How Burger King Is Making a Comeback

0:00At CLA, we're in your corner and on it. We coach tax strategies and Little League First Base. We help you adopt AI data tools and we adopt rescues named Buddy. We walk your factory floor and jog the local 5K, though sometimes we walk that too. Wherever you're coming from, we're right there with you. Wherever you're going, we'll get you there.

0:23Jason:CLA, CPAs, consultants, and advisors. Learn more at claconnect.com slash with you. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at The Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the Nexgrill 4-Burner Gas Grill on special buy for only$199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove 7-Piece Outdoor Dining Set for only$499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at The Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th through May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. Burger King's always been very interesting, but I could introduce you to a lot of extremely interesting people that you probably don't want to have an entire meal with, or they don't feel that their personality is really that appealing.

1:14That could be used to describe the relationship in the marketing that Burger King had for years. I'll use an example here. The Moldy Whopper was absolutely riveting, and it was a way that we tried to communicate. We used real ingredients that we didn't use preservatives. Ultimately, however, when you've got the Whopper on a huge screen and it's got mold all over it, it doesn't inspire you to go to a restaurant and order a Whopper.

1:43Jason:Running a business means solving problems. I tell you how the smartest entrepreneurs do it. Hi, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and this is Problem Solvers.

1:57Jason:In mid-February, I was just flipping through Instagram, and a video featuring the president of Burger King popped up, and he says, hello, I'm the president of Burger King. Here's my phone number. Call me. And then a number pops up on the screen. And I watched this, and I thought, okay, this is genius, because who that loves Burger King doesn't want to call the president of Burger King, but also I wonder what is going on at Burger King right now? Surely somebody was thinking, you know, we need to, or we want to create an even stronger dialogue with our consumer. And what better way to do that than to put the president of the company out there and give out a phone number.

2:38Jason:This is obviously going to drive a ton of attention, a ton of engagement, but why? What is happening at Burger King that's driving that thought? And now, because I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. I get to ask people like the president of Burger King, what is going on? And so today I am so delighted to be joined by Tom Curtis, who is not just giving out his phone number, but is doing all sorts of exciting things at Burger King. Perhaps you also heard about the new Whopper happening at Burger King. So that's just the beginning. Tom, welcome to Problem Solvers. I'm so excited you're here.

3:11Hi, Jason. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

3:14Jason:So Tom, let's start there. I know there is a lot happening at Burger King and I want to hear what your approach is and what you're thinking. And I'll tell you where my mind immediately went was Burger King's whole thing has been about customization, about having it your way. And so there's always been this messaging inside the brand of talking to consumers, but that you put that phone number out there and that you have spoken so loudly to consumers about how much you want that dialogue. To me, he says that something must be going on over at Burger King that is leading to this action, that is craving more customer dialogue, and I'd love to hear what that is.

3:58Yeah, so Jason, I loved how you opened this up. You talked about engagement, and you also talked about attention, and we're certainly looking for both. So on the engagement side, When I got here, we started talking to customers by wearing our uniforms or wearing our logo wear when we would travel. And we'd get in all sorts of really interesting conversations. And some of those conversations led us to the work that we've done over the last four or so years. And now we'd also like to inspire a little bit of attention around those things that we've been working on for this last four years or so.

4:41Jason:So actually, you know, before you go any further, I just want to point out that that is not the first time that I have heard wearing the brand apparel drives really meaningful insights. Yeah, you can get some information through a spreadsheet, but really the best way to understand what somebody's thinking is to ask them yourselves or to have them approach you like we say when we're at the airport or when we're traveling, going to the grocery store, what have you. and the listening campaign that you mentioned, the one where I gave out my phone number, was really a way to amplify that walk through the airport, that walk through the grocery store.

5:21And the things that we learned confirmed everything that we knew about the brand at the time. Once again, four years ago, the brand had gotten old, tired, irrelevant, and we wanted, but there was a latent love and there was a nostalgia around the brand. People wanted to return to it, but they just needed a reason.

5:44Jason:That's super interesting. Can you take me back to the problem part of what you were just describing? You said the brand had felt a little stale. People wanted to come back to it, but they needed a reason or they needed an invitation. Talk to me about diagnosing that kind of problem and then how to engage people in a way that brings them back. So when I was younger, my parents took me to Burger King. And as I raised my kids, I took them to Burger King. But somewhere around 30 years ago for me, I stopped going. I stopped taking my kids. And that was generally because I had a bad experience or the food didn't meet my expectation.

6:30So I went away from the brand and the creepy king nor any of the limited time offers were not enough to induce me to give it another try. And so that had us looking at the problem like that. Like, what is it that people need to feel to actually come back to a brand that they had a latent love for?

6:53Jason:Did you ever consider doing something Domino's-like? Domino's very famously announced, our pizza sucked and now it's better, which was so smart because it attacked that thing that you're describing here, which is people grew up with this brand. They have an affinity towards it. They have a dissatisfaction. And to hear the brand voice the dissatisfaction is to earn trust. So I'm sure you're aware, but I actually spent 35 years at Domino's. So I started my career there, spent many, many years there, still love the brand. And I was there during the turnaround. And yes, there was our pizza sucked kind of tone to what they did.

7:40And although history doesn't repeat itself, it does often rhyme. And I think if you really pay close attention to what we've been doing and what Domino's did back in 2010, it is an effort to be transparent and an effort to be honest and open with our guests and with America. and if you watch the advertising that started in the Oscars and continues to this day, you'll hear in there an acknowledgement that we haven't done everything right over the years and that we do feel like there are points in time where we let Americans down and I think acknowledging that is an expression of honesty that people appreciate and that they respond to.

8:27You know, often you learn this through a spouse or a loved one, just saying you're sorry and really meaning it and really listening at how you can be better can make a huge difference in a relationship. And at the end of the day, that's what this is. It's a relationship. We're the Hartford with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance, thank you. One size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business.

8:59Jason:So having seen this play out at Domino's and now Burger King, I'd love to hear you talk about how to get internal buy-in for this kind of thing because it's gotta be, and I've never experienced this myself, I've never led a international brand that's going to engage with this kind of conversation, but I imagine that it feels a little scary. The most difficult conversations and the hardest folks to convince are the franchise owners because they've often been with the brand for 30, 40, even 50 years, and they've worked hard and done a good job, but often some of their neighbors have not. And so, you know, when you talk about a brand, you're talking about the collective brand, so you're talking about them as well.

9:45So I think getting them comfortable with this idea is part of the challenge. However, what they knew and what I knew was that, once again, we had been working on this for four years. And when people go away from your brand, they don't just naturally come back. They need something to incite them to come back. And I think there's a sense of pride in the work that's been done over the last four years to improve operations, the restaurants, the quality of the franchise base and the franchisees that we have here. And that inspired them to be open to this idea. And certainly the traffic and the interest that we've seen in the brand because of it has confirmed that it's the right thing to do.

10:35Jason:You know, as you're talking about that, I'm thinking about, I wish I could remember whose bit this is, is a leadership guy who I interviewed on the show a while ago. But what he argued was that leaders, and this is a little different than what you're talking about, but it's going to circle right back to what you just said. He said, leaders have started to valorize

11:02Jason:vulnerability. And everyone thinks it's just, vulnerability is a currency, go out there and be vulnerable. And he said, you know, but the problem is that if you're just vulnerable, then it doesn't look like you have a plan. You're not a strong leader. It's got to be vulnerability plus action. So you stand up and you say, this went wrong. And now here's what we're going to do. And that is when the vulnerability becomes this on-ramp and this trust because you are voicing the thing that people recognize was deficient. And then you're telling them what you as the leader are going to do to make it better so that they feel like you're in control.

11:39Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that a lot of what is challenging in this exercise, if you will, is being vulnerable and humble, but also being proud. Think about those two things. They sound kind of opposite. But I think that, you know, I would not have been comfortable going out and talking about Burger King or inviting people to come back to Burger King and promising them a better experience if we hadn't done the work first. I have actually seen a fair number of brands want to take this humility and vulnerability and then say, but we're going to be better. I don't think that's sufficient.

12:24I think you have to do a good body of the work first. You cannot just say, I'm going to be better. The proof has to be in the pudding. You have to have shown the effort before you have the right to say, we are better. And at the same time, acknowledge that you're still not perfect. You still have opportunity and you want to hear more about how you can continue on that journey. That's where there's sincerity and honesty in what a brand is doing. Mm-hmm.

12:56Jason:Tom, why don't more brands, you think, listen to their customers? I feel like brands do it in focus group ways if you're a large enough brand, but I often talk to company leaders at all sizes and they're wrestling with some problem. And I say, well, have you directly talked to your customer about this? Do you understand exactly the way that they're articulating the problem that you're trying to solve for them? And they often haven't. And I imagine that part of what got Burger King into the problem that it had in the first place was that it drifted away from listening to the consumer, which is clearly part of what you're here to rectify.

13:45Jason:Can you diagnose why brands start to drift from the consumer like that? I think all brands believe that they listen to their consumer. But once again, they often do that through spreadsheets or they do that through some major work of analysis that's done by a team and not directly by themselves. And once again, I know this through the relationships that I have with people outside of work. I only truly understand them when I have one-on-one interactions with them, when I sit and have a meal with them, when I spend time on a park bench just having a conversation. The nuance in what they have to say, the inflection in their voice really leads to a deeper understanding of what they love or what they hate or what they want to see in the relationship that I have with them.

14:41Why wouldn't that be true in your workplace as well? Why wouldn't that be true in the relationships that you have with your guests?

14:49Jason:Tom, I want to ask you about all the other things happening at Burger King, but one more question just on the listening and engaging with customers, which is building off of that you are taking some of those calls. And it reminds me, I had a conversation once with Ivan Zhao, the CEO and co-founder of Notion, the software company. And his phone was blowing up nonstop as we were talking. And I was like, what is that? And it was every single time a customer submits any kind of comment, like any kind of product question, anything, his phone gets pinged. And I was like, that is madness that you have that.

15:26Jason:And he said, he's like, it's just really valuable for me as the leader to be seeing the dialogue that's taking place. I can't look at all of it, but I want to be seeing it. I never want to be detached from it. So I have sort of a two-parter here, which is number one, what has it been like for you as the leader to be engaging at the customer level like this in such a concentrated way? And then two, what is the other system that's taken place? You've got 41 ,000, you said, customer calls that came in. So what system did you guys build to process that, to track it, to categorize it? What are you doing with all that data?

16:05We had this as a two-week process, and I think we're six weeks in, and I continue to take as many calls as I can a day. Some days it's 20 calls, some days it's 10, some days it's none, unfortunately. 20 calls is a lot.

16:21Jason:That's a lot of calls, Tom. That's a lot of time that you're spending on this. Well, half of them are people just wanting to tell you, hey, we really love what we experienced in eastern maryland yesterday or in paducah kentucky and let me tell you about what my mom said when i took her into the restaurant and how it reminded her of when she was a kid and once again those can be very short but incredibly uplifting i get to pass those back directly to the teams and say, you created a special day for this person. And it inspires them to perform even better. You know, a culture of praise will go a lot farther than a culture of criticism.

17:05And that culture of praise, we're just as dedicated to that as we are to passing on actionable feedback that restaurants can act on.

17:14Jason:That's a great point. And also, it's a rare opportunity for someone at your level to be hearing the praise. The complaints might get to your level if it's serious enough, if some bad thing happened at some location. But rarely is someone able to tell the president of a company, The Scale of Burger King, hey, I just had a really nice time at this random location in Maryland. And then for you to be able to reach out the team in Maryland, that is pretty unique. And it doesn't happen very, it doesn't happen unless you engage directly with your guests. But you also asked about the process because to your point with 41 ,000 incoming calls and more coming in every day, I would have, I guess since we're about a month and a half in, we're averaging about a thousand calls a day.

18:00We have to figure out how to have a human interaction with every one of those calls. So we have a team that we assembled several months ago that was prepared to take all of the incoming. We didn't know how much it would be at first. We didn't know if it would be five calls a day. And so we had some social media lined up just in case nobody called. It turned out within several days, we had more of a backlog that we could that we could manage. So we have people who will engage with every guest with a voice and with a human being behind it. if they have some really strong desire to talk directly to the president, they will put that in a queue for me to return their call.

18:47I will do as many calls as I can do a day. My leadership team now is also helping return some of those calls. So if there's a call, for example, on the digital experience, my chief digital officer will call that individual back. But everybody's getting a human interaction. and if they really want to speak to me, then I will get to them.

19:10Jason:You've denigrated spreadsheets a couple times in this conversation, but is there a spreadsheet that is tracking what people are saying or what trends are coming up? I imagine over 41 ,000 data points, there's some pretty unique things that you can learn from. Yeah, and I don't want to denigrate spreadsheets or AI because we are using them to analyze the 41 ,000 data points, to your point, that we have incoming. And we're learning things like people love our original chicken sandwich. People want us to improve our french fries. There is inconsistency in our hospitality from restaurant to restaurant that needs to be addressed.

19:54How do we do that so that we are consistently a friendly brand? We're learning data points about individual locations, and we're learning also insights about the brand that we can use for brand actions going forward and new products that we should launch or products that we should elevate or products that we should protect. So AI and the spreadsheets help us in all of that. But once again, what we have to prioritize is the human interaction and listening to people and the emotion in their voice and the things that they're passionate about directly if we're really going to understand our consumer.

20:38All right.

20:38Jason:So as I said, this is not the only thing you're doing at Burger King. and you laid out a situation where a number of years ago, the brand had felt stale, and you're not going to solve that just by giving out a phone number. So can you walk me through some of the other things you had diagnosed and then spent years resolving? Right. So as I mentioned to you, when I came here, I had left the brand because of a bad experience that I had had. And then as I watched the brand as a non-guest, I didn't see any changes in the restaurant. And so I was never inspired to go back to a Burger King for maybe 15 years prior to actually coming here to manage the brand.

21:23And I knew when I came here that the brand had gotten dated, that the customer experience was not at the level that it should be. and once again using the spreadsheets that you get in the analysis that you get when I arrived here I knew that that was far more true than I even gave it credit for when I came here so you know I had to create a burning platform with our board of directors with our franchisees and with our operators to say guys this has been headed in the wrong direction for a long time and if we don't do something dramatic to change the course of history, then we'll continue to decline.

22:08And what I was most inspired by was how the board came, stood up to the challenge and said, hey, we will invest first in the brand alongside the franchisees in both marketing and in the condition of the restaurants. As long as when the EBITDA, the profitability of the restaurant starts to improve, the franchisees are required to invest back in it as well. And so we put that one-two mechanism in place where RBI first invested, Burger King first invested in the brand. That investment begot an investment from the franchisees. And now we've created a virtuous cycle that interrupted the vicious cycle that was in place when this management team arrived.

23:00Hmm.