When Dawn Keller joined California Pizza Kitchen as Chief Marketing Officer earlier this year, the company lacked an agency support team capable of driving a major brand transformation and international growth.
So she built one.
With the help of a competitive review and pitch process, Keller assembled an integrated agency team anchored by Iris, its new agency of record for brand, creative and social work, and supported by a trio of partners to handle PR, performance and brand extensions.
“We didn’t have a brand and creative agency of record at all,” Keller said. “And CPK, as well known as it is and as long as it’s been around, has almost never had one of the stature, size and scope of work for which we’ve hired Iris. It was a pretty evident gap, particularly [in light of where] we are with the brand and our aspirations for the next several years.”
We spoke with the marketing chief about her global vision for the brand; building an integrated agency team from scratch; her digital transformation strategy; and lessons learned from previous stints at culturally-relevant brands.
Chief Marketer: What inspired embarking on this new phase for the brand?
Dawn Keller, Chief Marketing Officer at California Pizza Kitchen: I’ve been with CPK since late spring. I was pretty familiar with the brand already, having been a consumer of it for 30 years or so. But once I got in and start talking to people, see the work, see the metrics and look at it through a different lens, some things started to become apparent. One is that we have a really great brand that is well known and loved over many decades, in comparison to a lot of other brands in our space. But it’s not frequently thought of.
When we look at business performance, we knew that getting the brand back into people’s mindset was a big pathway to us driving the next phase of growth. And that’s great, because it’s not like we’ve got to fundamentally change the value proposition or the offering. It’s getting people to think about it and reminding them of all the reasons that they love it.
So with that, I knew that there was some work to do on the brand front, on the social front, on the earned media front—with both social and traditional. And there was some doubling down to do on some of the things that have made us so loved and popular and where we differentiate ourselves over the years, which is in the world of our menu and our creativity.
CM: How did you compile your new agency roster? And how do they correlate to the goals you have as the company’s new CMO?
DK: When I got here, we didn’t have the right slate of partners. First of all, we didn’t have a brand and creative agency of record at all. And CPK, as well known as it is and as long as it’s been around, has almost never had one of the stature, size and scope of work for which we’ve hired Iris. It was a pretty evident gap, particularly [in light of where] we are with the brand and our aspirations for the next several years.
There was a PR partner incumbent that was not aligned and did not have the right capabilities or expertise. From my last two brands, I learned to understand when you have a brand that’s bigger than its business, and one that people naturally will talk about. At Krispy Kreme donuts, my colleagues were masterful at understanding how to work with a PR partner to do more than you can with advertising alone. I knew that earned media—certainly in traditional media, but also social—was an under-optimized space for this brand. I had worked with ICR before as they were building out the Blue Engine team and identity, and I just knew they were the right team with the right focus on consumer media.
Our performance agency, Acadia, had been brought in about a year before my arrival. I had spent some time with them early on and concluded that they were a very strong agency. They’re amazing to work with, they fit well with us culturally, they have great broad-based capabilities, and I thought that they had never gotten the best shot at proving what they can do in the paid media space because the rest of the integrated agency team—and even my internal organization—was not ready. So we’ve kept them on in the new and improved roster.
We’ve added an ad hoc agency, Push, out of Orlando, who was a participant in the brand and creative RFP and showed up really strong. They didn’t win the big agreement, but we’ve kept them in for some ad hoc work on brand extensions where they have some great expertise in the restaurant space. So I was happy to find a role for them as well.
CM: How much of this required carving out the channels for those agencies to fill?
DK: When I came into the organization, CPK was using external agency partners to help, with minimal PR. And it was very traditional and B2B-focused. They were doing all creative and brand work internally with an extremely lean team. It’s almost mind boggling to me how much they were able to do with so few resources. Over the years, they had had some agencies come in on a project basis to help, but there were none actively working with the team when I got here. They had hired a media agency, like I mentioned, about a year prior to my arrival, and before that had been largely inactive in paid media. So there were a lot of gaps.
We’re paving a lot of new roads for this brand—which a lot of people find surprising, because people know the brand and it’s been around for a while. But we’re in a new era now. We have really big ambitions as we’re approaching 40 years and realize how much equity we still have with a broad base of consumer segments. We need a strong slate of partners against a strong strategy to take us there.
CM: Can you take us through your brand strategy? What are your goals?
DK: We’ve got big ambitions right now as an enterprise to drive the next chapter of growth globally for the next several years. The bigger story includes new lines of revenue, unit growth and domestic and international strategies, and all stemming from a recognition that we are a brand that has legacy and equity in several countries. And we are not just a casual dining U.S. restaurant company. Remember, we’re also a 25-year-old line of frozen pizzas across the U.S., and lots of people know the CPK brand that way. Solidifying our paradigm in that way has opened us up to a lot of strategies that we are now actively working towards to grow the enterprise.
In my world in particular, from a marketing standpoint, it is about rejuvenating the brand and doubling down on an equity that we’ve had for a long time. And that is having craveable, unique items on the menu that represent our culinary point of view: we bring new flavors to people—often globally-inspired, in creative combinations and in ways that are approachable… in a relaxed, casual dining environment that has a California mindset. It’s not fancy, but it is elevated.
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CM: How are you approaching the digital aspect of the transformation?
DK: It hits on a couple of areas. One is we are driving a lot of initiatives to support growth to better serve customers who want CPK outside of our restaurant. We call that “off-premise” in the industry. Whether that’s delivery or takeout or catering, all of those areas represent a sizable portion of the business. But we believe we’re under-optimized there and consumers are continuing to look for convenient, high-quality, affordable solutions in all of those different use cases when they’re not coming into the restaurant.
At my last two brands I had an opportunity to make pretty good advances in this area of strategy. Here at CPK, we’re going to take it to the next level. How are we using data—particularly the knowledge that we have about our guests—through vehicles like our loyalty program, website or mobile app? And using that data to not only better understand our customers, behaviors and their preferences, but then of course action those insights into marketing, communications and even customer experiences that are more relevant. From a business standpoint, that’s going to lead right to the outcomes or the behaviors that we want to see that help drive the business. But it starts with doing something that is more valuable to the guest.
CM: How do you plan to deliver these new experiences? An app? Email?
DK: It’s all of the above. For a lot of retail or restaurant businesses, email is the dominant, current one-to-one channel that we have to engage with our guests. And we know that email has a lot of limitations. With certain demographics it’s not the preferred channel of communication, but it is still currently the most dominant—and we can do a much better job. We’re moving away from one-size-fits-all to something that is more targeted.
However, this coming year we’ll be making a much bigger push into SMS, and certainly for some customer segments that is far preferred over email. The technology is such now that we can do so much great content that’s engaging and interactive on a phone outside of emails.
We are talking about the timeline to build a new native app for CPK. We actually just launched a new app about a week ago, and this is definitely a step up from the one we had previously, but it’s not the aspirational version yet. We’re now turning our attention to the next level of that app, focused on engagement and personalization.
CM: Do you have any lessons learned from previous roles in marketing that you’re applying to this one? From Krispy Kreme, for example?
DK: I mentioned this idea of craveability, and it’s one of our stated top marketing strategies for rejuvenating and growing the CPK business. Even though the way we’re going about it here at California Pizza Kitchen is different than what we did and what the Krispy Kreme brand continues to do, there are similarities. Menu items, particularly limited-time offerings that are culturally relevant, can fit with things that consumers are already interested in talking about. And you can develop them in a way that creates that emotional “gotta have,” that drive, that FOMO—and unlock that through your media partnerships, influencers and finding ways for things to go organic on social. That’s when you can really mobilize consumers around this idea and drive business results.
The other one I talk about often internally and externally is how important it is for marketers to understand the financials of the business, the way the business works and makes money, and how the ideas you have and the performance of your marketing programs directly impact the P&L. That is so important, not only to make great sound decisions for your business, because as marketers we are growth engines, but also to earn credibility and support from some of your internal partners—like your CFO.
Understand the data, understand the metrics, understand how to model out the assumptions and the impact of the things you want to do in marketing. And understand how to measure it, so that you can tell the story and make sound decisions. I think it’s something that has held back marketers in previous eras and probably even still today. You’ve got to speak the language of your board and the rest of your executive committee.
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