We heard a lot from Papa Johns executives last week about how the brand was going to execute some marketing changes following another dismal quarter. Those changes include a shift back to local co-ops, a refinement of its value messaging, including on third-party delivery apps, and the deployment of a new field marketing team.
Papa Johns even shuffled its marketing leadership to facilitate these changes, naming Chris Lyn-Sue to the global CMO role, succeeding Jenn Bromberg, who has served as CMO since November 2024.
That said, marketing changes aren’t the only priority for Papa Johns in its quest to turn around negative trends. There is also plenty of work to do on the operations side.
During the company’s second quarter earnings call, CEO Todd Penegor said a major opportunity exists to “elevate the customer experience” to differentiate and drive incremental transactions. To address this opportunity, the company has bolstered its operations support team and field support structure, has built a “brand standards coaching team” to facilitate training, workshops, and restaurant evaluations, and has created a regional franchise business director model to provide closer in-market support through more frequent restaurant visits, regular business reviews, documented follow-ups, and standardized scorecards.
As of right now, a 400-basis-point gap exists in same-store sales, orders, and margin performance between restaurants in the highest quintile of operation scores and the lowest quintile.
“Raising the bar for the bottom quintile of operators is one of the single most important things we are doing to improve the consistency of our customer experience, brand perception, and topline performance,” Penegor said.
In addition to deploying new teams, Papa Johns is also expanding financial incentives tied to “operational excellence and restaurant image improvements.” Penegor said the company has about“ $5 million in operational incentives to allow franchisees to continue to earn incentives with strong overall satisfaction scores, inspection scores, and good out-the-door times.
“What we're trying to do is incent the system to raise the bar. We don't want to just discount to drive transactions, we want to make sure the consumer understands the total experience is worth what you pay — a great experience with a high-quality pizza to get customers to come back time and again,” Penegor said.
These efforts, including operational incentives, are expected to improve the brand’s perception of being inconsistent. Penegor said that perception has become an Achilles heel across its consumer base throughout the United States.
“What we're trying to do is make sure that we incent the system to get ourselves in a position to compete better … continue to work to make sure that the bottom quintile of our restaurants continues to raise the bar on operational excellence,” he said. “There is a lot of opportunity for our system to continue to work together to accelerate profitability. We're going to be part of the solution with some of the co-investment, but the system knows they're going to have to fight at the local and national level to bring that to reality.”
With this work, Papa Johns joins other chains like Wendy’s and Popeyes in bolstering its field operations staff to improve their performance, while Jack in the Box recently restructured its field teams to spend twice as much time inside restaurants.
Contact Alicia Kelso at Alicia.Kelso@informa.com
Follow her on TikTok: @aliciakelso
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