Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,53
Arby’s official accounts post a lot about video games, the glory of meat, and anime.* In a nod to the sanctity of Harland Sanders’s eleven-ingredient original recipe, KFC’s Twitter follows exactly eleven accounts: six random guys named Herb and all five of the Spice Girls. (Six herbs, five spices.) Wendy’s, which has positioned itself as the better-knowing older sibling of fast food, can be both thoughtful and not above hurling stinging barbs at other brands.
Amid all this, Taco Bell is perfectly poised for the social media ecosystem. After all, it’s hard to be indifferent about a business with standard-issue sour-cream bazookas and meat and nacho-cheese rethermalizers in its kitchens. Whether these things inspire baseline revulsion or a deep and abiding emotional kinship, Taco Bell inflames strong passions. Or, as Miller put it, “You hear that it’s either your favorite fast-food place or it’s a diarrhea joke.” But this dynamic liberates the company from the lame and onerous chore of pandering and instead endows it with the power to make its followers feel at home in the ethos of Live Más. It also frees Taco Bell to be as ridiculous as it wants. “One of our brand-engagement strategies is to fuel the cult of the brand,” Matt Prince, a senior public relations manager, added. “When you look at our brand versus others, it truly has a cult phenomenon where you have a lot of passion, but it works both ways—you either love or you hate. But I think that’s a good thing.”
In 2016, a few weeks before I visited the shiny Taco Bell headquarters, a historic billion-dollar lottery drawing had more or less dominated public conversation. It made for exactly the kind of topic that brands would capitalize on. “We had a plan, we had a setup, we had a storyboard of what we were going to do,” Prince explained, “and then we kind of took a step back and thought, ‘No, it’s not authentic to our brand, it feels like we’re just trying to be a part of something that’s not authentic to Taco Bell,’ and so we let it slide. And then the next day, we saw Burger King, KFC, a handful of brands, do the same thing. Our mind-set is, ‘If you can take out our logo and put in another logo and it makes sense, the chances are we probably shouldn’t do it.’ We have a lot of flexibility in our brand, and not a lot of others do in this space, so we have to make sure we don’t take that for granted.”
When Taco Bell does choose to weigh in on a cultural moment (or tries to manufacture its own), it turns to Jozlynn Pfingst, who holds the futuristic title “social and digital experience specialist.” Pfingst has been credited with fashioning the voice of Taco Bell from the boring heap of wet clay that defined the early days of social media, back when each and every company transmission had to be run by the legal department. What she emphasizes about a brand voice is a basic relatability that resonates with the customers who live their lives on these digital platforms: “It’s done by a group of twentysomethings who really get the space. They’re millennials themselves, so they understand what’s funny, what people want to say, they really understand the customer, and they live and breathe the customer because they are the customer themselves.”
This principle may seem simple and obvious until you observe how many companies either fail spectacularly at seeming casual (“How do you do, fellow kids?”) or try to inhabit a voice of staid, aspirational distance. “When you look at companies like Lexus, and you look at their Instagram, their Instagram’s so polished. It’s so obvious it’s a professional photographer in a set, closed studio,” Pfingst went on. “Everything that we want to do, we want to make sure it felt like you could either have taken that Instagram photo or you could have responded back with that same response. We want everything to feel really authentic and real, and so we make sure that the lens we put on everything is just, ‘How would a friend respond? How would a friend take this photo?’” If the Taco Bell feeds are any indication, your friend dresses hip, laughs a lot, and is not afraid to post pictures of their nachos with some spilled cheese or a stray bit of tomato or two on the table.
It seems significant that, in a way that’s sometimes completely unrelated