The Secret Marketing Playbook Behind Burger King, Popeyes, & Tim Hortons

0:00Daniel Blumer:You know, coming in, I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the drivers of our industry and can I structure my team in line with the drivers to then have one person focus on one driver for both. I have to say that that thinking evolved. But the one thing that was true is we completely changed the organization in terms of positions and structure, even ways of working. But the one thing that was very true, though, is the people inside it, they were phenomenal. they knew we were going to go through a transformation they were part of it and they gave a ton of input i think the best ideas actually came from the team saying like look we can do this we can do it a lot better there's everything else that we want to stop to be able to go faster a lot of this was with reporting they're like look we're creating all these reports hundreds of thousands of slides that nobody will ever read instead of focusing a little bit more on what's really happening in the business and we just told them okay go do that uh stop the reporting and do that and there was a bit of fear at the beginning they're like wait we can just do it that easily and for them yes it's fine uh turns out that we've transformed those reports we don't go through them we didn't go through them in the past and now we have very much what's the situation and what are we going to do about it the management team receives on a daily basis almost.

1:22I'm Eric Fulweiler, and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.

1:33Daniel Blumer:Hey, everyone. My guest today is Daniel Bloomer. He is the CMO of AMIA for Restaurant Brands International, which is Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Hortons, Firehouse Subs, 7 ,000 restaurants in the region. So this was a great conversation. I've gotten to know Daniel a little bit over the last couple of months, and I was really excited for it. So I think the place that we start is probably what really affects the rest of the conversation, which is Daniel doesn't come from a marketing background. And you all will know from our future of the CMO research and all that, that his grounding in commercials, P &L management, business operations gives him such a strong foundation for how he approaches marketing and how he's been able to drive the results that he has for the business over the last two years.

2:23And some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were just when he stepped into the role two years ago, he was just like, why are we doing things this way? And a lot of the answers were because we've always done things this way. And so he talks about how he changed the approach to data, how he challenged the category incumbent playbook of how to launch new restaurants and flipped it on its head from focusing on the product first to focusing on the emotional connection and cultural relevance first and foremost. And we have a great conversation about the people side of it. He made a change, RBI made a change to go from kind of a one AOR model to a network of boutiques, now probably including Rival.

3:00and he talked about why that was, what's driven the success of that model, and how to go about finding great ideas and most importantly, great talent in the partners that you work with. So such a good episode. Know you're going to enjoy it. Without further ado, my conversation with Daniel Bloomer of RBI. All right, Daniel, how are you? How are things in Zurich?

3:20Daniel Blumer:I'm really good, Eric. Really, really good. How are you? I am good and hopefully seeing you in France next week for Cannes. I know you're only in and out for one day, but hopefully we can make that work. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation. You know, obviously we spent some time together when I was in Zurich for our roundtable. I know that we've started on a pretty exciting project with you guys. Hopefully that's going well from your side. But when we were talking in Zurich, you know, I think I got excited about having you on the podcast, of course, for the work that you're doing at RBI, but also just a little bit more about your background and how you got there.

3:54And having you at the roundtable to share it, I was like, yes, this is going to be a really interesting conversation for our audience. So before we get into all that, the icebreaker question that we ask every guest is, can you tell us about a Challenger brand that you are very passionate about right now and why?

4:10Daniel Blumer:Yeah, I have to be honest with you. I thought about this one pretty hard. I typically don't get too stuck in one brand, which is kind of interesting being in marketing. But what I find a lot more interesting nowadays with a few of the challenger brands that i started to think about was they were behaving a little bit more like cultural labs i would say than just companies and that started to be pretty interesting i mean there was examples like you know taking the most boring products in the world it's water and then suddenly you have liquid deaths and they worked really well in the years and a bit of a disaster in other places so yeah i would say more than specific brands i think is the attitude.

4:48And I'm sure that we will get into this, but knowing a bit about you and your approach, that's very much something that you've taken to stepping into the CMO role at RBI in EMEA.

5:00Daniel Blumer:Yeah, that's right. So it's something that, you know, I started thinking about it and probably looked through my own lens, but it is something that I think is really important for brands nowadays. I mean, we all know lives are pretty busy, so we have to show up in a credible and unique way to connect with guests. Awesome. All right. So I'm sure that we will come back and talk about that. And I really want to try to get into like the how, how, you know, if you have the insight of like brands need to be more like culture labs, how do you actually do that? But before we go there, you know, folks listening, maybe, maybe some, maybe even most have not heard of RBI Restaurant Brands International, but they've definitely heard of the brands within your portfolio and within your responsibility.

5:40So can you please give us an overview on the RBI business and house of brands that you're responsible for right now?

5:48Daniel Blumer:Yeah, of course. So RBI stands for Restaurant Brands International. So it's the brand owner of four pretty iconic brands. One that I'm sure most of people know, which is Burger King. Then we have Tim Hortons, Popeyes, and most recently Firehouse Subs as well. And our job is really as a franchise wars, we want to bring these brands all around the world. That's what we're focused on. love it um and i know when i visited the office i got to see the test kitchen unfortunately i didn't get to eat anything but i know that's one of the perks of the job in the role that you have um all right so let's get into it so it was interesting you know when we sat down and i was like here's the show here's what we talk about what's on your mind and actually the first place that you started when i asked about like what is the mind map for you as cmo was actually going back to when you stepped into this role and what you've done differently since.

6:44And like I kind of hinted at before, your background is not typical for a CMO, although you've been at RBI for 11 years. So I guess, why don't you give everybody kind of like a brief headline of the chapters of your career that led you to where you are? And, you know, of course, what you've done differently, but why was that the first reaction to my question of what's on your mind map, this, what you've actually changed since you've gotten there.

7:12Daniel Blumer:Yeah, so indeed, being in RBI for 11 years, and the last two was CMO, but I had never probably officially been in marketing, which is kind of odd when you think about it. I did a bit of everything, so franchising development, operations in that time. And the reason I started with what I've done differently is because I don't think you would put somebody who doesn't come from marketing to keep running things the same way. And I think stepping in, we found two things. Number one was we were gathering data from every restaurant. Like, think about it. We have more in the case of international, you know, over 7000 restaurants.

7:53Daniel Blumer:We're getting data from every transaction, all these guests every day. And we're still looking at it the same way we looked at it 10 years ago. uh so that seemed a little bit odd and the first thing we did was we said okay if we want to look at every restaurant every guest how can we process all that and we transform the business to go a little bit more specific a little bit more granular and and just don't tap a ton of growth uh and then the other thing was coming from one of the smaller brands right so i spent the majority of my time at burger king but then i i worked on the launch of popeyes in europe one of the things that we did there was understand the role of culture and the importance of kind of how we show up in in consumers lives we call them guests and so one of the ways that we started thinking was how can we bring a little bit of that into all of our brands because it seems to create very powerful connections i think i mentioned this to you but you know if the theory says you start very functional and then you go emotional we're actually starting to see a little bit more success when you actually double down on the emotional communication at the beginning to build that connection with guests today.

9:03So let's unpack both of those, what you changed in terms of how the business and the marketing team approaches data, and then also kind of how you challenged or even flipped the incumbent category conventional playbook for how you launch and scale restaurants and locations. So on the data side of it, one of the things I thought was interesting, obviously your business has tremendous scale across the region and across the world but you're focused on a mia 7 000 restaurants and i think a lot of businesses even if they aren't at that scale can probably relate to this you said that you realized that y 'all were too focused on the averages so what did you what did you see that led you to that um conclusion and then what did you replace it with what was kind of the new framework or the new philosophy about data Yeah.

9:51Daniel Blumer:That's a really good question. So I think when I said that we look at averages, if you assume that every restaurant in a country is average, you're leading a huge opportunity on the table, which is every restaurant is the one restaurant for a five minute universe of guests or consumers that visit that restaurant. And every single one of those restaurants is different. So if we're looking at only averages, you're going to leave the real insight, the real truth of what's going on on the table. it's easier because it's a lot of information, but then we started focusing a little bit more on what happens when we look at what are the things that are different and special?

10:28Daniel Blumer:And then from there, can we understand what drives differences in performance? I mean, I'm sure like in every business, we have some places that do really well. I'm certain that don't, even within the same restaurant. And we started unpacking, okay, what are the drivers for those things? And how can we make sure that we scale those learnings to all of our franchisee partners? Hey everyone, Just another quick interruption. If you're listening to this podcast and you're not already part of our AMP community on WhatsApp, would love for you to get involved. So AMP is a community that we started at the beginning of the business, really, just to kind of bring together some of the interesting people that we were talking to, the marketers that we were coming across, many of whom have been on this show as well.

11:09And so now AMP is about 300 senior marketers from around the world, from various categories, different stages, challengers, incumbents. And it's really a place where people can share questions, can share resources, can make new connections, can use folks as sounding boards. And for those that are in it, you know, it is a very vibrant community. It's really taken on a life of its own, which is amazing. So if you're listening to this and you want to get involved, please go to our website, wearrival.com. there you can find the application form or reach out to me or someone I rival directly thanks so much and when it comes to the functional emotional and how you kind of flip that on its head so if the incumbent playbook for launching a restaurant was to first focus on the product and then try to build emotional connection you and this goes of course back to what you said in the icebreaker thought first about the emotional connection and the cultural relevance finding a way to build that connection, drive trial word of mouth.

12:09And of course the product is there, but you kind of prioritize that. And I think it's interesting because that definitely supports, as you know, a lot of the research and the approach that we have about the importance of cultural relevance, which has always been there, but also how a brand needs to build cultural relevance has changed the whole microcultures kind of playbook that we have. So tactically, how do you actually go about trying to build emotional connection and cultural relevance when you launch a new location or even around existing locations?

12:41Daniel Blumer:Yeah. So I have a benefit over many people out there, which is that we already have pre-iconic brands at least in one place when we buy them, right? So if we think about our BI's model, we'll go on by what we believe is the best food in the category that we play in. So if you think about Burger King, we believe it's the best burgers. If you think about Popeye's, it's the best chickade. That existed. If you think about Tim's, hopefully Ben's Coffee, and then even think about Firehouse, the best subs. So every single one from a taste profile is a leader in its category. And that means that there's a very poor group of consumers that are huge fans of the brand.

13:17Daniel Blumer:So that iconicity and that cultural relevance already exists and these brands have been around for a really long time. My job then becomes a lot easier, which is I can either bring the food or I can bring everything that has been built around it and just let people try the food. And the first time we did this, bringing brands around the world, we kind of went the first way and we went kind of product first. We learned a lot. We need to have the right product and replicate the same experience. However, if you take something that nobody knows, even if it's really good and you put it in a new place, they don't know it.

13:53Daniel Blumer:And Popeyes was a big revealing moment where we understood that the brand was bigger than what we thought it was. and it was just a cultural icon we started realizing a lot of people talk about it organically so we said okay how do we build that and that became the brief so the baseline was we need to have the same food and the best food in our category the new thing was we know we have an icon we need to replicate what created the icon in the home market in the majority of cases the u.s that's interesting and how does that like tactically i would imagine that changed a lot of things but when it comes to kind of the strategy around communication activation in market did that change like how you wrote briefs what you were looking for in an agency partner um what are what are the differences in how you know Burger King or Popeyes or one of your brands shows up in the world with this change philosophy yeah it definitely changed a lot of things again and products still at the center, but on the brief side, we made a lot less emphasis on having to talk about the product.

15:01Daniel Blumer:We made that a given. And we emphasized a lot what made the brand itself special. That was the first aspect. Second aspect, I would say, was when we were thinking about agencies, we involved them now actually a little bit later. We realized we had to do a lot more of the hard thinking ourselves. and we started interacting a lot more with very senior executives in the restaurant industry and get their takes. Some more getting, I would call it, more consulting experiences rather than agency inputs early on and then going with richer briefs to the agencies. So a lot of this approach and how you've taken on and evolved the CMO role within RBI comes from your background and your perspective.

15:51Again, not coming from advertising, not even coming from marketing, but coming from kind of more of that GM background, which as you know, is of course, one of the key findings of what we think makes effective CMOs and certainly how the future of the role hopefully will evolve is that like marketing is a means to an end. It's about owning the commercial results. So I really liked kind of how you talked about the three pillars of your role, sales, budget, and market share. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? And also knowing for your business, it's not just brand to consumer or brand to guest.

16:26It's also, of course, the whole franchise model. So how does that play out in how you view your role relative to franchisees as well?

16:34Daniel Blumer:yeah it's interesting i have to say when we had the round table dinner it got me really thinking a part of the conversation was around b2b used to learn from b2c and we used to think we're in b2c we're actually in b2b to c so there's a bit of complexity there and we have to learn a lot of that uh and the reason i'm going to going after that is in my world uh we have to our client is our franchisee but our consumer is the guest it's a little bit different um and so for our clients to be successful i need to be delivering the growth targets that we've set so that's where the budget really comes in we need to be working on that because that's the minimum that's what our partners signed up for uh when they bought the franchise obviously growing sales is kind of baseline because it means that we're achieving growth uh and then the last piece is market share which is more, you know, we're here to build the most iconic restaurant brands in the world, the most loved.

17:30Daniel Blumer:That means it has to come with growth. It has to come with scale. And we know the power of scale. I think what's unique is what we've discovered is when one of those things fail, typically the CMO starts to get a lot of pressure at the time. But most importantly, it doesn't take so long for all the others to start to fall apart. So that's a little bit more the warning sign where the house is about to break. You better do something now or it will break. And then if it does break, there's no more podcasting for me. Hey, everyone. I wanted to quickly jump in and ask a question that I'm sure all of you have thought of.

18:09What is the future of the CMO role actually look like? Is it evolving? Is it going extinct like a lot of businesses seem to think it is? we have put out our very first documentary as rival titled the future of the CMO. You can check it out via the link in the show notes below. We have interviewed some of the biggest and brightest minds in the marketing industry to understand what the future of this role actually looks like. Would love for you to check it out. Would love to hear what you think. Link in the show notes below. Yeah, that'll be the first thing to go, isn't it? Yeah. I'd love to hear, you know, well, I've heard it before, but for our audience, I really like how you think about kind of balancing.

18:49You've got kind of like your three pillars of sales, budget, and market share. But then if you look at a different dimension, you have to deliver on both the short and the long term. So how do you think about that? Short and long term, both for the brand, but of course commercial results, and then long term building the brands and the future potential and future revenue for the business.

19:08Daniel Blumer:Yeah. So I think about it this way. RBI at the end of the day is looking to build the most iconic brands in those places. And we look for the best people that we believe can help us do that. Now, that means that we go through a lot of brand custodians, we're franchisees at the moment. But over time, we know a lot of them come and go and they come with an investment thesis and they'll leave with that as well. We know that RBI today owns their brand, but we haven't owned this brand forever. We want to own them forever going forward, but we haven't owned them forever. the one constant in consumers minds is it doesn't matter who owns these things it's still burry king it's still popeyes tim hornet's or firehouse subs so with that the role i try to take within the organization is how do we make sure always that we're thinking about the best brand in that specific country in the long term right so if i think about in the case of switzerland if i'm talking to the burry king switzerland team i'm thinking about the burry king brand in Switzerland, which should in turn yield good benefits for the franchisee, for RBI, and for the brand in long term.

20:16Daniel Blumer:So that's a little bit my role. Some people don't like it because many times things that can't deliver immediate short term, I'm the one person standing in between them and achieving that. But in the long term, it really proves to be the right thing to do. And we want to own this brand forever. I'm curious, I know this isn't a question in the brief, but with everything that we've talked about and really starting, the starting point of our conversation was how you took a different approach, changed the model in a way when you stepped into the role. The people side of it internally, did you have to make a lot of changes?

20:50And I don't necessarily mean like firing people or hiring people, although, you know, if that was part of what you needed to do, of course, that'd be relevant, but also just kind of changing mindset and processes. Cause I would imagine, I know RBI runs relatively lean, but still it's a big organization. How did you approach kind of driving through the cultural change and any changes to talent that were necessary to kind of adopt the model of what you wanted to roll out?

21:17Daniel Blumer:Yeah. You know, coming in, I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the drivers of our industry and can I structure my team in line with the drivers to then have one person focus on one driver for growth? I have to say that that thinking evolved. But the one thing that was true is we completely changed the organization in terms of positions and structure, even ways of working. But the one thing that was very true, though, is the people inside it, they were phenomenal. They knew we were going to go through a transformation. They were part of it, and they gave a ton of input. I think the best ideas actually came from the team saying, look, we can do this.

21:55Daniel Blumer:We can do it a lot better. There's everything else that we want to stop to be able to go faster. A lot of this was with reporting. They're like, look, we're creating all these massive reports, hundreds of thousands of slides that nobody will ever read instead of focusing a little bit more on what's really happening in the business. And we just told them, OK, do that. Stop the reporting and do that. And there was a bit of fear at the beginning. They're like, wait, we can just do it that easily. And I told them, yes, it's fine. Turns out that we've transformed those reports. We don't go through them.

22:30Daniel Blumer:We didn't go through them in the past. And now it's very much, what's the situation and what are we going to do about it? The management team receives on a daily basis almost. So that's been really cool, I would say. We came in with an idea, but the team had a better one, I would say. And they had the ideas, we just let them do it. I'm just reflecting as you're talking about how often the answers to various questions in various ways really come down to, I brought a fresh perspective, you know, and the whole reason this podcast is called Scratch is because, you know, of course, you talk about challenger marketing, but really, it's not just about the size of the stage of the business.

23:09It's about approaching marketing from scratch for the world of today and what's going to be most effective. And so often, you know, what we hear from, and I'm very conscious of survivorship bias, because of course, we're interviewing the success stories. But, you know, maybe there were some in other organizations who came in with a fresh perspective that was wrong but you do need that balance of understanding the realities of the business and kind of the load-bearing structures of what you need to do but then coming in with a fresh innovative way that usually ends up basically like you said with the thousand page deck or whatever cutting out anything that doesn't directly tie the value of the product or service to the needs that exist in the market um so i just wanted to draw that out and kind of underline it for people listening because it's something that we, you know, doing this is hard to believe that it's part of my job because I get to sit here and learn from folks like you, which is great on its own.

24:02But then the benefit of now having done 150 of these or whatever it is, just seeing the kind of red threads and the patterns is great, definitely a perk of the job. I'm glad to be here.

24:14Daniel Blumer:You know, there's one more thing I would highlight is the majority of fans for a really hard problem, your team usually knows the answer it's just a question of unless them and when i say the team is you know many times it's oh this product didn't work this is my reality and then a bunch of people in the office doing a bunch of analysis but then turns out you just get on a plane go to that restaurant you ask the crew member and they tell you like it didn't work operationally many times is as simple as that. They just go down to the closest person to the consumer, as close as you can get. I mean, if you can get to the consumer, it's even better.

24:53Daniel Blumer:Typically, that's where the answer is. It's just how much are you looking for it. That is definitely another one of the key patterns that I hear in these interviews is just some version of we spend more time with the customer. We listen directly to what they have to say. Again, we cut out the fat between what we're thinking about doing and what the customer actually says. he or she actually needs. So Daniel, coming into the third and final chapter of the conversation, obviously, you're not doing all of this yourself. You do have an agency partner network that you lean on. And of course, we first met to talk about doing some work together during, and I know it was a little bit later on, you'd already made the change.