Once a brand smooths out those kinks, the marketing organization must pick up the mantle, Chatterjee said. It leaves Shake Shack’s marketers with an important job: Creating messaging that conveys the food is worth waiting for.
While other QSR restaurants, like Wendy’s, rely on boundary-pushing marketing and social media strategies to generate brand loyalty, Shake Shack’s taken a different tactic.
Just last year it named the creative agency Preacher its first lead creative agency and released its first brand campaign. Still, it eschews national advertising in favor of a paid digital advertising campaigns on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Consumers are unlikely to see Shake Shack commercials, splashy billboards or digital banner ads. The marketing strategy has so far complemented the brand’s caché and exclusivity.
Delivering a new experience
As the brand finalized the drive-thru strategy, there may be opportunities for it to add to, rather than detract from, the customer experience. Livingston and his team decided to start with the drive-thru design, incorporating canopies above the drive-thru that resemble the canopy above Shake Shack’s Madison Square Park kiosk.
“It’s got Edison lights underneath the canopy that mimic the streamlined experience that you would have at Madison Square Park, or a lot of our patios,” the CMO said. “That’s the first touchpoint you have in the drive-thru that tells you this feels a little bit different.”
The marketing team’s experimented with other strategies: For one, integrating the brand’s mobile app with the drive-thru experience, so that customers can order ahead via the app and collect their food without ever leaving their car. The team also found that highlighting certain menu items on a digital promotions board actually proved effective and led drive-thru customers to order more of the promoted items.
