When Boston Market Lost the Plot

There is something wonderfully elegant about a business that knows what it stands for. Boston Market used to be one of them.

They had a dish. Just one, really. Rotisserie chicken. It was fast, warm, familiar, and absolutely dependable. That mattered. Because when you're hungry and rushed, you're not really looking for a menu. You're looking for a shortcut. Something you can understand instantly. Boston Market gave you that.

And then they took it away.

At their peak in the mid-90s, Boston Market had over 1,200 locations. That’s no small feat. They had invented a category the grocery stores hadn’t even touched yet.

Which is exactly why the pivot was such a disaster.

They changed the name from Boston Chicken to Boston Market. It sounds harmless enough. But they didn’t stop there. They added turkey. Then meatloaf. Then ham. In other words, they introduced menu items that didn’t expand the brand, but fractured it. New options weren’t chosen to meet new needs. They were chosen in the hope that more meant better.

The customer thought otherwise.

Retention dropped from 80 percent to 20. Sales collapsed. By 1998, they had filed for bankruptcy and were more than $700 million in debt. Today, just sixteen stores remain.

From the outside, this looks like an operations problem. Too much complexity. Too many ingredients. Too many SKUs. But what actually failed was something upstream of logistics.

They broke the mental model.

When people think of a brand, they aren’t performing a logical audit. They’re not weighing options on a spreadsheet. They’re using what Daniel Kahneman branded System 1: fast, intuitive, automatic thinking. They grab the simplest available explanation that lets them make a quick, satisfying decision. And the simpler that mental shortcut, the stronger the bond.

Boston Market confused the shortcut. The association between brand and product grew fuzzy. People still recognized the name, but they no longer remembered the reason to go. And when that happens, they stop going.

This is what Ogilvy ad legend Rory Sutherland might call the collapse of the heuristic.

It’s an error made by clever people who assume customers make decisions with well-thought-out logic. They don’t. They make decisions through meaning, memory, and heuristics (mental shortcuts that reduce the complexity of choice by relying on cues like brand, familiarity, or past experience). What Boston Market failed to see was that their category dominance wasn’t due to quality alone, but clarity. It was the automatic association between name and need (or want). The brand meant chicken. Once it meant something vaguer, it meant less.

Customers are also more likely to grant you authority when your claim is narrow. Say you do one thing well (for Boston Chicken: rotisserie chicken) and people will believe you. Say you do five things equally well, and they’ll start to question all of them. Specialization signals confidence. It creates a frame that’s easy to understand and hard to argue with. Boston Market weakened that frame the moment it diluted the claim.

And there’s a larger point here.

Adding choice doesn’t guarantee more appeal. It introduces friction. When people are faced with options that don’t align with expectations, they become uncertain. And uncertainty is fatal to habitual behavior. If you’re in the business of repeat visits, then predictability is your greatest asset.

There are ways to grow a restaurant. Adding dishes that expand time-of-day is one. Breakfast for a dinner brand, for example, can work. So can occasion-driven items that match a different context. But when you compete with your hero product, you don’t just risk confusing the customer. You risk them never returning.

The paradox of choice is well known. But in food service, it plays out with brutal speed. People don’t want to re-learn what a place stands for. They want to walk in and feel sure. And when that certainty disappears, so does the traffic.

Boston Market made a perfectly rational decision. But consumer psychology is not always rational (it’s, more often than not, irrational). It’s symbolic. It’s associative. It runs on what Heath and Feldwick (Heath and Feldwick) called low-attention processing. Which means you can’t afford to mess with the associations people have already built.

A brand is a low-resolution proxy for trust. It works because it stands for something clear. If you want to test how clear your brand is, ask one question:

Could a six-year-old describe what you do?

If not, don’t expect a distracted, hungry adult to figure it out at lunch.