could be watched live on their website. Ok this is cool. Blowing up anything is cool.

Today I went to RubyTuesday.com to watch the explosion and was greeted by an "apology" letter from their VP of Marketing to Cheeky's Bar and Grill, stating they were terribly sorry for blowing up their restaurant.

Right.....

After reading the letter, and then watching the video it occurred to me that there was no possibly way that Ruby Tuesday could be this ridiculously stupid. After a 2 second Google search it came to my attention that this "stunt" was Ruby Tuesday desperate attempt to get some attention. They even went to the extreme of creating a non working website for Cheeky's Bar and Grill promoting the fact that they got blew up. View the website here.

They thought it would be funny and entertaining if they accidentally blew up the wrong restaurant. I think it's funny that everyone knows this is a lame attempt to turn their business around.

They had my attention when they told me they were going to blow their own restaurant up. Instead of using my attention to their advantage and communicating something of value, instead Ruby Tuesday thought it would be a better use of their time to scam me in an attempt to get me to chuckle.

Let's lay this out on the table. In order to pull this "stunt" off they had to build a fake restaurant - or remodel one to look like the fake Cheeky's. A fake website was also built for Cheeky's. Then they had to spend advertising dollars to promote that they were blowing up their restaurant. They had to pay to have the fake restaurant blown up. Pay for a film crew and then pay again to promote the fact or "not" promote the fact that they blew the wrong restaurant up.

Hmmm. That sounds like a lot of work to get me to eat in your restaurant.

I know what Ruby Tuesday was thinking: if we do something weird, people will talk about it and hopefully come eat in our restaurant.

Well, I am talking about it but I'm not saying anything good. Oh, and I won't be eating in your restaurant.

UPDATE: Ruby Tuesday has uploaded a video of a behind the scenes look at how they executed the stunt. You can watch it here.