In the early days of the COVID lockdowns some restaurants and QSRs became makeshift grocery stores. They filled a gap for their customers when standard groceries ran low or just felt too dangerous to shoppers. But the self-descriptive brand Just Salad turned the idea into a new business to go alongside its 30+ store footprint in cities worldwide. This is but the first in a line of new business ideas CMO Andy Rooks and the management will be exploring in the next year. The impetus for all such innovation, Rooks says, is having genuine conversations with customers, not just harvesting …

It has been a wild ride this year for skincare maker Urban Skin Rx and its founder/CEO Rachel Roff. The company was launched around 2010 as an extension of her successful spa and laser treatment center in Charlotte, NC. It was driven by Roff's own passion for making skincare products more relevant to a wider range of melanin-rich skin. A decade into Urban Skin Rx, about half of sales are still D2C but its products are available at Target, Walmart, Ultra, CVS, and a number of other outlets. A surprise TikTok hit and the Covid-driven self-care impulse have helped sustain …

How many mattress brands can the world support? That is a perennial marketing question, usually aimed at the massive clutter of competing D2C brands across all categories. It seems to me the Purple mattress brand, however, always had going for it three important "P"s to differentiate it among the me-toos. They had Proprietary technology, a Puckish humor to their ubiquitous video advertising, and, of course, they were Purple. Even so, the brand still has to contend with rising customer acquisition costs, and a physical retail channel that has become constricted at best. But Omnichannel Marketing Director James Brohamer is cooking …

Every marketer wants to crack the code on younger demos and the ways that digital entitlement has shaped Millennials and Gens Y/Z. But not many CMOs with whom I have spoken plot it as out as specifically as Saladworks' Mark Mears. He has pored over the research, and folded in his experience leading the marketing for Cheesecake Factory, Noodles & Co. and Schlotzkey's to create a concise profile of digital natives that informs all of the fast casual restaurant brand's efforts. Mears is tweaking every touchpoint with these cohorts, even the terminology he deploys across the franchise. His "4Me Generation" …

While the COVID crisis ravaged the dining and restaurant sector, it was a very different story for many QSR brands within that segment.