Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Inspire Brands, Inc.
Inspire Brands CEO on Marketing for Chains Like Dunkin' and Sonic | WSJ News
Paul Brown, CEO of Inspire Brands, which owns restaurant chains such as Sonic Drive-In, Arby's, Dunkin' and Buffalo Wild Wings, shares the business and marketing strategies that keep each of his company's franchises distinct, and discusses the current state of the hospitality industry.
#Food #Hospitality #WSJ
About Paul Brown
Paul Brown, co-founder and CEO of Inspire Brands, has been active in discussions about the franchise business model, consumer behavior, and the role of technology in the restaurant industry. In May 2024, he hosted an "Open For Opportunity" roundtable at Inspire Brands headquarters alongside International Franchise Association President Matt Haller, where he described franchising as a "uniquely American business model" that allows entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses. Brown also praised Atlanta as a "phenomenal place to headquarter and grow a business," citing its talent pool and business-friendly political environment. In interviews and appearances throughout 2024, Brown discussed consumer spending patterns, noting that the company sees different behaviors among lower-income households, particularly those earning below $45,000, who are increasingly seeking value. He highlighted the restaurant industry's shift from analog to digital marketing, stating that in 2019, 80% of Inspire's marketing spend was on linear TV, while by 2023 it had shifted to roughly two-thirds digital and one-third linear. Brown also addressed the company's growth strategy, including expansion in India and Latin America, and noted that Inspire has no exposure in China. He emphasized that the restaurant industry is "the last really large industry" to be fundamentally transformed by technology, and that Inspire has adopted OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to improve prioritization and transparency across its highly matrixed organization.
Transcript (83 segments)
M
Marcelo0:00
Let's zoom out a bit before we look in a little closer. You obviously have Dunkin' Donuts, Arby's, all these brands, which give you a pretty good view across the country, but we've heard mixed signals about where consumers are right now. They have jobs and they're happy about that, but they're worried about inflation and the prices that they're seeing. Where do you see it right now and where do you see it heading this year?
P
Paul Brown0:22
I think you'll hear the same thing from me that you've heard, which is there are a lot of mixed signals out there. I have to say that I'm quite surprised around the overall robustness of the consumer. And I think most CEOs I talk to say the same thing, thought that we might be in a much different position right now. We do see different patterns depending upon the extremities of the consumer, particularly if you get into the lower income. And we see, like I said, most everybody in the US and we actually, 30% of our transactions are cash as well. So we actually see the full spectrum. And we are seeing different patterns in the below $75,000, particularly the below $45,000 in US household incomes. And you're seeing a lot more going to value. So everyday value is certainly getting a lot more pickup. We're seeing some trade down within some of our brands to actually smaller size combos or less items on the check. But we're also seeing different patterns across brands. One of our brands, Dunkin', is actually seeing a bit of an uptick in that particular customer base because it's priced in the middle of the tier of a lot of its competitive set. So I think it's actually getting a little trade too into that brand where a lot of our other brands are just seeing different patterns. So it's just all over the place.
M
Marcelo1:40
But the cash component is an interesting look at the country. Do you see that consumer behave differently than the people who pay with credit or not necessarily?
P
Paul Brown1:49
It's certainly the most sensitive, so everything I just said, it gets a bit accentuated with that customer as well.
M
Marcelo1:53
Is there a single menu item at one of your brands that is the signal that you look for that gives you an idea, 'Oh, people are really feeling it' or, 'People are willing to splurge a little bit'?
P
Paul Brown2:03
It's really more the pattern. Do we see an extra attached? Do they add a slider to it or do it with a small combo versus a medium combo? So it's a little bit of a trading around the menu versus any one menu item.
M
Marcelo2:14
With so many brands that you kind of oversee, how do you make sure the marketing is distinctive? Do you communicate, 'Right now we're worried about price sensitivity. Let's all advertise accordingly'?
P
Paul Brown2:27
No, we let the brands actually do what's right for those brands. And so even though we've created a portfolio through acquisition, we share a lot of services on the back end, we try to be very thoughtful around what makes the brand distinct in the eyes of the customer. And that is under the control of the brand president and the CMO of that brand. So what makes a restaurant a restaurant is what food does it serve, what's the experience, how does it talk about itself? So the messaging, the marketing, the pricing, even though we get advice from the shared services, the ultimate decisions around where we fit within the price spectrum, what promotions are we running, is owned by the brand. So underneath it, in the back end, we're sharing all the services that go into delivering those capabilities. But the brand remains distinct.
M
Marcelo3:11
And for something like the Super Bowl ad that Dunkin' Donuts did, how involved are you? How much is the brand deciding all that? Do you just give 'em a budget and they make it work or can you tell us a little bit about the backstory?
P
Paul Brown3:23
Well, the Super Bowl's kind of a big deal, because you spend a lot of money. So I get a little bit more involved, not in actually what it was, but the final like, 'Are we really gonna spend that money?' And so, sometimes brought in a little later in the process.
M
Marcelo3:40
It's good to know it's not just journalists who play that game.
P
Paul Brown3:46
But you know, I like to get involved in the very front end, especially when we buy a brand. What is going to be the positioning of this brand? Are we all aligned around what its target customer base is, what its target customer base isn't? How are we gonna be competitive from a culinary standpoint? What are we gonna do differently now that it's part of Inspire versus maybe what it was doing when it was standalone. And you know, so call it the upfront strategy, and then after that, it's making sure you have the right people that are empowered to make the decisions.
M
Marcelo4:15
And in that case, I think Dunkin' Donuts, correct me if I'm wrong, never had had a Super Bowl ad before you bought it?
P
Paul Brown4:22
No, they had never done a Super Bowl ad. And so last Super Bowl was the first one. And I mean, Jill Nelson, who's the CMO, is here, she can maybe explain why. But that one was a little bit more accidental, I think, in that you had been talking I think to Ben Affleck about a talent kind of arrangement and he had just started an agency with Matt Damon and they wanted to actually play a creative role and worked and came up with this thing that actually worked so well. J-Lo showed up, she wasn't even supposed to be at the restaurant, she showed up. I think you convinced her to go in front of the camera. And so, and we looked at that and said, 'This is really, really special. And so maybe there is something.' This happened to be two weeks, I think, before the Super Bowl or something like that. And so maybe we have something that's Super Bowl ready. Really planned out by the way.
M
Marcelo5:13
Yeah.
P
Paul Brown5:14
But it helps that we buy a lot of media across all of our brands and so we're able to find a really good placement pod, 1A, I think, in Super Bowl, and it really meant a lot to the franchisees, because honestly, I think a lot of the franchisees thought that when we bought them that we would cut back on all these things. We would actually dilute the brand. We wouldn't let them spend the resources. So this was a little bit of the opposite of that to be honest.
M
Marcelo5:39
And then the second, how involved was your creative teams? How much did you just outsource it to the stars you brought in?
P
Paul Brown5:45
Okay Jill, I don't think I can do your job for you.
J
Jill Nelson5:49
I feel like you're setting the stage. It's very opportunistic, is probably the right word that we would've used to describe the entire experience. But as Paul said, for Dunkin', joining the portfolio, we were able to learn from all the other brands and kind of change our approach in general from all this LTO messaging, lots of quick turns, to something a little bit more brand focused that kind of reflected what Paul said around the positioning. So it was quick but impactful.
P
Paul Brown6:17
Yeah, that's one of the things, I think, brands in this space can run into, the trap of becoming an LTO machine, just talking about whatever the next limited time offer is without any real thematic, what is it laddering up to? Is it actually helping build the brand and build awareness versus kind of the next 1% of sales that you might get? And so I think Jill and the team have been great at transitioning from that model to a much more platform based model.
M
Marcelo6:40
We don't have to just talk about them, but how much was buying that brand about changing the marketing? Did you think there was an opportunity to represent the brand to the country or was there other aspects of that coffee business you liked?
P
Paul Brown6:53
Well, that morning, that day part is an amazing day part to be in. And there are only really three big players on that day part, Dunkin' being one of them. And it's a great day part because it is, one, we have a high frequency of customer. Generally in this business, it's not a tremendously high frequency customer, but in the morning day part, it is, which actually lends itself to a strong loyalty program, which lends itself to a lot of information and data that comes off of that as well. And we had seen some things that the brand had done, had not seen the full benefit of. They replaced every single piece of coffee equipment in every single restaurant, every single espresso equipment in every single restaurant right during COVID, right before COVID. So we felt there's an opportunity to really push harder on that side of it as well. The one thing we did is actually kind of accelerate the redesign of the loyalty program that was, I think, holding the brand back a bit. And there was already work being done that we actually accelerated the redesign.
M
Marcelo7:48
What all did you actually change?
P
Paul Brown7:50
It was very, basically you get a certain number of points and you can get a free drink.
M
Marcelo7:54
Okay.
P
Paul Brown7:55
Points, drink. Points, drink. It was very little utility to it, right, and so we turned it into a full points based model with a points fund. So that also helps in a franchise environment to where if somebody's actually earning points in one restaurant, money goes up into the fund, and if it's redeemed, it goes back. So it actually allows for a lot more flexibility and utility. And since we relaunched the program last year, our loyalty dollar sales are up 24% year over year. So it just shows that actually, that is an important component, particularly of that day part.
M
Marcelo8:26
And is that data showing that it's just the core customers who are coming back more or are you bringing in new people? What's the—
P
Paul Brown8:31
It's a little bit of both. So one of the things we did is add a tier. So if you go 12 times a month, you get boosted status.
M
Marcelo8:39
Okay.
P
Paul Brown8:40
Which, a little rocket goes off on the app and all that. But you know, 20% more points for every purchase, as long as you're boosted and stay there. And you actually, you see the frequency curve. The moment we launched that, it actually drove frequency above 12 up. So that is obviously pulling your frequency customers up. We're working on some initiatives and marketing to bring more people in the funnel, but a lot of it is actually just getting people for more frequency and more upsell.
M
Marcelo9:08
I mean, it's interesting to hear you talk about this. I know you were in the hotel industry before you got into the food business. Obviously, the loyalty programs there are well established. How much of that did you bring with you? How much have you, are you, do you see some of the dynamic pricing that hotels and airlines have used? Is that coming? I mean it's gotten a lot of bad press. Wendy's and others talking about dynamic pricing on their burgers.
P
Paul Brown9:30
Well, a lot of what we're doing in the hotel industry is a model. I mean, even in the loyalty program, the fund based model, I think we're the first restaurant company to do a fund model like that, where that is the way you do it in the hotel industry. It's the only way you can actually have programs that can really extend across multiple franchisees and maybe ultimately multiple brands. But even how we're organizing ourselves as a tightly integrated shared services platform, where the brands, as I mentioned before, have the elements that keep them distinct. But everything behind the scenes, everything around buying, media, everything around customer marketing, all those capabilities are shared under a common platform with common technology. On pricing, that's part of this fascinating transition that the restaurant industry is going through, going through being an entirely analog industry. I mean if you think about it, the menu prices were static. The relationship you had with a customer started when they walked on your property and it stopped the moment they walked off. You had no idea you could keep talking to them. You had to have a channel to them. Now it's going to be highly digitized, we'll be 30% of our sales will be digital sales, actually last year. That's up from 15% in 2020 and that's up from single digits even, you know, three or four years before that.
M
Marcelo10:39
Was that the pandemic that made that happen?
P
Paul Brown10:41
It certainly accelerated the trend. And so what that allows you to do is obviously have a more personalized approach. Personalized in how you market to them and personalized even in how you actually put promotions in front of them. So meaning that, I can decide whether you get a deeper promotion than I do because of what I know about you. So personalized pricing.
M
Marcelo11:03
Do you take data you know about me from Dunkin' Donuts to help price my wings?
P
Paul Brown11:09
I mean we do have visibility across, so we have a unified data platform that runs across the brands. And so we do have the ability and, where possible, to actually de-dupe and come up with an Inspire level record, appropriately, obviously, utilized. And then that allows us to have richer information about you as a customer from a first party standpoint. And that also allows, therefore, our ability to utilize third party through anonymized data and other sources to actually be even more accurate than it would if we were just looking at one individual brand.
M
Marcelo11:39
And I mean, do you just segment everybody and then you know, 'Okay, this is the kind of person who might show up at Arby's for lunch,' and you're gonna send me a coupon?
P
Paul Brown11:47
No, it's a little bit more around susceptibility, does this person respond well to promotions? A very promotionally sensitive person versus a more upsell sensitive person. So it helps to actually figure out what kind of offers to target at the individual. It also helps us be better at when we go for lookalikes externally. And so the more visibility we have to what people are doing amongst our brands, it actually helps us be even more precise around when we go ask for lookalike data.
M
Marcelo12:15
Do you think consumers understand it well? Like how do you avoid someone worrying that I'm gonna pay more for my coffee?
P
Paul Brown12:21
I mean, part of it is you just tiptoe into this. I think it's really, you gotta be smart and not get, probably greedy is the wrong word, but actually going too far too fast in this. So we're dipping our toe in the water.
M
Marcelo12:32
Because in the hotel, I would imagine there's a lot more, are there fewer variables than there would be for food?
P
Paul Brown12:37
On pricing, or?
M
Marcelo12:38
On pricing, yeah.
P
Paul Brown12:39
There are. Hotels are different because you have the overarching loyalty program that goes across a hotel chain, which for frequent travelers is a big part of their decision, and it causes people to really consolidate their business within the chain and the loyalty program. So points is a vehicle for promotion and pricing and status, quite honestly, as a vehicle, is a great lever. So it is harder to use a status experiential benefit in the restaurant, in the QSR industry, than it is in hotels. So that's a big variable difference. And then you do have less to play with. The margins are less. You're talking about a three or $4 coffee, not a three or $400 hotel room, and so you have less variables there too. So it's a bit more about how do you stay top of mind, how do you get smarter around what message you're putting in front of that individual at the right time. Not just the message rather, but the timing of that message. So it's a lot more, I think, precise because you have fewer levers to play with.
M
Marcelo13:41
But it's remarkable how digitized, to use your word, the food industry has gotten, right. I mean it wasn't long ago that you didn't know who was walking in or out of a store, much less what they were buying.
P
Paul Brown13:51
Yeah, well it's transformed everything marketing. That's one thing I get so excited about. And one reason we actually created Inspire is because to build the right kind of infrastructure and capabilities to be competitive in that world versus the older world, which is you do some ads, you put them out in linear TV, and you hope that they reach the right person and maybe sometimes find their way in and have a hard save. So it's an industry that is incredibly advertising sensitive. 25 to 30% of our sales we can directly attribute to advertising. And it's incredibly responsive. If we put a product out and an ad out tomorrow, I can tell you the next day whether it's actually working on how it affects sales. And it's moved from that kind of model to a highly digital model. So even for us, in 2019, 80% of our marketing spend was on linear TV, 20% digital. Last year, it's two thirds digital, one third linear. It really should be further. We just have to get franchisees sometimes to come along in the journey with us and the fact that, again, we're able to utilize channels that you couldn't utilize before. And it is just, you can tell I get excited about it, because it's actually what makes this industry so exciting to be in at this moment in time, because particularly in all things marketing, it's just a fundamental transformation.
M
Marcelo15:04
And are you using the digital to also pick up signals, like negative sentiment on TikTok or something like that? And then, I mean, people are also vocal about how unhappy they are about pricing, right? And brands can suffer there. So do you look for that? Do you have teams that are telling you, 'Oh man, this—'
P
Paul Brown15:19
We're looking for that where we can, if we know it's happening real time or if we can attach it. Sometimes it's hard to attach it to a specific restaurant, but if you can, we have mechanisms of pushing that to the teams to try to do something about it quickly and service recovery. So we monitor that very, very closely.
M
Marcelo15:36
How much is the marketing this year about value? I mean you're in the value segment, but I mean I've seen your competitors put out ads saying, 'Oh, the burger meal is 10.99, it's cheaper than McDonald's or whatever.' Is that the way to get people to try an Arby's roast beef sandwich that they've never had?
P
Paul Brown15:50
Yeah, you're seeing a lot more value messaging out there, and you will, and you're also seeing a lot more discounting, direct discounting. So menu prices have actually gone up tremendously across the board. If you look at the landed price, the landed price post discounting or whatever terms, it's actually going up much less. And it's because you're seeing a lot more, off of a higher headline price, you're seeing a lot more discounting, but you're also seeing more always on as well. Two for this, two for that, three for this. And so in order to stay value. So I think that is going to be the mantra and I think one thing we have to do, if you talk about the state of the consumer, is stay agile because I think nobody really quite knows how the rest of this year is going to shape up. We're talking about what we're seeing in customers today. Even 'The Wall Street Journal,' you have Jamie Dimon talking about 8% interest rates. And as of yesterday, the market's pricing in a 70, 80% probability of three rate cuts, 50 basis points in June. So who knows. Then you throw everything out. So what we have to do and what we're focused on is being really agile. I mean the way Jamie said it is we're trying to set ourselves up to be successful as a company at 8% or 2%.
M
Marcelo17:02
Right, right.
P
Paul Brown17:03
I think that's kind of the place—
M
Marcelo17:04
And the competition, then, is just people buying groceries and eating at home? I mean that's what you have to fight off?
P
Paul Brown17:10
Yeah, absolutely. The in-home, at home, out of home, is definitely a dynamic. And when you see those lines cross, it's one of the things we watch all the time, which is, whether you price of food inflation at home or out of home, and you can see the impact when out of home. Grocery prices, actually, were accelerating much faster than restaurant prices the past few years. And so you could see the benefit that those lines have crossed. So it's something we need to watch out for.
M
Marcelo17:39
We've seen it in our reporting, we've heard from people, like the sticker shock, if you want to call it that, that they see when they go to the restaurant, is like a visceral, like people really are, you know, it's anti-motivating, I guess you could say. You haven't seen that in the categories you're in?
P
Paul Brown17:52
Well again, it depends on the category. You see it more in sit down. So we see it a bit more—
M
Marcelo17:57
Yeah, Buffalo Wild Wings.
P
Paul Brown17:58
Buffalo Wild Wings. But by the time you get all the way through the tax, the tip, and everything, it can turn into quite a, not us, we're not like that. But everybody else, every other casual dining restaurant, is a problem.
M
Marcelo18:10
I guess, do you wanna pick one of the brands that you guys bought? Because you've rolled up several. And maybe explain what was it that you saw there? What did you change? Did you change the menu? Did you change the buildings? Was it the marketing? I don't know which one you want to pick, but it would be interesting to hear your thought process.
P
Paul Brown18:26
I think Jimmy John's is a good story. Jimmy John's is a phenomenal brand, a phenomenal product. And the founder did an amazing job of building really high quality, fast, captive delivery. So about 30-ish percent delivery. But it was actually slowing down in growth. In fact, it was negative comp when we bought it and what we found is a few things, some of the things that were making it great initially were holding it back. It was not doing a lot of the things that you do in this industry, which is combos, limited time offers, more product innovation.
M
Marcelo19:01
They didn't sell combo meals, right?
P
Paul Brown19:02
No combo meals, which causes you some challenges with pricing competitiveness, no real innovation in the product. And also we looked at the messaging and how it was actually positioning itself. It was positioning itself entirely around speed. And then we looked at that, you start looking at, well, to a consumer, there can be a trade off between speed and quality, right? And Jimmy John's is extremely high quality. Everything's made there, cooked there. So we actually twisted the message around and came up with a new ad campaign supported by Anomaly on actually, having a counter character that was actually talking about, lamenting, the quality of it. And so we were able to kind of bring the quality cue message into the overall messaging that didn't get in the way of the speed. And I think that was a little bit of an unlock too. And a little irreverence is brought in there every now and then, which I think that brand has the right to do.
M
Marcelo20:02
So each brand kind of sets its own strategy, you give them a budget, or how does it work?
P
Paul Brown20:07
Yeah, budgets are relatively fixed because in a franchise environment, there's generally funds that actually drive the investment. And so, and it's a percentage of sales that gets contributed to the funds. So that can be a finite thing. Now, on the positive news for marketers, it's a budget that generally doesn't get cut, as long as the top line's growing, the marketing funds are growing, but you have to actually be justified in how you spend it. But that is set. We do look at where they're spending the money, how much they're spending on infrastructure versus spending on media. And it's one thing we look hard at is really trying to ask super hard questions about anything that isn't going into working. Because sometimes you'll buy a brand where they've gotten a little bit relaxed around—
M
Marcelo20:49
How much do you have the operators of the stores kind of have input on any of the marketing?
P
Paul Brown20:55
It depends on the franchise group and the franchise relations. And we obviously keep them close and there's marketing committees and those sort of things. A couple of our brands have borderline approval rights on certain things with franchisees, other of our brands don't. So we respect that obviously when we buy the brands.
M
Marcelo21:12
And you do operate some of your stores. So what do you learn from doing that that you wouldn't otherwise?
P
Paul Brown21:17
Yeah, so we operate about 2,500 of our stores, restaurants, which is different than a lot of others. It allows us to align our incentives with our franchisees. Because when we're talking to a franchisee about the challenges of commodity inflation or the challenges of—
M
Marcelo21:33
Wages.
P
Paul Brown21:34
Other inputs, wages and others, we're right there. And so we think about the full P&L, not just our cut of the top line. Which is one of the challenges, sometimes, in the franchise model is that you can get a little overly enamored because you do a lot of things to drive the top line that don't necessarily flow through the bottom of the franchisee. And so that keeps us a bit honest there. It also allows us to try things first. So we remodeled 100 Arby's before we asked a franchisee to, on our own dime. We made lots of changes in that process and it allowed us to move faster once we rolled it out. Buffalo Wild Wings Go, which we're opening our 100th standalone Buffalo Wild Wings Go tomorrow in Manhattan, we built the first 50 ourselves, to actually figure out the right real estate strategy to go along with that. And then once we turned it to franchising, we've sold 600 commitments in 18 months because they were able to see what we were doing with our company restaurants first.
M
Marcelo22:26
And if you have that many franchisees owners, how do you handle the issues we were just talking about before in terms of corporate purpose and the marketing messages you're willing to take on and the ones you don't. Does that all come through you?
P
Paul Brown22:40
I think your values and belief systems and alignment around that are actually more important in a franchise system than I think they are in a normal company, if you will, because that culture, that common belief system, that alignment around purpose of the brand, is kind of the glue that holds the franchise system together. And it's something that when you bring in a new brand, when we bring in a new brand, it comes along with that franchise system and that belief system, we're really careful not to, we pay very close attention and we're very respectful of that. And so we've tried to create a culture at the Inspire level that is really complementary to the value system and belief system that will come in with the franchise groups. Many have been part of those brands for 20, 30, their families may have been part of them for 40 years. And that's a big part of their culture. So we have to respect that.
M
Marcelo23:28
So, but you ultimately, whether you decide to get behind a social cause or political issue, that comes to you, or how do you guys decide this? Do you have a committee?
P
Paul Brown23:37
We really take the stance that we focus on things that influence us directly as an organization, influence our business directly as an organization, and really have to keep in mind that we have 3,300 individual business owners. We have 650,000 team members. We serve 300 million customers a year that we're very careful about speaking out for them. And so we really try to be very thoughtful around when we're going to be out there saying something. Is it actually something that has a direct impact on our business and our franchisees and our team members?
M
Marcelo24:15
So you were sure orange jumpsuits weren't gonna offend anybody? You could get by with that.
P
Paul Brown24:20
Well it doesn't mean we don't get edgy every now and then. And I wouldn't know if orange jumpsuits are edgy, but yeah, it doesn't mean that we don't, but I think part of that, again, goes back to being clear who your customer is. Ultimately we're in the business of serving customers. Who they are, what motivates them, what will motivate them to actually hopefully do more business with you. Certainly what would get in the way of them doing business with you is important to understand. And then just kind of stay in that lane as much as possible.
M
Marcelo24:44
I want to give a chance, yes, questions. Go ahead.
C
Carolyn24:55
Hi Paul, this is Carolyn. I'm with AppsFlyer. We're a company specialized in measurement to help marketing understand how to drive growth. So I wanna ask a question, picking into a point you made earlier. When you acquire these brands, you had mentioned about the brands shared the back end infrastructure. So I'm curious, not all the brands were acquired at the same time. What are the components that you have deliberately integrated so that the Inspire brands in general have a consistent back end infrastructure?
P
Paul Brown25:35
Yeah, and we're actually in the middle of the journey. That's a great question. So obviously from a data platform standpoint, that's one of the first things we do, is have a unified data platform, and try, where possible, to bring all the data in one place. That's a foundational element. Above that, we call it Inspire Digital platform, which is the web app platform. And so extending, the experience will continue to look very different from the customer, consumer, but a common platform across the brands. And we have three brands on that today. We have three more brands to put on that, because that doesn't happen overnight. And then the MarTech stack that goes along with that. As you know, if they're already on a well-established CDP or something, we actually may think about keeping that, but we really try to get that as unified as possible. And then, anything that kind of hangs off of that, anything that drives from a customer marketing standpoint, loyalty program, not the program itself, but the underlying technology and infrastructure underneath the program, we also try to actually align that as well.
C
Carolyn26:40
So is the loyalty points program, did that get launched recently?
P
Paul Brown26:46
For Dunkin', the new version of it, called Dunkin' Rewards, was launched in, what, October, November of last year? Something like that. 2022, gosh. It's already 2024, sorry. 2022. And that was, again, the different point structure. Buffalo Wild Wings has a loyalty program that came along with the brand and Jimmy John's has a loyalty program that came along with the brand and they're separate. They're not linked, we don't have an umbrella across them, like you do in the hotel industry. Doesn't mean that it couldn't happen at some point in time and we're building things in such a way that if we decided that was the right thing to do, that we could. And so building to that as a potential outcome. Nothing in the works now. And then we're in the process of launching a loyalty program for the other two brands that don't have one.
S
Steven Tristan Young27:36
Hi, I'm Steven Tristan Young, CMO of Poshmark. So the speaker that we just had earlier talked a lot about cultural hotspots, hot flashes and moments. I'd love to hear your perspective as a CEO with a number of brands that cut across so many different dimensions of audiences, what's the guidance that you give to your teams about when to be involved, not to be involved? This is tricky water, because you do have a lot of brands that a lot of people love. What's been your stance on that? I'd love to hear the CEO perspective.
P
Paul Brown28:00
Yeah, and the brands are very different. Even if you look at demographics of the brands, for instance, with Buffalo Wild Wings, it's 60% male, Dunkin' is 60% female. And so you get in, you get east coast, west coast, middle of the country, it's about as diverse from a customer base you can possibly get. And so the advice is to be laser focused on who their customer is, and think about the cultural flashpoints, the things that actually matter to those guests, and do it in a respectful manner. So it's always, try to push the envelope and be top of mind, which is a big game in this industry. You always have to be top of mind. Do it in a way that again is aligned with what our guests would expect our brands to do. Not something that's out of left field, not going into a place that brand doesn't have permission to play. And certainly being respectful of, not just again of the customers, they're part of it, but also others that may, again, like I said, we don't want to be a reason for people not to come and be part of your brand experience. But I do not, that is not my job. I mean, my job as the CEO, I think, is set the culture and set the processes and help build the capabilities of the teams that are making the decision. But I think particularly the portfolio of diverse brands like this, and I'm a little bit of an experimental marketer from the past, but I'm not the person that you want making those decisions.