El Pollo Loco’s Gabe Alonso on Building New QSR Brand Strategies to Engage with Younger Customers

On today’s episode of The QSR Experience Show, Bobby speaks with Gabe Alonso, VP - Digital Marketing at El Pollo Loco, a restaurant chain that specializes in Mexican-style grilled chicken. They discuss how Gabe landed at El Pollo Loco after an extensive career in marketing, the ways in which his team has been revamping the loyal program and app, and why it's important to treat digital products as "living and breathing" things. They also discuss how El Pollo Loco is making the customer experience consistent across digital and physical channels, how trends like AI and ML are helping improve customer messaging, and why you need to have people to scale technology.

Topics discussed:

• An overview of Gabe's extensive career that's brought him from MTV, to Nike, to Activision, to Pepsi, and to his current role as VP of Digital Marketing at El Pollo Loco.
• How Gabe has worked on relaunching El Pollo Loco's loyal program and app over the past year, and how they're focused on engaging younger consumers.
• Why a digital product should be treated as a "living and breathing" thing that needs to be developed and shaped through customer feedback and use.
• How El Pollo Loco is working to create consistent brand experiences across its channels, including the app, digital ordering, and physical locations.
• Top trends impacting QSR marketing today, including how brands are playing more into culture, working with influencers on content creation, and how AI and ML can help create better offers and messaging.
• Advice to QSR marketers that includes a reminder to understand your audience and why you need to invest in people in order to scale your technology. 

Guest Quotes: 

"I would say that we have a big opportunity for us to storytell our origin story, where we're from, who we are. I would argue that despite being around for 40 years, people still don't really know us. And I think we have a new generation in Latino Gen Z, multicultural Gen Z that we can really identify with and resonate with if we just start to tell our story a bit more." (21:17-21:42)

"When you unleash a program or a digital product, that you should treat it as a living, breathing thing. ... You have to continue to take in insights and testimonials from consumers and continue to feed that into your development process to make it better, more efficient, and easier for the consumer." (8:32)

"We leverage machine learning to create propensity models for purchase, product propensity. ... We're getting smarter and smarter, it feels like, every month with our partner and more efficient on our offer strategy and bringing back that ROI with driving discount efficiency." (15:01)

"Understand who your audience is. That's key because that then informs everything else that you're doing, whether it's the spend that you're putting into your local marketing opportunities, or the creators that you want to connect with." (17:48)

"Just having the platform isn't going to solve your problem. You need human resource, people resource to be able to connect dots, to be able to then create content or strategies off of those insights that can then impact your business." (18:59)