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It’s tempting to conclude from CKE Restaurants red-ink sales report for January that sex doesn’t sell. However, while Kim Kardashian eating salad in a bathtub failed to boost Carl’s Jr.’s sales raises questions about several things, sexiness isn’t one of them since it wasn’t involved here. Unless you’re 14.

CKE says Carl’s Jr. saw a -9% same-store-sales performance (year over year) for the four-week period ended Jan. 25, 2010. Its announcement did not include a single mention of Kim Kardashian or the Grilled Chicken Salads she began promoting on Dec. 16, 2009. Yet less than a month ago, CKE crowed that “Kim Kardashian is a Hit for Carl’s Jr. and its New Line of Grilled Chicken Salads.”

CKE claiming Kim Kardashian was a hit reminds me of President Bill Clinton’s infamous “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
● Kim Kardashian flouncing around in her nightgown may get you 258 million media impressions, as CKE claimed, but “buzz” has little value if it can’t be converted into something tangible. Like sales.
● The “young, hungry guys” that CKE claims as its core audience may have watched the Kim commercial 1.8 million times as claimed, but if that doesn’t translate to butts in seats or cars in drive-thru, the brand may have gained awareness but…see “buzz” above.
● Carl’s Jr. may have enticed thousands to watch Kim actually eat a salad, live, via streaming video on Facebook, as it did on Jan. 13. But if sales drop 9%, it was an awfully expensive lunch and CKE got stuck with the check.

The other media lesson is that CKE can announce, as it did, that salads “have been selling at record pace” and news media and assorted watchers will retweet, repeat and print that unsupported claim with no questions asked. That’s a more disappointing performance than Carl’s Jr.’s. But since Carl’s Jr. didn’t have entrée salads before, I guess any sales could be record-setting, eh? No doubt salads’ share of Carl’s Jr. sales mix increased, but was it better than moving from ”negligible” to “a tad better than negligible”? CKE doesn’t say.

Now Carl’s Jr. is back selling burgers (the Grilled Cheese Bacon Burger), all’s well and we need never speak of that Kim Kardashian episode again. CKE’s already forgotten it.