The Challenge
With so many restaurants touting similar deals, price alone wasn't bringing in customers. We had to find a new way to break through and drive transactions for Jack in the Box. Looking at fast-food sales data, we noticed a critical shift in consumer behavior: customers were no longer defining value by price alone. Experiences that offered personalization, control, and gamification consistently outperformed run-of-the-mill discounts, offers, and coupons, achieving more loyalty and increased order value by making deals feel personal and earned, not given or generic. So the challenge was to turn value into entertainment, finding a way to turn passive, transactional coupon acquisition and redemption into an engaging, participatory experience that made customers feel like it was just for them.
The Solution
The increasingly static, repetitive discounts consumers had grown numb to needed transformation. So we took the passive transaction and turned it into a personalized, participatory experience. DealQuest didn't just give customers deals. It sent them on their own personal quest to earn them. We built a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure experience powered by generative AI, integrated directly into the Jack in the Box app, that rewrote itself in real-time based on each customer's interactions. Players typed in unique prompts to decide where to explore and how to defeat food monsters they encountered. The AI instantly processed their inputs to create individual story outcomes and visuals—meaning no two quests were the same. But the real innovation was tying narrative progression to reward. Whenever players beat a new mini-game or enemy, it triggered a specific deal token redeemable for real menu items inspired by in-game villains. The deal was automatically added to their digital cart, creating a seamless path to purchase within the app. Crucially, the deals got progressively better the deeper they ventured into the narrative, ensuring that value wasn't just a price point but a victory. A multi-channel campaign across TikTok, Meta, and Reddit brought value-seekers and gamers into the experience. By blurring the lines between gaming and commerce, we shifted Jack in the Box's value message from "discounted food" to "interactive entertainment."