Arby’s is on a roll! In the highly competitive Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) category, the company has outperformed its peer group for 14 straight quarters. The company attributes part of its success to “a marketing approach that continues to resonate.” The man behind its bold marketing moves is CMO Rob Lynch.
I recently talked with Lynch about the courage it takes to act boldly. “It really just boils down to getting excited about stepping outside of your comfort zone. Doing things that make you uncomfortable, but moving forward because you believe that they're the right things to do. And I believe that you're only able to do that when you're confident. When you're confident in your products, when you're confident in the team that is supporting you, and you're confident that you're prepared for whether or not that action you are taking makes you uncomfortable. You're prepared for whether or not it delivers on what you're hoping for or if it goes sideways and goes in the wrong direction,” shared Lynch.
Lynch gave up a great position at Taco Bell to join Arby’s leadership team almost three years ago when it was a brand in need of a turnaround. His reason? “I had an inherent belief in my ability to help turn this brand around, and a belief in the leadership here. Paul Brown, the CEO, had only come about three months before I joined the company. I fundamentally believed in his vision for where he wanted to take the business. And I believed in my ability to help him get there.”
It turned out to be a risk worth taking. Lynch said, “We've had a really good run. The last two and a half years have been unbelievable. It comes down to getting everyone on the same page, getting everyone to believe in what the real objectives are, what we're really trying to accomplish. And then building a strategy to get there and getting the right people in place. Building a team that you really care about and that really cares about you and the company. And giving them the tools and the support they need to do great things.”
Part of that support system is the backing to take risks said Lynch. “I was giving an interview about six months ago and someone asked me, ‘How are you guys beating the industry? It's not like you had a new patented technology that no one else has access to that's allowing you to do this.’ It made me laugh because in our business there's a lot of creativity, but very few patents. But it really is the fundamentals of leaderships and the fundamentals of brand marketing. There's not a lot of secret sauce here. It's knowing who your customer is, knowing what your brand stands for and how you uniquely meet that customer's unmet needs, and then figuring out how to connect with them in an engaging and relevant way. That's what every brand aspires to do and that's what we've focused on here. Our tactics may have been a little bit different, and they're different because we are OK taking risks that maybe our larger more entrenched competitors are not OK taking. But other than that it really boils down to just a belief in what you're doing, the willingness to put in the hard work and to take risks that others wouldn't. So I wish there was some kind of unbelievably game changing technology or process that we've built. It's really not the case. It is Marketing 101 executed with excellence and with a team that's passionate about what they do.”
One of the reasons Arby’s marketing resonates is because it is very focused. Lynch shared, “We weren't going to try to be everything to everyone, even though one of our key strategic platforms is a variety of proteins. We know that our food appeals to a certain group of people. It's kind of hardworking, Midwestern people, who put a value on sandwiches that not only taste good, but also satiate them and help them get them through their day. We were going to be the place where these people who really value big meaty sandwiches were going to love. So that's the target audience and what we're going to stand for.”
Arby's first vegetarian menu items introduced for Leap Day promotion. Photo courtesy of Arby's
The brand has been a bit bold in advocating for carnivores, sometimes in provocative ways. Lynch admitted the one program that gave him the most anxiety was when they launched the vegetarian hotline. “We did that knowing that vegetarians don't typically come to Arby's. And we also did that knowing that our heavy meat eating customers actually get tired of being told that they shouldn't be eating what they love to eat. So we created this hotline to reinforce that. To make a joke about how we know that you are going to love these big meaty sandwiches. They’re so good that even vegetarians are going to have a hard time making it through this promotion. It was a huge pickup in the media and we got a lot of letters from people that were not happy about us doing it. But you know what, those people were never coming to Arby's. It's hard to inspire anyone without pissing someone off. Because inspiration is a function of emotion and for you to strike a chord and create emotion in somebody, typically there's a flipside to that too. For us it's not about going out with the intent of upsetting somebody. We don't try to be hurtful, but we try to be true to who we are, and we try to be true to our customers.”
This year, Arby's introduced a Leap Day Vegetarian Menu which included items like the Angus Philly Sandwich (fire-roasted onions and peppers, melted Swiss cheese and mayo on a toasted Philly roll minus the mouthwatering USDA Choice top round Angus steak Arby's is known for). Lynch acknowledged lessons learned from the hotline experience helped shape the Leap Day promotion.
