Old School Strategies in a Digital World | How Krispy Kreme Brands Itself

Thanks so much for having me, Dave. I'm really looking forward to talking with you and sharing a little with your audience.

I think one of the reasons people really still love Krispy Kreme after all these years, and they think of it as sort of the OG — not original glaze, but also the OG of donuts — is because of the way we're made. And I think a lot of your audience will resonate with: we're very authentic. People tell us, 'Oh, it's authentic, it's sincere.' Why? Well, how many companies of any product that you've ever seen show you the entire manufacturing process right before your eyes, from the time you mix the dough to the time you put the dough in the proofer to make it rise, to washing it, frying it, glazing it, to going in your mouth? And we put a giant window up so everyone can see it. There's no sleight of hand here. It's the real deal. And in this world, things are getting so processed and commoditized, and I just think you can kind of lose that analog touch of authenticity. We still have it. So we certainly think of ourselves as a retro brand because we think the world needs this kind of thing now more than ever. But from a product perspective, that's pretty old school — where you're willing to show everybody everything you do every day, all the time, and a lot of it's still done by hand, and a lot of it's still done the same way we've done it for many years. And then on the experience side and the values, we are blessed. I have to say, we bless very few people — maybe no people — come into Krispy Kreme angry. They know they've made the decision to make their day better at that point. It happened before they got into the parking lot. And even if they're having a rough day or whatever, they did it for a break. They're happier when they leave. So we know that we're that part of people's day, and you don't want to mess that up in the experience. And honestly, we have a lower bar than some in trying to make it happy because they come in happy and they typically leave happy. You almost have to work hard to mess that up, and we try not to do that. We definitely try not to do that. We try to have values of service that are around generosity. You know, sampling of these hot fresh donuts — people do think it's insane that we do that. I mean, what idiot gives your prize possession away for free when you walk in the door? No, you actually gave me your book, yes, Krispy Kreme, Dave Meltzer, and that's kind of the end of it. But it's a rare thing for people to be so oddly generous in today's world. It's a zag, and I think that's sort of our heart.

Yeah, in my 20-plus years in marketing, I've been lucky. I had a good education, and then I went to Kraft, which was like a master class — they were known as an academy company, they taught you a lot of CPG. And then I went to PepsiCo at Frito-Lay. And I heard your podcast recently with Brett, and like, so you know that machine is what it's capable of, and it's amazing. So I had all these incredible learning experiences, as a lot of folks do. And some of the things I did gain: just performance analysis, performance analysis, and also maybe performance analysis. So it's fun to make the Super Bowl ads, and it's fun to do those, and I think that's great. And jetting off to get creative awards is really cool, and I'd love to do more of it. But it's got to work. It's got to work hard. It's got to sell product. And that may seem like a pretty basic thing for people to expect of marketing, except sometimes people lose their way a little bit and can't do that. So I think I learned that from those places. When you learn how to do everything really well, then you know when you have a smaller budget and so on, what corners you can sort of safely cut off. Maybe you don't need this many rounds of product testing, maybe you don't need that. And you use your experience to kind of allow you to go faster. I think that's been really great. Now when I got to Krispy Kreme, like you said, all bets are off. The pace we move at is a lot quicker in the sense that there's a lot more activity done on a much smaller budget. And what I learned along the way is that social media for me has been pretty effective — provably, quantitatively effective. It makes targeting a lot easier. And if something doesn't work, you stop it, and then you just lean in harder to your other assets, and you can just be so nimble with it. But what I think a lot of folks in the space don't always do is we measure every campaign we do. I mean, every three or four weeks, we're measuring: did it work? Did it not work? What do we do different? Do we A/B test it? Do we do a dropout market? Do we do a hold? We're doing all that so we can constantly improve, because we definitely don't have the hubris to think that we've got it figured out. And whenever a new thing comes along — and it wasn't long ago when TikTok was new — you try it out, you try it in the market, you see what works. If it works, you do more of it, and if it doesn't, you don't. So I think this notion of constant tinkering, evaluating, and moving on and not getting stuck in your ways is important. I mean, 10 years ago I would have said if you ever do anything but national cable, you're an idiot. And that's not how the world works anymore, and it won't work that way. Like you said, in five years, I don't know what's next, but I hope I remain flexible enough to try it.

Well, the question is, in all humility, remembering that we're a doughnut company. We're not curing cancer. We're not solving good governance across the world. We know what we are. We're an indulgence in something that can make people's day. But we recognize what the brand is and what it can mean. It's those small things in life. It's those small things that make each day, and those days together that turn into weeks and months. And there's this trend right now on TikTok we've been observing called 'glimmers.' Glimmers are the opposite of triggers. People trigger all this toxic vitriol and politics and stuff, and there's this sort of counter — it's all trying to unify people, trying to think about kindness and generosity without some sort of expectation of something beyond that. It's almost countercultural at this point, and it's a zag, and it actually becomes a point of distinction. And it's been something that we realized, 'Wow, maybe we do have a role to play.' When the pandemic hit, that was the exact question you would have been so proud of us, Dave. That was the exact question we asked ourselves: 'Okay, what role can we play in this?' And our role was to share joy. An overwhelming majority of the donuts purchased at Krispy Kreme are given to somebody who didn't purchase them. They're shared. Overwhelming majority. That is bizarre. And if you do this, I want to be your friend. If you buy 12 cars and give 11 away, get me on your list. Nobody does that. Nobody does that except for us. There are very few products that exist that way, where people use the product — we're not the hero of the story, we're the tool through which other people are the heroes of the story, and they can use us as a means to express their heart and their generosity. And in the pandemic, we decided we would demonstrate that shared value by giving away mass quantities of donuts with no expectation of anything in return. So from Doctor's Day to Nurses Day, eight weeks we said, 'We love our healthcare workers. Anybody with any health badge of any sort, just come in and ask for whatever you want.' Whatever you want, no charge, no sign up, don't give us your email, just here's all the donuts you want. And there were people who came in and took 50 dozens for no charge at all. And a crazy thing happened. By the end of that, people would come in and they would get a couple dozen for free, and they'd ask to buy other dozens. And the days of the week that we weren't giving them away — we did this on Mondays — our sales went through the roof. And I think it's because there is an unspoken, not talked about much in the media, need out there for people to connect and for people to feel like there's still good in this world. And it's worth looking for and it's worth hanging on to. And that was our role in the pandemic. And we did it with Grad Days when we gave all seniors — now we've done it every year — a free dozen donuts. That's like a $16 value for free, no strings attached. And we keep trying to show generosity. And we found, as such a cliché, the more you give people, generally they reward you in the long run because they remember it. They remember kindness.

Well, first, for your audience to know and for my CFO if he's listening, we do use all the regular metrics too. So frequency, penetration, overall sales — quick call after this interview, what the heck did you say? But the reason we look at love is because all those other metrics are measures of performance, measures of functional performance. Love is a measure of intimacy, and that carries the longest. To your point, they say sales overnight, brand over time — that old saw. But the brand over time is determined by intimacy. So who is the better customer for Krispy Kreme in the long run: the person who stops by for a doughnut on their way to work say 10 times a year, or the person who drives four hours each way to get it twice a year and brings 10 dozens home? If you look at statistics, you can lose sight of the intensity of liking for the brand. It's that intensity of liking for the brand that creates evangelism for the brand, that creates zealous zealots for the brand, people who want to engage and communicate and talk about your brand. And so love, which we measure in every country in which we operate — almost every country, the open new markets, it's not right away, but almost every country we operate in, we know we measure it for ourselves, but we also measure it versus all CPG competitors and all retail competitors. We want to be the most loved sweet treat brand in the world. And the reason we look at that is because it is highly correlated to the long-term brand health, which does correlate to sales over time. But it's also that people here want to — we know we have something special, and brand love is a way to make sure, and measuring quantitatively brand love is a way to make sure you're not messing up the something special, that sort of dust on the butterfly wing that makes Krispy Kreme the special company that you remember from Akron, that you think about with your grandfather. Because if you take someone who's never been there today in LA, they will remember that experience. And I'm certainly not going to be the marketer that messes that up, and I don't think any of my successors or anyone on my team wants to be that person. So love is a weird way to talk about it to some people, but to us, it's just the means through which we express depth of care for the brand, depth of sharing values, sharing donuts as well.