Management attributed the 8.3% global system-wide sales decline in Q4 primarily to a significant reduction in U.S. marketing spend and a difficult year-over-year comparison against the prior year's SpongeBob collaboration. The 'Project Fresh' turnaround plan was introduced to address operational drift and a previous over-reliance on short-term discounting versus long-term brand building. A comprehensive consumer segmentation study revealed that Wendy's had neglected its core quality differentiator, le ...