Buffalo Wild Wings was sucked into a downward spiral as millennials ditched the chain — but the new CEO has a plan for a comeback

The parent company of Arby's, Roark Capital Group, completed its
Paul Brown, who led an effort to turn around Arby's business, will be CEO of the newly formed operating company that will oversee both Buffalo Wild Wings and Arby's.
Brown told Business Insider that the major changes on Buffalo Wild Wings' horizon include a new menu and new marketing strategies.
The biggest problem Brown says he has to solve: Buffalo Wild Wings lost what made it unique.
You can read Business Insider's

Buffalo Wild Wings needs a savior — and it may have found one in the CEO who led an effort to transform Arby's business.

Buffalo Wild Wings has struggled over the past two years with slumping sales and a monthslong battle between executives and an activist investor.

On February 5, the parent company of Arby's, Roark Capital Group, closed a $2.9 billion deal to acquire Buffalo Wild Wings. Paul Brown will serve as the CEO of the newly formed holding company Inspire Brands, which encompasses Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, and R Taco.

The next day, Brown sat down with Business Insider to talk about Inspire Brands and his plan for Buffalo Wild Wings.

"There will obviously be some changes to the menu, changes to the experience, and changes to the marketing," Brown said.

And while Buffalo Wild Wings isn't going to transform into Arby's 2.0, the sandwich chain's turnaround over the past five years — which primarily involved shifts in its menu and marketing — has become a blueprint for the future of the chicken-wings chain.

"I think the process and the mindset of how we went about it is exactly how we're going about it with Buffalo Wild Wings too," Brown said.

Solving Buffalo Wild Wings biggest problem

Brown says Buffalo Wild Wings' biggest problem is that it lost what set it apart from the competition.

"I think that if you look back when Buffalo Wild Wings was really, really, really successful, it was really the only one out there doing what it was doing," Brown said. "We had a nationalized local sports bar, and then more competition has come in, and I think that some of that competition has been a little bit more innovative."

Brown continued: "I think there's an opportunity to figure out the 21st-century incarnation of what made it so successful during particularly the early 2000s."

A "sea of sameness" has emerged as a common problem in the sit-down casual-dining industry in recent years. Buffalo Wild Wings, which has sought to market itself less as a sports bar and more as a general casual-dining chain, was caught up in the industry sales slump as more millennial diners ditched the sector.

In May, Buffalo Wild Wings' CEO at the time, Sally Smith, wrote in a letter to shareholders explaining its slumping sales that "millennial consumers are more attracted than their elders to cooking at home, ordering delivery from restaurants, and eating quickly, in fast-casual or quick-serve restaurants."

Brown plans to emphasize what makes Buffalo Wild Wings different from other sit-down chains.

"When it was growing gangbusters, it didn't position itself against its traditional cast of casual-dining players," Brown said.

He added: "I think there's an opportunity to step way back and say it's not and let it define its own category — a little bit of what we did with Arby's."

Buffalo Wild Wings needs a menu no one else could serve

Brown has signaled that Buffalo Wild Wings needs a new menu strategy. Currently, much of the chain's success depends on chicken prices, which can be extremely volatile.

"Ultimately, if you're in the restaurant business, it comes down to food and innovation," Brown said.

To update Buffalo Wild Wings' menu, Inspire Brands is turning to Arby's for inspiration.

When Arby's spun off from Wendy's in 2011, it was losing millions of dollars a year.

Arby's had realized that it needed to serve menu items that customers couldn't buy anywhere else, Brown said. And if the item was sold elsewhere, Arby's needed to have the lowest price.

The chain kept its iconic roast-beef sandwich and Jamocha shake but began rolling out limited-time offerings like the Meat Mountain, which contains every meat on Arby's menu between two buns.

At Buffalo Wild Wings, whose menu has been little changed over the years, Brown plans to roll out a similar strategy: looking for things that other chains aren't serving but that Buffalo Wild Wings can provide.

"There's been a loss of product development at Buffalo Wild Wings over time, partially because casual dining to date has not done as much of it," Brown said.

Inspire Brands wants to fix that with a "systematic approach" that Brown says allowed Arby's to rapidly churn out creative new menu items.

A new persona is on the horizon

Arby's success has also been tied to its creative and sometimes borderline bizarre marketing strategy.

The chain debuted the bold "We Have the Meats" campaign in 2014. Its social-media manager was given more freedom that year after a tweet comparing Pharrell Williams' hat at the Grammys to Arby's logo went viral.

Brown described the approach as "create the personality, the brand, use earned media and all forms of earned media to create a persona around it as well as an awareness around it."

"If you think about it, the Buffalo Wild Wings brand is made for that," he said.

He suggested Buffalo Wild Wings' "persona" wouldn't be a rip-off of Arby's but would involve taking similar risks.

"If we sit here a year from now saying that Buffalo Wild Wings is sounding a lot like Arby's, then we failed," Brown said.

Brown continued: "I think that is going to be the key — how we actually take the learnings and the capabilities from what we've done and leverage those learnings, leverage the infrastructure, and do it in a way that the brands look completely different from each other."

Nothing at Buffalo Wild Wings will change — yet

When asked what customers can expect to change at Buffalo Wild Wings, Brown said, "Nothing."

Much of the work to turn the chain around will be occurring behind the scenes, at least for the next few months, he said.

Brown says he's already met with some Buffalo Wild Wings franchisees. And in January, before the deal officially closed, Inspire Brands started consumer research to figure out what is going wrong at the chain and determine what Buffalo Wild Wings' new era should look like.

Arby's provides a blueprint for change, Brown said. However, he'll need to prove that its success wasn't a fluke.

Inspire Brands plans to acquire a diverse array of chains in need of "repositioning," Brown said. Meanwhile, Buffalo Wild Wings will be the test drive of whether Arby's turnaround can be replicated — or whether Brown is operating with a flawed blueprint.