“We're a taco in a burger world”: Taco Bell
Defying conventions at every turn, inventor of not only the “Fourthmeal” but also free refills, Taco Bell has been challenging the status quo of the QSR category since its founding in 1962. We spoke with Ashley Prollamante, Senior Director, Brand Creative Strategy and Nicole Weltman, Head of Social at Taco Bell to find out how the brand consistently reinvents itself while staying true to its core.
How would you describe Taco Bell’s tone of voice? What makes you distinctive?
Ashley Prollamante: Our character is the life of the group chat. Everyone knows this person who is the glue and the spark plug of your best group chats. It is flexible because that person can be different to everyone. They can look different, have different interests and passions and hobbies and even personalities, but they have some core attributes that make them able to pull off that heavy lift of being that person. And our social team is now taking this character, this life of the group chat, and asking, ‘How does the life of the group chat manifest in social?’ Our digital team that's working on our app overhaul, is asking ‘What does this mean in the digital space, in the digital ordering interface?’ and ‘How does the life of the group chat manifest in that space?’ which probably looks a little different to each channel owner.
We have three very specific points of difference. One is Mexican-inspired and I don't think we're doing the best job at leaning into this aspect of our heritage as hard as we can. So, there's a lot of upside there. The second one is innovation and flat-out creativity. Activations like Live Más Live are where we really put that creativity on display. Then the third one is value: how can we be really innovative in the value space? An example is that Taco Bell invented free refills. And that defied convention at the time in the value space. And that is the ambition that we're constantly chasing as it relates to value.
Nicole Weltman: We’re different, but not alone. For quite some time, we had a list of what our tone was, and it was a lot of characteristics that are still true. There's an irreverence. There's a huge self-awareness, because if you're different, but not alone, you have to be self-aware, right? There's wit and being in on the joke. It’s not bullying, we're in on this joke together and we hold up this mirror to our community. So, all of that is true, but those characteristics are like planets revolving around the sun of: different, but not alone.
When you're in advertising, branding and social, there is this tension, especially on social, where we need to figure out how to take this format and make it uniquely ours. I am not saying look like everyone else, sound like everyone else. I'm saying use the format. So that is where a lot of our social strategy was birthed from – different, but not alone. A colleague of mine would talk about how the energy in the room shifts when you put a bag of Taco Bell on a table at a party, or when you tell someone you work at Taco Bell, and all of a sudden, they want to share their favorite menu item with you. It's like, ‘I am unique, because I like Taco Bell compared to the rest of QSR or the rest of America.’ Or when someone loves an obscure band, ‘I'm special because I like my obscure band, but I want to find my people and geek out with them about this obscure band.’ That’s different but not alone.
You have such an engaged audience, how do you decide where to show up for them?
Ashley Prollamante: We would never say we're culture followers, instead that we show up in places that our fans take us to and that our cult belongs to. There are choices that we make like we don't really belong here or there, but for others we're already here, so let's lean into that. We look to our mission and our muse and some of our principles like spotlighting the undiscovered, for example, which is when we think about our founder Glen Bell – he didn't invent tacos, but he democratized them and showed them off to a lot more people. That's more how we think of ourselves. We use our footprint as a mass brand to hold up people that are doing things that we think are interesting. At the most functional level, Taco Bells are sometimes where people try flavors, forms and peppers for the very first time, for example ‘Oh, I tried Sriracha for the first time at a Taco Bell.’ You can't underestimate our impact in that way, just based on our scale alone. But we didn't invent Sriracha. So, there is a bit of a hitching onto our fans that are going interesting places.
Nicole Weltman: So, we were having a lot of internal debate about, how do you chase a trend and use a trending sound on TikTok but still show up in a way that is reflective of the community and shows that we’re in on the joke. And there was this trending sound, probably nearly two years ago, but it was cheerleaders chanting, ‘Whatcha looking for?’, and someone on our content team used that sound to say the same five ingredients remixed, because, that’s us, right? And that was the first time that we really hit the bullseye of using this trending sound early, but it was so uniquely Taco Bell. Like, thanks sound for enhancing something that we have to say. It was not depleting or competing and so this was perfect. So, we can take these trending sounds, but not lose sight of who we are, what we have to say.
It should not be one person's decision what content we do. We have a group of people that I call ‘chronically online’, which is becoming table stakes for your social media team. To be chronically online is to understand what is rising to the top of the internet that day. It's a slice of the zeitgeist of what's happening today that is on everyone's radar. They live and breathe the internet. So, we will talk about where we are with the trend, but if I can't get a piece of content made by x time, we'll move on. If we can't figure it out, and if it feels like we're forcing it, or our content strategy doesn't make sense, the ideas aren't pouring out of us, then we will move on. We have filters and questions that we ask ourselves to help make that decision, but it is pretty much a decision by committee.
There are times where we've spent a lot of money on a celebrity and the content that we put on their channel is gangbusters for our brand. But on Taco Bell organic, we posted something featuring this same celebrity, and then a week later, we posted a very similar asset in length, copy, time of day, of our CMO, Taylor Montgomery, talking from Live Más Live about Cheez-Its inside a Crunchwrap, and it outperformed the celebrity by 2x. That's crazy. Why? Because it's us. Why are you following Taco Bell? To see stuff about Taco Bell. Sometimes it's that simple. It's the stuff that is so ‘us’ that is driving the news and the buzz. It's very basic, but you can get so distracted by everything that's going on, the echo chamber that is advertising, AI, do this, do that, work with celebrities, right? Sometimes you just need to be you. So, now, we use it as a reference point internally – should we post about this organically? Taylor Montgomery outperformed the celebrity. That's part of taking what the internet gives you: your audience is telling you what content they want to see.
What QSR category norms is Taco Bell trying to push back on? How does your slogan Live Más help you do that?
Ashley Prollamante: This is another weird paradox for the brand, because we are inherently a Challenger brand in that we are the other choice. We're a taco in a burger world. In the QSR category, we are smaller, especially when you start looking at it globally. But on the other hand, we like to say we're a category of one. We often see in focus groups where people are asked to clump similar brands together that Taco Bell was alone. It's on its own, because it is a bit of a snowflake.
We refer to most of our previous brand work as ‘Live Más 1.0’. Over the last decade, we were trying to cement ourselves as rebellious. We break convention, we do things differently. And that inherently was a bit of a positioning trap. To position yourselves like that, you have to have an enemy, versus when you lean more into just being unconventional. We do things our way, and we’re starting from a place of anything is possible. Live Más 2.0, where we are today, is a bit of a different look, and it doesn't require an enemy. Actually, maybe the enemy is just boring, but I think that's more of the season that we're moving into.
Live Más 1.0 was about establishing ourselves as more of a lifestyle brand and not just a cheap fast food brand. The era before that was about heavy value, heavy discounting, and it was what was happening in the category. However, it wasn’t inspiring for us as a brand to look at the category. Even though we made some incredible work in that in that era, launching breakfast, the Ronald McDonald campaign, when you still play that playbook, it keeps you in the category. And other brands started to use that same playbook. You started seeing snarky Wendy on Twitter, and all these different QSRs basically taking shots at each other. So, that playbook that was once disruptive, was now ubiquitous. It just became not distinctive anymore, and literally, our life blood is distinctiveness. How do we continue to be different?
How are you positioning yourself with Live Más 2.0? Where are you finding your inspiration?
Ashley Prollamante: The cultural rebel is our muse. It's a mindset that exists across lots of different demographics. It's generation agnostic. There's a little bit of art and science to how we think about it. The science that we're trying to be really anchored in is that in order to keep growing, we need to be more relevant to more people. It’s this paradox of be more broadly appealing and yet be super distinctive. It’s a really tough needle to thread, but that's where cultural rebel becomes important. Just because we need to sell chicken to a shitload of people, doesn't mean we can't do it in a way that is interesting and aspirational and has a point of view that's really pointed. We have a really broad, robust group of consumers that we need to win over, hundreds of millions of people, but we need to talk to them in a really specific way that makes them think that we're interesting.
Nicole Weltman: The memes that we create that are most successful are literally things that we see in our comment section all the time, and then we serve them back up in just a little bit of a creative, more curated way. But the heart of what we're saying is what people are saying to us. And that is a blessing. Not every brand gets a comment section so rich that it can lead to briefs for content, but every brand could come close or use the comments in their category as a brief. It's about taking what the internet gives you. And taking what the audience, the community gives you, is a principle that we've had that has been a huge, strong star for us.
Tell us about your audience. Who are they?
Ashley Prollamante: We're a youth brand and always have been. They define what culture is and what it looks like. If you want to be relevant in culture, you have to be in tune with whoever the youngest people are at the time. What I was more concerned about, that I could feel coming out of COVID as we started to get really slapped in the face by Gen Z, was that we had to make sure that they cared about us and every brand was playing with the exact same set of insights about them. That was terrifying to me, and that's what I started to see play out in the work, across not just our category, but honestly, every brand. So for us, it was really more, what about Gen Z is a unique point of difference that's relatable to only us, that we can leverage? And that's really where we started to think about: yes they're really diverse, but there's this really, uncanny blessing, honestly, that in this generation, you're starting to see this really complex intersection of identities in terms of ethnicities. My son is Filipino, Colombian and Italian, which is a perfect expression of what this generation looks like. And there is this tension of wanting to preserve some of that in them, but be this really modern, remixed version of that. What an incredible parallel to our brand, the fact that we have a Spanglish tagline. So, at one point we were like, ‘Should we let go of Live Más?’ But this was such an important moment in time to say, ‘No, actually, we need to really double down on that.’ Live Más is this fusion element of our brand and we decided to really lean into the Mexican-inspired strand of our DNA and figure out what to do with that, because it's really important.
Credit: © Taco Bell IP Holder, LLC/PRNewswire
A lot of your content is very much of the moment. How do you make sure you stay on top of everything?
Nicole Weltman: All of the trending content goes to our Taco Bell Newsroom. The Newsroom runs at a few different speeds, and we bring different people together based off what the speed is. So, if it’s the trending content and weekly brainstorms for content, then that is similar to a writer's room. It's the creative brainstorming about what are we making this week? What's trending this week? People bring forward what they're seeing from their unique corner of the internet, and we make a plan, and we go, and we execute. Then there is more of a long-term brainstorm, which may not happen every week, but it’s like instead of writing an episode, you're writing your season arc. If you want to take the writer's room analogy, it's the bigger white space, the things that we want to get after for some bigger ideas. And sometimes we bank them. And we have a bank of ideas, so that if sales are soft, or we haven't popped off in culture in a minute (and you can feel it in the building when we haven't been in the news in a minute), then we have ideas about what cool things that we want to do. And that is harder to continue to prioritise, because we're chasing the weekly stuff, so sometimes bringing in different minds and people helps. There's actually a really tactical version of the bank of content that is about sales-driving ideas. So like, if CRM is going to make this offer, this is what the content looks like. Our sales can be really cyclical, and we see them trend to either, when our menu is turned over or when we're in the news, and when our menu turns over, it generates news, so those things are related. So, that's why it's a newsroom, because it's meant to solve for when we might need bursts of news, at what level and with whom.
You’ve taken some big risks when it comes to your social strategy. Can you tell us about how you challenged the trademark on Taco Tuesday and how you mitigated those risks in your campaign ‘Freeing Taco Tuesday’?
Credit: © Taco Bell IP Holder, LLC/PRNewswire
Nicole Weltman: I felt like we were walking on a tightrope with the Taco Tuesday work. Our fear was comments like, ‘You are Goliath. You went after “David” Taco John's (who also was a Goliath, going after David's mom and pop shops), and you did it just so that you can advertise on Tuesday.’ But really, no one should have [a trademark on Taco Tuesday]. This is crazy for everyone, mom and pop, big, small, it doesn't matter, and if you know about trademark law, it is just a pure violation. If something is nomenclature, so if you look at the number of hashtag Taco Tuesdays garnered alone, there's no way this should be trademarked. But you have to really understand trademark law to understand what we were doing. So, we used trademark talking heads and law-fluencers to make it make sense on TikTok. They had to lead, and we took some of those videos and sent that to the press. So, it was very orchestrated. We are a courageous brand and we don't operate from a place of fear of getting cancelled. But if you don't think through all of the different scenarios, you're not being a good stakeholder. You're not being a good [brand] steward. What I mean is, who should lead? Who should authenticate? How should the information get to the consumer, so that they really understand and there's no room for misinterpretation?
There was a lot of time and care that went into the briefing. It was really intricate and full of law and our actual filing. We also had a piece of creative that was our filing, so people could green screen to explain it. We also had the trademark lawyer review the content, just for accuracy, because it is so nuanced. I feel like we spent months in a room figuring that out, and we cracked it, and then it was great.
How do you make decisions on what to focus on next for Taco Bell?
Nicole Weltman: We have this thing called Ring the Bell: it’s where our innovation, share and transaction growth are going to come from for the next few years. So, there's a very clear blueprint. We all know what percent we are trying to drive for sales growth to be successful this year and our CMO starts every all-hands meeting with ‘What's the magic number?’ We are all really rooted in business data and there's a very clear north star that everyone in the marketing team knows. And then there are the initiatives that sit underneath that, so we know we need to grow chicken. We know we need to grow value. Everyone in the building knows it. We start our yearly planning with our three big goals, which are rooted in consumer barriers and they’re in the voice of the consumer. So, one is that Taco Bell has lost its way on value. So, every value campaign has to come back and address that problem. We all know the three big things we're trying to unlock this year, and then from there you get a tonne of autonomy.
So, we have our three big things, one of which is value. Then we say, big picture, ‘What is the best way to win value? What is the best way to address this consumer barrier?’ Actually, value doesn't belong in the newsroom. We're not going to try to insert value into real time trending content. It's more at the brand level, so what's a great way to bring the value message to a really cynical and discerning Gen Z audience? Influencers. Value has much more of an influencer and paid media spend and is not in our organic strategy. We augment all of the things we're trying to get after, against all of the tools in our toolbox.