Last week we welcomed Yum! Brand’s former CEO, Greg Creed, and founding COO of Kitchen United, Meredith Sandland, to join Thanx CEO and founder, Zach Goldstein, at an intimate event in Dallas for restaurant industry executives. Creed and Sandland talked about their award-winning books, R.E.D. Marketing: The Three Ingredients of Leading Brands and Delivering the Digital Restaurant, and shared insights into the digital evolution of the restaurant industry.
The conversation focused on key issues facing restaurants including why marketing should be R.E.D. (relevant, easy, and distinctive), the role of 3PD in the digital world, and if NFTs are here to stay. In case you missed the event or the live stream, you can check it out here.
“Easy Beats Better.”
An old adage of Creed’s from his days at Yum! Brands, “easy beats better” has become his marketing mantra. Goldstein expanded on delivering ease to restaurant customers through digital touch points, saying that while many restaurants want to create a distinctive experience, focusing on ease of use for apps, online ordering channels, and digital interfaces may be a simpler and more cost-effective way to meet consumer demands.
Buy not build.
“The time we spent trying to build technology was time we weren’t spending on things we were actually good at.” During his tenure at Yum! Brands, the company made several investments in tech to make their existing brands more successful. Creed believes restaurants who aren’t experts in technology, should focus on what they can be exceptional at, which for Yum! Brands was getting food out the door that is hot, on time, and accurate.
Scale hospitality, digitally.
Sandland understands hospitality in a digital world from her time at the Google-backed ghost-kitchen, Kitchen United. “Technology makes it possible to touch every single person consistently, to remember what they ordered, to recommend the right thing, and to scale that hospitality in a way that you cannot do with humans,” said Sandland. However, she emphasized that the goal of technology doesn’t have to be eliminating human-centric touch points but rather scaling the experience.
