And so, I do expect that over the years we’ll continue to invest in more of an industry standard of around 4%. Some brands are spending upwards of 5%, but we’re not in any rush to try to catch up to that if we can’t prove that we can get the returns. Franchisees have been very happy with our marketing investments, because they’re seeing that same top line growth that we’ve been seeing. Particularly when you look at the underlying indicators like we’re talking about with Perks and digital and the digital mix and our ability to drive traffic. These are all things we think are rooted in the operations and how we’re marketing that. So, I think we’re in a good place right now for now.
Operator: The next question comes from Matt Curtis with William Blair.
Matt Curtis: I just wanted to get back to the pricing discussion for a moment. And I ask how you view the value proposition right now following your most recent price increase? And if there’s been any signs of consumer resistance so far. And then relatedly, I noticed on this last increase, you seem to have left pricing on big unchanged, correct me if I’m wrong. So I was wondering what your thought process was around that?
Steve Cirulis: Sure. Let me just take the sort of consumer dynamic for one second. If you remember, when we talked about our pricing strategy for the year, we knew that based on the way we could see inflation evolving, we would be modest in our price. And we have, our 1st action was 1.5, we had a 1.1 and the recent one was in a similar zone as those others. And that was deliberate. We got, in where we needed to be as vis-à-vis inflation, which has come back to us. So, that’s been helpful. What we’ve seen as a benefit, I alluded to it in answer to the earlier question is, it looks like some other of our competitors have continued to take some price, and that may have benefited us in terms of relative value that we’re providing to our customer base.
As well, you know, our menu is fairly broad. So, even though we might see some movement around from whether that’s away from DSPs or whether that’s from big sandwiches to others. We feel like we still create that kind of what you get for what you pay equation is working in our favor. And the best we can tell, Matt, from the data we see, relative to fast casual, our traffic continues to put us in a position where we’re taking share. We’re taking traffic share and we’re doing it consistently week over week over week and have throughout the quarter. So, as Bob said, I think we’re in a good spot as it relates to our demographic, In terms of their employment level, their savings that they still have left and they still like to come to Potbelly. So, I think we feel pretty good about where we’re headed here into the fourth quarter.
And then, the second part of your question was related to kind of where we’re taking pricing, where we’re not taking price. We tend not to take pricing consistent places across the menu because we want to make sure that we’re within both psychological barriers, right, nines and zeros and those kinds of things, we want to make sure as well we want to balance across channels. So, sometimes we’ll take a digital only price, sometimes we’ll take a size only price, or sometimes we’ll take a category only price. It really varies. And this last price increase, we may have hit bigs a little bit less than we did others, as we try to maintain that value across the menu for our consumers.
