Digital menu-board system rolling out based on 12-month ROI

May 26, 2011 by Dave Haynes

WAND Corporation has made a nice transition from pure-play POS guys into also doing well-received digital menu systems. The Twin Cities-area company has been doing more and more business with their biggest POS client Wendy’s, but also winning some other deals.

WAND just announced a nice deal with McAlister’s Corporation, a quick-casual restaurant chain that has more than 300 McAlister’s Deli locations across the U.S.

The ideal set-up for a McAlisters includes a string of 47-inch digital menu boards, two 47iinch digital Point Of Purchase boards and two more 17-inch customer-facing displays on the counter-top.

“McAlister’s worked through a structured search for knowledge and experience in the Digital Menu Board arena,” says Randy White, VP of Information Technology for McAlister’s Corporation. “With the multitude of options out there, our team ultimately selected WAND as someone who could provide the analytics, rollout, and true partnership in our first pilot locations.”

In those tests, in March, McAlister’s was seeing double-digit sales increases at the digital locations.

Customer surveys, says a news release,  have found the Digital Menu Boards to be more engaging than traditional print menu boards, and customers feel the Digital Menu Boards enhance or upgrade the restaurant environment. The unique combination of dynamic content and enterprise controlled day-parting attracts the attention of customers and effectively communicates messaging through the use of animated images and high definition video to influence customer’s buying behaviors.

Several corporate sites are already installed and showing a positive ROI, so McAlister’s Corporation is planning an initiative to roll out the additional corporate stores, based on a 12 month break-even point.

“It all comes down to ROI,” says Annica Kreider, the chain’s Vice President of Marketing. “We’ve seen consistent results with the various menu items we’ve chosen to promote on our WAND Digital Menu Boards, and we are very satisfied. We’re offering this solution to our entire franchise system.”

A 12-month ROI, I like. And I really like the suggestive selling aspect of countertop displays. It would be interesting to see if testing showed any difference if those displays were not part of the mix.