Like most brands, Wendy’s messaging has always been geared toward a younger audience. As a quick-service restaurant (QSR), young people — specifically 18- to 34-year-olds — present the biggest growth opportunity for Wendy’s and, therefore, our competitors.

But it's a generational tradition for younger generations to blaze their own trails and distance themselves from the interests of older generations.

That presented Wendy’s with the delicate challenge of how we might appeal to a newer, younger consumer without alienating our connection to our core consumer.

Appeal without alienation is a skill Wendy’s has proven expertise in through activations like our annual #NationalRoastDay, when users gladly ask to be roasted by Wendy’s and share it as a point of pride.

While Wendy’s has developed a robust following across social media platforms, including newer and younger platforms such as TikTok and Twitch, we discovered an opportunity in the form of an older, overlooked, and arguably less hip platform: Facebook.

Despite newcomers like TikTok er platforms achieving massive growth, Facebook still remains the most used social media platform 1. In fact, 85% of TikTok users also use Facebook 2, which offersWendy’s a massive reach of fast-food eaters.

Although Wendy’s Facebook page audience skews slightly older like the rest of the platform, we still have a cohort of younger users. So how might we reach these younger users without alienating our current slightly older users?

Our idea was to lean into the current audience and satirically post like a parent — aka a baby boomer.

1 and 2 - Hootsuite and We Are Social: Digital 2021 October Global

Our parents’ quirks both on and off Facebook can be irritating, but also incredibly endearing — even entertaining. Boomers have a distinct yet endearing style of Facebook posts. Posts — without nuance, rules, or a clue of what is and is not considered appropriate on Facebook. By using satire to post to Facebook as a boomer, we could engage normally with our older audience while entertaining and charming our desired younger audience.

We began posting like a boomer on Wendy’s Facebook page, and the results started booming. By bravely going against Facebook’s best practices and using boomer best practices — such as low-quality pictures, all capital letters, nostalgia, misspellings, and unrelated comments and questions — our posts started generating massive engagement. Older Facebook users engaged as normal with all of their unique quirks, while younger Facebook users began to engage by role-playing as older Facebook users, developing a community within Wendy’s social media posts.

We began posting like a boomer on Wendy’s Facebook, and the results started booming.

Bravely going against Facebook’s best practices and using boomer best practices — like low-quality pictures and all capital letters — generated massive organic reach and engagement among older and younger users. In fact, we doubled our average organic reach per post. Most importantly, per a Facebook brand lift study, our boomer posts drove a 20% lift in intent to visit Wendy’s — beating the entire QSR category average.