Yum! Brands CMO on How Taco Bell Achieved Cultural Relevance Through a New Development Strategy

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

Photo credit: Taco Bell Facebook

The Taco Bell marketing campaign “Live Más” is well-known even outside of marketing circles. But it was created in 2012 at a time when the brand was no longer culturally relevant and needed a serious boost in sales. To pinpoint what went wrong, parent company Yum! Brands brought in a strategic consultancy to kick-start a turnaround led by a new development strategy called R.E.D.—short for relevance, ease and distinctiveness—which evaluated Taco Bell’s relevancy in the marketplace and how to set it apart from competitors, according to a piece in AdExchanger.

According to Yum! Brands CMO Ken Muench, relevance, ease and distinctiveness are the core elements of marketing—and to be a holistic marketer, you need to have all three. Some people are good at making something culturally relevant, he says, while others may be skilled at making a brand distinctive or creating a pricing structure. In order to ensure that employees have skills related to all three, the company has trained all 2,000 of its marketers around the world to focus on all three components.

For more on Yum! Brands’ R.E.D. structure, plus examples of other brands in the company that have employed the strategy successfully, read on in AdExchanger.

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