As economic uncertainty persists and undermines consumer confidence, major restaurant brands — including quick service, fast casual and beyond — have watched same-store sales growth flatten out or barely inch up. A notable exception is Chili’s.
The chain has posted two straight quarters of same-store sales growth of more than 31% — performance that outpaced the industry and was perhaps surprising, considering Chili’s neither launched new food or value options in the quarter. Executives continue to credit marketing with driving guests into its restaurants.
“Our world-class marketing team … continues to find new ways to insert the brand into pop culture and differentiate Chili's from its casual dining peers,” said Kevin Hochman, CEO and president of Chili’s parent company Brinker International, in a call around the chain’s earnings. “This is what we call building the brand over time and is a way to separate ourselves from the sea of casual dining competitors.”
The executive at the head of that marketing team — and one called out by name by Hochman on the earnings call — is George Felix, who joined the chain nearly three years ago after six years at KFC- and Pizza Hut-parent Yum Brands. During his tenure, Chili’s has returned to consumer conversations by serving up pop culture nostalgia, value offerings and combinations of the two.
“Now more than ever, as consumers are having to make more choices and trade-offs on where they spend their money, we want to be a brand that's both top of mind but also trusted to deliver great food, atmosphere and value,” Felix said.
Marketing Dive caught up with Felix to share the insights that drove recent campaigns, explain the chain’s media strategy and offer an update on its rewards program.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: According to Chili’s recent earnings call, the Fast Food Financing experience generated more impressions than last year’s Big Smasher launch. How do social and influencer elements amplify these experiences?
GEORGE FELIX: We've got a great social team that partnered with several influencers to make sure that they had a chance to get in the Fast Food Financing experience. So anytime we do something experiential like that, we want it to be the best possible experience for those that can have fun and go through it themselves, but we also want to make sure that we're creating enough content so that those that couldn't attend still get a feel for what that experience was all about.
We’ve previously talked about Chili’s use of nostalgia, which the chain continues to tap into. How do you approach campaigns that are rooted in nostalgia?
Each one's different. We've got several audiences that are Chili's fans that we want to be reaching in authentic ways. Scranton and our Radical ‘Rita are both probably leaning towards that millennial, nostalgic audience.
When we were building a new restaurant in Scranton, it provided a very unique opportunity for us to do something that we normally don't do with a new restaurant opening, which is make a big national marketing push behind it. That was certainly a nostalgia play, but the interesting part about that is, there's all of us that watched it when it was on, and now it's had this whole resurgence… that really expands generations. It started as a nostalgia play, but I think it also resonates with the younger audience in a fun way.
With the Radical ‘Rita and Tiffani Thiessen… we want to find fun, unexpected ways for us to to show up. Between the color-changing drink and our ‘90s swizzle sticks, who better than Tiffani, who's a ‘90s icon to bring that fun vibe of the ‘90s back.
They're not all skewed towards that nostalgic, millennial audience. We've done a lot of things on TikTok and with influencers that gears towards a younger audience. But everything we do, we want to be deliberate about how we're reaching that particular group and do it an authentic way.
The margarita is a pretty iconic menu item at Chili’s. How are you looking at it as a platform for marketing to different audiences?
Margaritas are a very important part of our business. We actually sell more margaritas than anyone in the United States. Margaritas are the No. 1 cocktail in the U.S., and tequila is the top trending spirit in the U.S. We feel like it's a great place for us, and we want to continue to reinforce our leadership in that space.
There have been a few opportunities this year to really highlight margaritas, [like] our NASCAR execution with Ride the ‘Dente and the music video. Speaking of experiential, we recently took our patented mechanical bull margarita shaker that's featured in the music video down to Talladega. It's fun to see the NASCAR audience really get to experience the true meaning of Ride the ‘Dente. We think that reaching the NASCAR audience with the country music approach seemed like a great fit.
We have another great agency we work with, Mischief, that came to us with an idea of how to stand out and make National Margarita Day a bigger deal, and our partners at Lifetime helped us make that mini movie, and hopefully that spurs more celebrations of a really important holiday on our calendar.
Obviously TikTok is in flux right now, but how are you looking, not just at TikTok, but Chili’s entire media mix?
We have three big areas that we're investing in. TV is always going to be a huge part of that, because it's a great mass reach vehicle to get our message out there and keep Chili's top of mind. We're going to continue to invest there in big moments on TV where we know the audiences are. Given the nature of TV, that's going to be a big chunk of our spend.
We also want to continue on our cadence of what we call “culture pops,” which are the things we've talked about here today: the ways that we can continue to insert Chili's into the cultural conversation.
The third piece of that is social. We've got an awesome social team that is always looking to organically jump into conversations that makes sense, but we also have strong influencer partnerships that have been really great for us across social platforms.
How is loyalty feeding back into your your marketing ecosystem these days?
My Chili's Rewards is still an important part of our business, but we are going through some revamps of the program. The biggest thing we're focused on right now is, how do we make that easy and take the friction out of the program? Frankly, a lot of loyalty programs, they're not as easy to redeem, they're not intuitive, and that impacts both our guests and our team members. Right now, it's just not easy enough, so our teams are working very closely with our partners at at Ziosk on how we can make that experience easier.
Then going forward, we want that program to be less about sending out a lot of discounts and coupons — which is what that program historically was, going years back — and to be more about hospitality. That's something that we really put an emphasis on… that shouldn't be any different for My Chili's.
