Ep. 277- GUEST: 🛑 STOP Asking for so much DATA! w/Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba [Matt Bettis Sr Dir Customer Engagement & Loyalty GoTo Foods]

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast presented by marigold and this episode is going to make you hungry that is my guarantee why we have someone incredible here who do we got we got matt bettis now matt is the senior director of customer engagement and loyalty of go-to foods now maybe you don't know go-to foods but i bet you kind of do okay go-to foods is the they have all these affiliated brands, 6 ,700 restaurants, cafes, ice cream shops, bakeries in all 50 states, 60 countries. And here's some of the brands, okay? Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba, Moe's Southwestern Grill, McAllister's Deli.

1:20I can never say that right. Schlotzky's. I can't say that right either. Seattle's Best Coffee. Basically, everything you consume on a daily basis, it's match responsibility. And we're going to hear all about how he drives loyalty and customer engagement. I'm fired up to have him here. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thrilled to be here. And it's great to talk to you, Jay. I appreciate that. So my, we're going to get into all things, but I'm just curious about something. If I worked where you work, I would, I think I would eat everything. I would accomplish no work whatsoever, but you have access to all the greatest food on earth.

1:53Is it like right there's your cafeteria, the coolest cafeteria on the planet? Yes, that is accurate. It is the coolest on the planet. So we do have kitchens in the building where they're always doing tests of new items they're going to potentially launch in store. There's a lot of access to all of the brands. There was a joke, of course, we rebranded as a company. We used to be called Focus Brands. Now we are GoToFoods. There was a joke about when you joined the company, you would put on the Focus 15, which was access to Cinnabon and Auntie Anne's and all of these phenomenal brands, which are delicious.

2:30But when you've got access to them all day, you have to make sure to in moderation, you know, to not put on too much. But, yeah, it's great to work for brands that are that are so beloved by so many people. I mean, dream job for a marketer, for sure. So so it's been a great experience here. That is so cool. I mean, to be a fan and then to actually be able to work someplace that you're a fan of, that's such a cool thing to do. So how did this happen? Have you just had just coolness around you your whole career? How did you wind up doing this? So it's an interesting question. I never would have thought I would have been in this position when I started my career.

3:08I won't tell you exactly when I started it. I want to maintain some mystery here, but let's say a while ago. Originally, I was a computer engineer. Technically, my second job, but one of my first jobs was advising the Pentagon on technology strategy. So I reported to the actual Pentagon in DC for one of my first jobs. The idea that a certain number of years later, I would be advising marketing, loyalty, and customer engagement for a food company was not exactly on my mind. I went back when I was doing this, there was a heavy implementation component to the technology strategy we were advising.

3:43So I was a developer for about half of my day. It was not something I really wanted to be doing long-term. This is in a pre-agile world. You didn't have as much agency over what you were developing. So I knew I had to go back and get another degree. I really didn't know what marketing was. I thought marketing was a TV advertising and that was it. So I went back to business school and just started to take some classes in marketing and just absolutely fell in love with it. I realized it's not only advertising, which is a part for sure, but there's a heavy data-driven component to marketing. It's product, it's pricing, it's everything else.

4:21That really appealed to me as someone with more of a data mindset, more of a technology background. So the roles I've done since then have really been all leaning more towards the data side of marketing. And then that is a natural fit with loyalty programs. So I think that's how I wound up in loyalty programs, particularly in restaurants. We're in a charmed position in a lot of ways because we have access to so much data and have the ability to really get out targeted messages, targeted offers, all of that. And I know it's not what excites everyone, but it is actually what excites me. I've told people, if you want a marketer to design a Super Bowl commercial, I'm not your guy.

5:01If you want someone to really dive deep into the data, figure out the exact right message at the exact right time to get to the exact right person, that may be something I can do. I think you get the award for the hardest pivot in a career of all time. I mean, somebody going, yeah, I worked in the Pentagon, and now I do loyalty programs for Carvel. Wait, what? Well, I hope I tell my nine-year-old son daddy worked at the Pentagon. He couldn't care less. I really hope someday this impresses him. It's got to impress one of his friends, I hope, someday. Me? It impressed me. It impressed you. Well, that's all I wanted, Jay, was just to impress you.

5:39I don't care about him anymore. No, it's amazing. But yeah, cool, cool, interesting start to the career. You never know where your career will take you. All right. So I have a question about loyalty. All right. You all have 25 million loyalty members. That is a lot of people. And I know this is probably not the right way to ask it, but I'm just going to ask it. I go to the mall. Okay. We have an Auntie Anne's in my mall. I buy some pretzel bites. I eat them. And then I don't really think about it for a little while. And then three months later, I go back to the mall. I go, I'm hungry. I'm going to buy pretzels again from Auntie Anne's.

6:13And I do. Does that mean I'm a loyalty member? Like, how do you drive loyalty? It's amazing to me drive loyalty from people like just buying these things casually. Like, what are you guys doing to bring everyone together? So it's a really good point. When you think about loyalty, there's, of course, the true loyalist. And we've got brands that have people coming in 10, 15, 20, even more times per year. I mean, once a week, you know, that's a very important segment, but we don't want to ignore the relatively infrequent guests. You know, you coming in once every three months wouldn't put you super, you know, you don't come in every week or anything.

6:50We still want to be able to drive you to additional frequency when possible. Now, when you talk about are you a loyalty member, we want to drive loyalty for all guests. Everyone that comes in the store, we want to drive brand affinity and loyalty. A lot of that focus is on the actual loyalty program. So when you sign up for the program, whether you have or not for Auntie Anne's or for any of the brands, and then identify yourself in some way during your transaction, whether it's in first party, meaning web or app or in store, you can scan QR codes, you can give your phone number. There are a bunch of different ways you can identify yourself.

7:26Then you're really in our loyalty program. We're then taking all of that data. We're trying to match you up to similar guests to create segments and figure out how we can drive you to both have longer term tenure and loyalty, but also some additional transactions, more in the short term, additional transactions or additional spend. And let's say if you're going to Auntie Anne's and you get pretzel bites, well, can we get you to buy a lemonade while you're there? Things like that. Can we find key moments when you'd be more amenable to make another trip to buy pretzel bites? I'm sure when you look at a mall brand, some of it is just based on, okay, I've got to return my khakis to J.Crew, so I happen to be in the mall.

8:04Can we make sure when you do go to the mall, you're going to make that stop at Auntie Anne's? Those are all very important to us. So it's both the true loyalist who's coming all the time, and that's their favorite place that they go to weekly or some even more, and the more infrequent person that we want to – there's a big percentage change if we can take it from three visits a year to four, right? It's a 33 % increase. So both are really important. You know, you just said something to me that I'm embarrassed that I don't ever really think I thought about, which is within your loyalty, however you're defining loyalty of somebody, you're seeing if there's like-minded people that are doing certain things.

8:42And you're creating segments based on looking at what other customers are doing and making segments from that. And, you know, somebody may be a SaaS marketer out there. And maybe they're not looking at, for example, how people are using their platform. and if they look at people that are using their platform in a similar way, that could become a segment, right? Or a consumer brand could be all sorts of different things. I've always thought of segmentation, uh, like, okay, they've bought this many times. Their lifetime value is this, you know, they spend this much dollar amount, but you're saying that you're looking at segmentation in a totally different way.

9:15Yeah. I mean, that's a big part of it for sure. This many visits, this much spend, um, we, you know, what are you spending on? What are the occasions, what's the even things for a lot of our brands, seasonality, day of week, all of these different things can contribute to a picture of who you are as a guest. And, you know, this is relevant for every brand from you've got a database of a thousand people to we've got, like you've mentioned in the tens of millions. It's with us having so many guests in our database, we can build even, I mean, we can split that 50 different ways and still have half a million.

9:54And I'm just pulling numbers out of thin air, but have a big base of very similar guests that we can kind of build journeys for to try and drive that incremental behavior. Really, that's kind of our North Star is always trying to drive incrementality among those guests. So yeah, it's where I am very lucky to have access to all of this data and be able to build those segments based on it. So let's talk about data for a second because I think marketers of all sizes, business and consumer, when they get that first interaction with somebody, there is a rush to collect a lot of data. Like I need it all because we want to run these campaigns.

10:33We want to do all this stuff. But is that the right move? Like when someone is first giving you their data, are you just collecting a ton of stuff or are you kind of grabbing it over time? What is the right way to kind of get the data you need? This is a really good question because I think the default is, well, what harm can it be to get more data? To an extent, it's not wrong. In some cases, you just have more fields in a database. That's not the end of the world. when you think about guests having to give you this data, every piece of data they have to give you, at some point they're going to say, okay, this is too much.

11:11I'm not giving you all of this. Really what we want to do is get just the minimum required to get them into the program initially. The minimum we really need to do our segmentation. What we want to be doing is progressive profiling. So rather than someone comes into whatever your business is and you ask for information on them, And this is relevant. I've worked in B2B. I've worked several different B2C companies. This is relevant no matter where you are. Don't ask for first name, middle name, last name, maiden name, blood type, birthday, anniversary. I mean, I've seen people that just say, well, okay, we need to get every single piece of data we possibly can.

11:52Get what you need to initially, which oftentimes is like name and a communication channel. Could be phone number, could be email address. Get the rest over time and incentivize them to give you the rest. Give them incentives if it's points or whatever kind of structure you've got where you can say, hey, you know, great example. If we don't have your birthday, we can't send you a birthday offer. It's not possible because we don't know your birthday. Well, we could send you an email saying, hey, why don't you tell us what your birthday is? And then you'll be in to get this birthday offer. We really want to make sign up for the program as simple and quick and easy as possible.

12:25On the flip side for our data teams, just collecting everything when you don't really have any path to ever draw an insight from it, that can just cloud analysis. You've just got so much data. It's the whole signal for the noise problem. You've got all this noise and you can't find the signal because there's just so much data. So you don't necessarily want to collect absolutely everything, try and get enough data to get you the insights and set you up for the future. But if you try and collect too much, not only are guests not going to give it to you because of timing or privacy concerns, it also sometimes can make analysis harder.

13:03So get what you need, not everything. Yeah, it's what you need, not necessarily what you want. You want everything. And then it's also, you know, when you get that initial communication channel, is there a lot of focus on, okay, we need to kind of earn our keep. We need to really crush it out of the gate so that way we can kind of earn the right to ask for more information. I mean, is that kind of that welcome series really important for your business? It's incredibly important. Uh, that's, that's probably one of the most, if not the most important customer engagement, uh, strategy we have is the welcome series.

13:40You may be very surprised to know this, and this is, um, common throughout the industry. This is not just our brands. It varies by brand, uh, a very healthy portion of guests that sign up for loyalty programs, never use them. I do not know why you would sign up for a loyalty program. I mean, I can understand it every so once. If it were 1 % or something, I'd say, okay, they signed up, they forgot, something like that, totally fine. But it's very high percentage, surprisingly high percentages never use it. What we need to do, the second we've got, when you sign up, we've got your email address.

14:12A lot of people, they've signed up through an app, so we have the ability to send them push notifications. We need to get them in for that first transaction, if not immediately, very soon. We really want to make sure that they're engaged with the loyalty program, that they don't just sign up, forget about it. And then two months later, and we see this just like every brand does, then they try and sign up again because they forget they even had it. So driving that first purchase. Also, once we get that first purchase, then we have some information on you. When you just sign up, we can't do much with just your name and phone number and email address.

14:43We can send you things, but they can't be really personalized. Once you start transacting, and we know, Jay, if you go into Carvel, or let's say you go into Jamba and you have a favorite smoothie there, then we can start to understand, okay, people who really like that smoothie also are very amenable to this other menu item, something like that. So it's incredibly important to get them engaged with the program, not just signed up, right? That's super interesting about that instant fall off for a lot of loyalty programs. You're right. It's like, why would you sign up for it? Something that you all do that I think any business should bring in that I don't know is not on enough people's radar, which is the small things.

15:20Whenever I walk into a Moe's Southwestern Grill, I got one down the street from me. And this has been the case for years. Everybody that works there screams out the second you walk in, welcome to Moe's. Oh, I'm very familiar. Right? Iconic to the brand. It's iconic to the brand. And instantly, the moment I walk in there, I'm like, oh, I feel good. I feel connected. Like even now I'm thinking about it. There's this like loyalty pull. Those little things matter, right? Those things add up for your, for the whole process. Absolutely. And it, you know, what we sell is food for sure. Right. But there, it is such a competitive industry.

16:00I mean, I don't, when you go to Moe's, I'm sure you've got five other, uh, Tex-Mex or Mexican or options that are very similar. And that's not even counting. If you're going for lunch, you've got sandwich options, you've got all this other stuff. Moe's is a great example. When a guest comes in, the team members all say, welcome to Moe's in a way that everyone can hear. It is creating an experience. It's creating something that's truly differentiated in an industry where it's very difficult to be truly differentiated. So I think that's where we want to be as a company is have something, not just another burrito place, not just another sandwich place.

16:39We want to be a truly differentiated experience beyond just menu. So I think that's a fantastic example. Yeah. And I think everybody could bring that into their business. These little things that you stand out, you've got to break through the noise. Speaking of breaking through the noise, probably your biggest work accomplishment, and this is off script, was that you were awarded the best costume this past holiday season. And I believe you were, where were you? Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is that correct? This is correct. First, two things are correct about this. This is my biggest professional accomplishment by far.

17:11I was talking earlier today. I still have the sheet of paper, best individual costume at go-to foods. I haven't even gotten it framed. So I got to get that framed and put up somewhere so that people know. Yes, I would. I, um, you, you may be shocked to know this, but, um, maybe I was a little bit of a nerd back in the day. I'm sure you can't tell now, but, um, I would had a star. I bought a star Wars costume. It must've been in like, like when the phantom menace came out in the late nineties and it still barely fits. So I've been getting lots of good use out of that. So yes, won the costume contest, biggest professional accomplishment here, possibly of my entire career.

17:44So wait, I want to know, okay, so you, if you weren't going to be that, what was the second choice that you were debating between, between that and you were really about to be, you know, I don't know, Darth Vader or Yoda, or was it all Star Wars universe? So it's, I really wanted my team to do i'll tell a real quick story i um i want my team to go in a theme for halloween so last year my team was going to go as the scooby-doo characters because we had the right number for scooby-doo uh long story short i was born in dallas and was long raised a texas rangers fan well if any follow baseball texas rangers made the world series last year i bought a ticket and flew and went to the game and i was like sorry guys scooby-doo halloween is canceled return in your costumes so we didn't get to do that last year this year i really wanted to do something themed to our restaurants um i thought i had a really good idea but uh i don't like to force things on my team and they just didn't get a big you could tell there just wasn't a lot of momentum around it um auntie ann's this past year actually launched a fragrance called need with a k k k n e a be.

18:50It was, I understand the reaction. It did phenomenally well. It drove so much buzz and it is because of the power of the smell of those pretzels. You walk into the mall and you smell pretzels. Um, it, I've had some on me by the way, I didn't get a bottle to myself, but I've been in meetings with the chief brand officer. She brought a bottle. I said, well, give me, give me a little bit. I got a date with my wife later. Let's let me get some of that. So my idea was let's all go as let's do branded fragrances that are kind of silly. You know, things like, you know, John Deere smell like a tractor or something like that.

19:23We'll all build one. You just could tell there wasn't a lot of excitement around it and I couldn't get them on board. But that was my idea for Halloween this year. If I hadn't done my Star Wars costume, which is my fallback, we would have been other branded fragrances beyond Auntie Anne's need. So, well, I'm glad you don't work at a fertilizer company. That's all I'm going to say. Right, right. Exactly. That is unbelievable. There's many things about that. that's unbelievable. Uh, well this, this episode has been unbelievable. You're awesome. Listen, we're going to put all your info in the show notes, but how does everybody follow you, connect with you, get involved with you?

19:56What can they do? Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm on all of the social media channels. Um, really the best way to connect with me, LinkedIn, Matt Bettis. Um, I don't think there are many others benefit of having a relatively unique last name. Um, but But yeah, always happy to connect with people. We do, like I've mentioned to you earlier, when these brands are so iconic that when we have a job posting, I get a lot of people reaching out because everyone is so eager to work at this brand that they've known since they were a baby or children in some cases. So always happy to talk through our brands, talk through marketing, anything.

20:32If people want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I'm there as Matt Bettis. Would love to talk to people. That's amazing. We're going to put that in the show notes. I learned a lot today. I'm going to go eat everything now. Matt, thanks for being here, man. Please do. Thank you so much, Jay. I really appreciate you having me. It was great to talk to you. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.

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