The beacon of light for the drunk and illiterate

I was driving home tonight when this thought hit me: Everyone knows what a Waffle House is. Everyone recognizes its brand from far away, on the highway, especially when completely hammered. Since its inception in 1955, the logo has remained basically unaltered. How is it that a business needs no updating? Or even still – do you ever see marketing for Waffle House? It needs none. And why is this brand so solid that nothing can essentially touch it?

The website of Waffle House isn’t web 2.0 compliant. Its content isn’t up-to-date, which makes me think that they do nothing in way of trying to keep people coming back to the website. I never see commercials or brochures. They rely solely on either word-of-mouth or expecting people driving on the interstate to see the huge yellow sign and decide to eat.

What makes them a company who needs no marketing? I would say it is in their target demographic. Who eats at Waffle House, especially during the night hours? Truckers and really drunk people. This means that their standards are already set pretty low, as there are several people who refuse to go to WH on unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. These are assumed to be the people who are ignorant of the visual communication in the world and cannot be driven by the same factors that other companies target consumers for. Coca-Cola can be shared by several ages, several races, several monetary categories. WH, however, assumes that it brings in the poor and the dregs. These are the people who may be so drunk they cannot read a menu, so they point at pictures of what they want.

So, WH is successful, methinks. If they attempted to try and market themselves as a higher class establishment, I think it would fail. It would be putting makeup on a pig. But it’s just so odd that they never even tried (or if they did, I was not alive to notice).