Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,54

to food, Taco Bell generates loyalty by offering open seats in a cold and cliquish digital lunchroom. If you catch a Taco Bell fan in their virginal engagement with the company on social media, you might think Taco Bell were a celebrity inviting them to join it on vacation in St. Barts. “It’s really incredible,” said Pfingst. “People when they get a response from Taco Bell on Twitter or even if you like one of their Instagram photos, it’s fascinating to see what they’ll do. They’ll take screenshots of it and put it as their cover photo on Twitter or Facebook, and then they’ll update their bio and they will say, ‘Oh my God, Taco Bell commented back to me on 6/6/16.…’ So that’s a lot of how we tailor our social strategy—who we talk to and really being focused on millennials because they’re the ones who notice the most.”

The cult of the Taco Bell brand is a powerful force. Take it from Jake Booth, an army veteran and onetime sheriff’s deputy in Florida, whose first words to his family after miraculously waking from a forty-eight-day coma in 2016 were “I want Taco Bell.” After he got his strength back, his devouring of eight tacos was seen as a symbol of his unlikely recovery. “We’d all been waiting an entire month for him to eat those tacos,” his older brother told USA Today. “It was symbolic of the entire thing—more of a metaphor of him having woken up and being given a second chance at life.” Later, on a sad night in 2018, an electrical fire at a Taco Bell in Montgomery, Alabama, burned the store to the ground. In what was originally intended to be a joke to mock a distraught roommate, one local woman created a Facebook event for a candlelight vigil to honor their lost institution. Then over one hundred shell-shocked mourners actually showed up in the bitter winter cold for the memorial service.

“I have seen a lot of things on social for other brands, but I’ve never seen the level of the craziness that I think Taco Bell fans have, of the love they have for the brand,” Pfingst explained. “It’s insane. They have tattoos, they create swag, there are people on Etsy who created lines of Taco Bell clothing, Taco Bell crocheted tacos. They’re creating all this stuff out there and it’s just because they love the brand, and it’s just fascinating to see that level of love and craziness for a taco company. But it’s out there and I think it’s so unique, comparatively I mean, to anyone in our category. People out there don’t do things like that for McDonald’s.”

Of course, long before the emergence of viral social media stunts, fast-food brands still lived with a mischievous thirst for publicity. In a 1996 April Fools’ Day prank, Taco Bell set off a firestorm by announcing in a full-page ad in The New York Times that “in an effort to help the national debt” the company had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. Over a thousand media outlets picked up the story, and thousands of angry citizens called the Taco Bell headquarters as well as the National Park Service, which had been caught completely off guard by the ruse.* When asked about the story by reporters, White House spokesperson Mike McCurry quipped, “We will be doing a series of these. Ford Motor Company is joining today in an effort to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial.… It will be the Lincoln Mercury Memorial.” Two years later, Burger King used April Fools’ Day to introduce the Left-Handed Whopper in a full-page ad in USA Today. It featured a sketch of the redesigned burger, highlighting the “meticulous” placement of sesame seeds “to ensure the least amount of loss during consumption,” as well as a “rearranged orientation of condiments” to favor lefties. The joke is that the Whopper is a circle. But that didn’t stop thousands of people from showing up at their local BK to ask for the new version.

The arrival of social media and its permeation into every nook of waking life has turned the maintenance of brand relevance into an existential imperative. It’s also given the manufacture of internet virality a mystical importance. As a result, a brand’s cries for attention now tend to ring a little on the dystopian side. In the years since the introduction of the Double Down, the infamous KFC sandwich made of two fried chicken breasts,