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Red Lobster sales spike thanks to Beyoncé’s blessing

Not bad for a single line in a song.

 

Elijah Watson

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 9, 2016   Updated on May 27, 2021, 6:09 am CDT

Red Lobster’s sales and Internet presence skyrocketed last weekend thanks to an endorsement from the queen herself, Beyoncé.

The singer dropped a new song, “Formation,” last week, and while it’s great for a number of reasons, the lyric “When he f**k me good, I take his ass to Red Lobster” really stood out.

As soon as the Internet realized that Beyoncé was name-checking the seafood chain, it did what it does best—make jokes.

People soon began to wonder whether and how Red Lobster would respond to Queen B’s endorsement.

Unfortunately, Red Lobster did respond—but it did so poorly.

This was Red Lobster’s moment: an opportunity to rise to the occasion and leap ahead of every other brand out there. That’s why the Internet was so disappointed that the brand had failed so miserably.

Of course, Red Lobster tried to make for its mistake with followup tweets, but the damage was already done.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this Internet notoriety, the chain still did remarkably well over the weekend. Sales on Sunday jumped 33 percent over figures for the same time last year, the company revealed.

“We are absolutely delighted with what we saw over the weekend, particularly the consumer sentiment that we saw expressed,” Red Lobster CEO Kim Lopdrup told CNBC. “It’s clear that Beyonce has helped create some Red Lobster fans, and we are very grateful to her for that.”

Red Lobster trended on Twitter for the first time, with its first response to “Formation” receiving more than 14,000 likes and retweets each. There was also a spike in Google searches for “red lobster” on Saturday.

Photo via Mike Mozart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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*First Published: Feb 9, 2016, 3:39 pm CST