Modernizing Your Marketing Strategy With Andy Rebhun

A solid product can only get you so far when your marketing strategy is falling behind the times. In the digital age, understanding what your consumers need is vital. Andy Rebhun is the Chief Marketing Officer at El Pollo Loco. Before that, he played big roles with major companies such as Ford and McDonald’s. He even had a hand in the launch of McDelivery. In this episode, Andy chats with Evan Brandoff about where to focus when modernizing your marketing strategy. He gives valuable insight and practical tips on accelerating growth by valuing emotional connection. Plus, he shares tips for young professionals just getting into the industry. Stay tuned!

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Modernizing Your Marketing Strategy With Andy Rebhun

We have Andy Rebhun on the show, who is the Senior Vice President Digital and Marketing Officer for El Pollo Loco. Before making his mark in El Pollo Loco, he played a significant marketing role at both McDonald’s and the Ford Motor Company. It’s going to be a great episode. Let’s get into it.

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Andy, thank you so much for coming to the show. We’re so excited to have you.

I’m happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

After school, did you live in Detroit for a couple of years?

I did. I was lucky right out of college to get a job opportunity with Ford Motor Company. The year was 2008. It was probably one of the most challenging years for the economy. Gas prices at the time were at $4, which is now normality across the United States. I decided to roll the dice, moved to Detroit, and was happy to be a resident there for about three and a half years.

Ford was hiring in 2008?

They were, believe it or not. I got in about four days before they had a hiring freeze. I started on June 2nd and they had a hiring freeze on June 5th. It was pretty wild. I got in right before they stopped hiring and it was a great experience and opportunity.

I’m sure you learned a ton from the work that you were doing, but it must’ve also been an incredible learning experience to see what was going on with the auto industry in 2008. What was that experience like?

It gave me an opportunity to step up and lead a lot differently than I probably would’ve normally had the opportunity to do. The company was going through a major restructuring. There was a fairly new leader at the time who is now considered to be one of the greatest CEOs of all time, Alan Mulally. He brought this idea and thinking to the company of One Ford, one team, one plan, one goal.

It had this whole notion of everybody rowing in the same direction, believing in the plan and not having the suppliers fight the company and the company fight the dealers. It was one of those keystone moments that changed the trajectory of the company. It was an unbelievable company to work for, unbelievable dealers and probably some of my fondest memories from my professional career at Ford.

Did you end up taking that job out of school? Was it a role in marketing or because of Ford itself?

I was walking around a career fair at the University of Wisconsin in our basketball arena. It was so funny because I didn’t have Ford on my radar that day. I ended up meeting a recruiter for Ford. I think sometimes recruiters are good salespeople. When she said, “Would you ever consider working for Ford Motor Company?” In the back of my mind, I was like, “There’s absolutely no way that I’m going to move to Detroit.” Things led to things and the opportunity seemed so fascinating.

The cool thing with digital is you have the opportunity to target a lot more precisely.

Being 21 at the time, you can have that opportunity to roll the dice a little bit. For me, it was one of those things where I was like, “If this doesn’t work, you’re going to be able to pivot quickly and get a new opportunity. You’re young. If this works, this could be one of the most amazing experiences of your life.” I was hoping the latter would be the case and it was.

Did you spend any time in downtown Detroit while you were there?

I did. I still have probably about 4 or 5 jerseys from the Red Wings. My friends were huge Red Wings fans. I came from LA Kings and converted to a Detroit Red Wings fan. There’s a reason why it’s called Hockey Town USA. Those fans are so passionate. The games are so fun. It’s great to be Downtown because I think everything is close to one another. You have Comerica and Ford Field. It’s a great downtown area. I love spending time there.

I lived in Downtown Detroit from 2013 through 2015. There is something so special. To your point, everything is so close to each other. It’s a cool city and something special about being in Detroit as it’s rebuilding. Typically, out of school, you move to a city and care about your professional growth, close network of friends. It’s something about being in a city where it’s a Renaissance, that culture is so special. I’m sure you got the feeling that firsthand as Detroit started its rebuilding process.

It was great to see that city come to life. Given the auto industry in 2008, it was one of those low periods, but very quickly as the US auto industry rebounded, you saw the city come more to life and a lot of building downtown. One of the things that’s always funny about Detroit and I don’t think people realize, is you can pretty much throw a rock and hit Canada, which is right across the river. Obviously, I had an opportunity to go to Canada too, which is super cool.

I think it’s the only place in the country. Maybe there’s one other place where you have to go South in order to get to Canada.

I did the Detroit International Half Marathon. You run over the border over the Ambassador Bridge, which is super cool. It’s a fun race to do if you haven’t done it.

You spent a couple of years in Detroit working at Ford Motor Company. What came next after Ford for you?

I was in Detroit for technically about a year and a half and moved to Kansas City with Ford and back to Detroit. It’s a total of three and a half years in Detroit and a year and a half in Kansas City. I had a mentor who worked for McDonald’s. I met him very early on in my Ford career at an experiential event in New Orleans, Louisiana. We stayed in touch and about five years into Ford, he said, “Would you ever consider working for McDonald’s?”

Being a marketer and knowing the incredible prowess that McDonald’s has in terms of the history of the brand, I jumped at the opportunity and thought that it was an incredible brand to be a part of. In 2013, I moved from Detroit to Boston, essentially from Mustangs to McNuggets and started my career at McDonald’s.

If my research serves right, you were behind spearheading the Uber Eats McDelivery, is that right?

Yeah. I was definitely part of the team that helped launch McDelivery. One of the early markets is Atlanta and Florida. That was one of the first markets that came to launch. We had a team at national that was dedicated to doing the majority of the launch, but from a local perspective, we were one of the first markets to go out with it. It was an incredible opportunity to see it come to life on the ground.

I was living in Chicago in about 2014, 2015 and that was when Uber Eats was starting to get into the delivery game. They had this different business model but then seeing your restaurant brand own it on the platform and do an incredible job growing off-premise sales, was such a cool opportunity to be a part of. Especially in Atlanta, the market was extremely receptive to the new idea. We had great press, great coverage from it. It was fun to be able to deliver Big Mac and French fries all over the city.

Was McDonald’s the first major brand to partner with a food delivery service?

McDonald’s was one of the first to partner with Uber Eats. One of the other early adopters was Starbucks. We were lucky to get a foot in the door early and quickly. The brand had an incredible partnership with them at the time. It was a fun experience to see the business grow.

Internally at McDonald’s, what were that year’s initiatives? What was the problem that you were looking to solve that ended up pursuing a partnership with Uber Eats?

The biggest piece is consumers are changing the way that they like to experience the brand. In an era where digital is growing so rapidly, you had a lot of the younger generation of consumers that were wanting the ability to have delivery of their favorite restaurant chain to their front door. Delivery was slowly picking up in terms of the market share that it was gathering. For us to continue to be competitive and be that market leader, it was the decision that was made to try to expand our reach, extend and allow the opportunity for consumers through the use of their phone to get McDonald’s delivered to their doorstep.

Thank you for doing that for us.

Yeah, no problem.

I’m sure that there is an in-depth SWOT analysis that went into whether you should pursue this partnership or not. What were the key threats? What would have been the reasons that this partnership wouldn’t have been good for McDonald’s?

I don’t think there are ever threats. I think McDonald’s is seen as the pioneer and leader. If there is something that they see as an obstacle, the franchisees and employees figure out a way to figure it out. That’s what innovation and leadership look like. The great thing about McDonald’s that they do so well is you take bits and pieces of what would be the United States and you test. Every large restaurant brand in the world tries to get a lot of data prior to rolling out a major initiative.

They test and try to see what’s working? What’s not working? Where can we get better? What are efficiencies that we can realize? We did that in this circumstance and realized some of the kinks, initially, and were able to adapt and be that lead and have a lot of other restaurant chains look at us and say, “McDonald’s did a good job with this.”

You mentioned franchisees, with an initiative like this, do you need to get the buy-in from all the franchisees? How does that process work?

I think it depends on what restaurant brand you’re a part of in terms of how that works. The franchisees are a huge piece of how McDonald’s goes to market, so their support with that initiative was huge. When you look at the way that different restaurant brands are in terms of geographic density, certainly in big cities, there’s always a huge opportunity for delivery. I think a lot of people at the time were working in offices, there’s not necessarily coverage of McDonald’s or Starbucks or whatever other restaurant chain.

One of the things a lot of marketers are trying to figure out is how you function in a cookie-plus world.

People sometimes can’t step away from work so there’s that huge opportunity to have that food delivered to the front office or whatever part of the city that you might be in at the time. We saw that as a huge opportunity. Especially like city centers and hubs, I know you’re in Philadelphia, but like Boston, Philly, New York, it’s a huge opportunity to have somebody on the ground there delivering the product.

What I find so interesting about massive partnerships, initiatives like Uber Eats and McDelivery is there are such clear benefits to both sides of the puzzle. It must have been great for user acquisition for Uber Eats. The ability for consumers to get McDonald’s easily at home is a huge win. For a couple of years, you couldn’t go outside, at least, in Philly, without seeing a billboard or something marketing that partnership and the fact that you could get McDelivery on Uber Eats. Something that I always wonder is, those marketing campaigns, who is that driven by? Is that driven by Uber Eats and they’re getting buy-in from McDonald’s to feature McDonald’s on billboards or the other way around, where it’s driven by McDonald’s and featuring the opportunity to get on Uber Eats?

It depends on the nature of the partnership and the promotion. There are times when it’s led by the delivery provider or the restaurant chain. That’s something that is preestablished sometimes in a contract or if there’s a big idea and either Uber Eats or McDonald’s wants to do something, one of the sides approaches one another with what that big idea is.

Fast-forward, you’re now with El Pollo Loco. First, can you tell us a little bit more about El Pollo Loco?

El Pollo Loco is a regional chicken brand. We are a fast-casual fire-grilled chicken concept. We’re known for our fire-grilled chicken, the long cooking process that we have for our chicken, which is slowly marinated. It tastes incredible. I eat it pretty much almost every single day. We’re in six states, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas and Louisiana. We’ve made some announcements that we are going to be expanding geographically East, not quite to Philadelphia yet, but we are going to be going to Denver. We’ve announced plans in Oklahoma and Kansas.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

What’s your go-to on the menu?

I usually like the double chicken tostada salad, but because it’s the holiday times, we have this good Pozole Verde, which is a Mexican chicken soup. It’s absolutely delicious. I usually get a tamale or two to accompany it. We have these good chicken tamales on the menu. One of the cool things about our concept is we pretty much have a menu that’s very consistent throughout the year. As with most restaurant chains, we’ll have an LTO here or there. I’m loving the LTO now.

I still haven’t gotten my hands on El Pollo Loco. I need to change that very soon.

We’ll see if we can arrange that if you’re in one of our markets.

How many store locations are there now?

We have about 500, 480 to be exact. We’re growing and opening up a couple of new stores. It’s our plan to continue to expand.

Is that expansion fueled by more corporate store openings or franchising El Pollo Loco?

It’s primarily through franchising. I think our growth strategy is primarily asset-light. We’re looking to grow via franchisees.

I love that your LinkedIn mentions that your job was to modernize marketing in El Pollo Loco. Along with many other things, you wear a lot of different hats and have achieved so much, but what does that mean to modernize marketing?

When Bernard Acoca, who’s our former CEO, shared with me the opportunity to come in and lead the digital organization, there was definitely a perception that El Pollo Loco was not seen as a digital leader in the space. We didn’t have a very high digital media spend. Our loyalty program was not very tied together very well. We didn’t have segmentation and looked at data and analytics. I think if you’re going to be a modern and progressive restaurant company, you have to have a digital superpower to continue to grow, fuel what the brand needs to be modern and be seen as a consumer savvy brand.

Bernard and I had a conversation about what exactly the brand wants to be? What does it want to stand for? The opportunity was to relaunch our loyalty program. It was to shift some of our media spend into digital significantly and to overhaul or social media creative or email creative and build our off-premise delivery channels. You probably saw some headlines that we were the first restaurant chain to launch drone delivery. We did that as well, which was a good opportunity with our partners at Flytrex. I think that was initially the intent of how you modernize your restaurant brand.

How is the drone delivery going?

It’s good. It’s funny. People are always wondering, “Can I get it now?” What I say to them is, “We’re still doing it by invite only.” There are still obviously some major restrictions with the FAA and hurdles that Flytrex is working to overcome. Some of our most valued loyalty members have been able to experience it. It’s fun when you get to see it in action because usually, it stops traffic and people stare up at the sky like it’s a UFO or something.

There’s this branding of Air Loco on the side of the drone, which people put two and two together that it’s El Pollo Loco, but it’s cool. I think the biggest piece is it’s fast, efficient, and more cost-effective for the consumer and us. It was an opportunity to lead the space and be the first to market. We’re super proud of it.

You join El Pollo Loco. They have a delicious product, but not as modern as they could be in terms of their digital marketing strategy. I’m sure you had a future state of where you want it to be in terms of their digital strategy, but the hardest part is knowing where to start. Where did you start? How did you know where to go first?

I think the biggest piece is when you’re brought in and the organization is looking to accelerate growth, you have to see where the biggest opportunity lies in terms of how can I turn a profit? How can I build an emotional connection with the brand and the consumer? I think the first thing was our loyalty program. The loyalty program is essentially our most valued consumer with the brand. The first thing I did was I called our top 50 customers and I said, “What’s working? What’s not working? Tell me what you like about other loyalty programs that you use.”

If you are younger in your career, younger in life, you have the ability to fail more often and use that as a learning opportunity.

That was a means for me to understand and listen to the consumer. In modern marketing and career-building, you have a 30, 60, 90-day plan. Part of my 30, 60, 90-day plan was to sit down and listen to our consumers. I think that there were a lot of things that I learned at McDonald’s, but El Pollo Loco is a different brand. You have to understand the target consumer and who you’re trying to go after. The loyalty program was my biggest goal. That was where I started and a lot of that was because it was, still is and is a huge revenue driver for the corporation.

Going back to McDonald’s for one second, it’s relevant to both El Pollo Loco and McDonald’s. How similar are consumer habits in different parts of the country? Meaning are the most popular menu items at McDonald’s in California, the same as the most popular menu items in Texas?

No, there’s definitely some menu differentiation. There are menus that are higher beef markets. There are some items in some parts of the country that skew chicken. Obviously, weather patterns change. There’s some seasonality to coffee drinking and frozen beverages if you have that on your menu. It ebbs and flows, but there are some markets and certain proteins over-index and healthy versus fried. You do a lot of consumer research to try to understand where that is and look at sales patterns, you make a recommendation and decide whether or not you put your hat into the rank with a certain product.

Going off of that, does your digital marketing strategy differ in all different parts of the country or the world as a global brand?

The cool thing about digital is you have the opportunity to target a lot more precisely. There’s obviously the ability to identify unique customer segments the building of habits online as consumers go through different types of apps and they click on different websites with cookies. It gives you the power to do a lot of different things. One of the things that a lot of marketers are trying to figure out is how you function in a cookie-less world, which I know every brand marketer in the world is trying to solve at the moment.

For now, the biggest piece is we work with an incredible media agency initiative that helps us lead the charge in terms of understanding where we should place our digital bets and how we do a better job of segmentation and personalization. We try to reduce our cost per customer acquisition costs to benefit our brand overall.

Jumping back to El Pollo Loco, you saw the main opportunity at first as a loyalty program. What did that loyalty program look like for El Pollo Loco?

I think the biggest piece was the way we were communicating with the customer. Let’s say, Evan’s a guy who comes into El Pollo Loco and typically orders a chicken burrito. He comes there for lunch and dinner. He is a chicken burrito customer. Unfortunately, the way that the company used to function was we would send Evan everything.

It didn’t matter if Evan was a single guy ordering his chicken burrito or a married guy with a family. We didn’t do a good job of understanding how Evan wanted to interact with the brand. Evan would receive family meal offers for tortilla soup and desserts. The beauty of a loyalty program is you have the data of what Evan typically buys from El Pollo Loco.

We were sending every email to every individual and offering a lot of discounts to Evan even though he didn’t need to be discounted. When you look at the data and get a better understanding of who your customer is or want the customer to become, this was a huge opportunity for us to do a much better job of personalizing the communication with Evan and other like customers and trying to differentiate the way that we wanted Evans to interact with the brand.

You’re probably like, “What does success look like?” For us, success was Evan was opening up more emails. Evan was visiting the brand more frequently. We could attract Evan during different dayparts. There is a number of different characteristics that you can do to try to increase that frequency and average check. We put in a lot of measures that allowed us to accomplish that.

The goal of a loyalty program, saying it back to you, is ultimately to drive more traffic, get Evan to come to the store more. The way to do that is to more effectively collect first-party data or sentiment data about what that person likes or cares about in order to message to them more effectively what’s going to drive them to the store?

I think the other big piece, which sometimes gets lost because as a company that has shareholders, you obviously want to increase shareholder value and make sure that you’re continuing to drive sales and revenue. The other piece with the loyalty program is you want to try to build an emotional connection with the brand. We have a gold chip and guac pass.

We, in August of 2021, to some of our top loyalty consumers, sent them what’s the equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. We sent them a gold card that essentially allowed them to get free chips and guac for a month from us as a result of their loyalty to the brand and their business. We tried to do different things to try to make sure they know we like them, care about them and appreciate them for their regular patronage.

There’s a stat that I find interesting that over 60% of consumers prioritize buying from brands that support initiatives that they care about. Outside of delivering the right messaging about the right product to the right people, how much do you think about what you’re doing outside of the restaurant when it comes to building loyalty amongst your customer base?

We definitely want to make sure that we are felt and have a presence in our local communities. There’s been a number of initiatives over the last few years that we’ve done to try to make sure that the consumers in the markets that we do business know that we support and fund initiatives that are very community-driven and are behind the communities that we operate in. It’s very important to us as a brand to make sure that we know that we’re present in the markets that we operate in.

There are a number of examples from the last couple of years where everything from We Are Latina to fund Hispanic businesses that were disproportionately impacted by the COVID pandemic to doing different types of scholarships for moms who wanted to accelerate their careers essentially. We call them Madre ships, who wanted to make sure that we appreciated moms, families, etc. There are a number of different initiatives that we’ve funded and believe in that are true and core to our brand and our heritage that I have been very successful over the last few years.

We did the final canvassing of a new initiative we launched which is a website called LocoGiftsAndGear.com. It’s an opportunity for us to represent our proud Latin heritage and connection to LA. One of the things that we’ve done in terms of our positioning has been to call it our food and the culture of LA Mex. We’ve partnered with these awesome creators on three different capsules of merchandise, whether it’d be a hat, a t-shirt, a skateboard or a surfboard. We have a $7,000 bike on the website created by a guy in Compton, Manny Silva.

It’s a cool site and gear. It’s something that’s very true to us. We’re proud of it. We were going through the final revisions of the website last night. It’s the first time we’ve delved into this space. It’s something that a lot of QSR brands are doing at the moment, but we wanted to do something truly unique to us and in a way that people would expect only El Pollo Loco to do it.

How did you all come to the decision to open a merch store?

You’ve seen a lot of successful collaborations in this space. When you’re trying to extend the reach of a brand and think about ways that you can continue to have an emotional connection with your consumers, not only in the markets that you do business but in future markets, these collaborators and artists have a big following outside of probably what’s traditionally El Pollo Loco. We wanted to partner with people who were unique, true to us, and allow us to extend the brand in a unique, fun, interesting cultural capacity.

This was a way to do it. We had a number of agency partners who worked on this, like VITRO, Primary Color, Initiative, our media agency, and Edible, our PR agency. There are a lot of different players who were involved with this and a lot of people on the corporate side who spent a good amount of time on it. We’re proud of the way it came together and hopefully, we’ll sell a few things.

My wife is in need of a new bike. I’m going to check out that. It’s probably out of my budget, but it sounds awesome. I can’t wait to check that out. The last topic I want to touch upon. You had mentioned before the episode that if you could teach a college course, the topic would be how to differentiate yourself and make friends in Corporate America, which I love. There need to be more tactical courses like this and personal finances and so much more, in my opinion. Why is this topic important to you?

As you move forward and accelerate your career further, the biggest thing you learn is to stay true to yourself and your values.

Especially now that we’re still in a remote state, people are lots of times very focused on business and work. There are a lot of times where you’re in a corporate situation where you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to create that rich, personal connection that I think is needed. Lots of times, the agency-client relationship is very agency-client-like. I have a role with my agencies. They cannot use the client word. It’s a partner or collaborator.

A client is way too hierarchical for me. I like everybody who is part of a team. I got to see this early on at Ford with Alan and his leadership and that organizational culture that you want all the oars to row in the same direction. I feel like relationships are a huge part of getting things done in Corporate America. If you’re looking for something while you’re at that company before, during or after, you never want to burn a bridge. You always want to keep the door open.

For me, it’s so important to maintain relationships differentiate yourself by picking up the phone, calling people and asking how they’re doing. When you’re asking them how they’re doing, you ask them, “How are you really doing?” By adding that word “really” and emphasizing “really” you’re going to get a different response. I learned that in grad school at Kellogg. I can’t take credit for that, but that was something that I heard, use and continue to use because I think it gets people to smile and perk up.

If you could go back and give college Andy some advice about how to level up at differentiating yourself and making friends in Corporate America, what can they be doing in college or as a graduate to level up in this capacity?

From a college standpoint is I would say, be involved and continue to be involved. Do clubs sports, organizations, be involved on campus because the more you can learn, the more employment you can have prior to taking that big or small first corporate job. You’re going to set yourself up for success. One of the things that I know is very intimidating as a college student or as a grad is you fear failure, but as you are younger in your career and life, you have the ability to fail more often and use that as a learning opportunity. I believe if you fail early and you fail often, it’s going to accelerate your growth in the future. When we, as an organization, make mistakes or my team makes mistakes, we like to think of some of these things as Little Bets.

It’s a great book. I read it during the pandemic. When you make little bets, you look at companies like Amazon, Netflix and Google. What they do is take what is probably a significant amount of money for them. For other companies, they can scale and it can be smaller. You take a little bet and try to see how it works. If it works great, you iterate and pour more money into it. If it fails, it fails. You fail quickly and you learn from it. It’s one of my big philosophies.

Have you read the book about building your flywheel?

I have.

It’s shooting those bullets to see what the next flywheel is.

It’s a great philosophy, for sure.

Are there any failures that are top of mind that were most impactful to the forming who you are now?

Not necessarily a failure, but as you move forward and accelerate your career further, probably the biggest thing that you learn is you want to stay true to yourself and your values. One of the things that you’ve probably gathered as you’ve read this is that I’ve moved around a lot. What’s crazy is I already have Marriott titanium status for life at my age, which is a little bit scary. The values in terms of what is important to you evolve and they change a little bit.

As you get older, you definitely want to be closer to family. You want to be able to allow them to be a part of your life. Sometimes you get very mired depending on where you’re at in your career and what your goals are and the day-to-day grind. That’s probably, I wouldn’t call it a failure, but I would call it an evolution of what is important and the way I look at life and business.

Andy, this has been super insightful, interesting and fun for me, at least. There’s one last section of the show. It’s the lightning round where I’m going to ask you four questions and we’ve got two minutes to answer all four questions. It’s the first thing that comes to mind. First question, what’s your favorite youth sports memory?

It’s playing soccer at the Rose Bowl. I was on a soccer travel team. This was right before the World Cup. I want to say it was 1994 and our travel team was at the Rose Bowl. Playing soccer at the Rose Bowl was probably the first thing that comes to mind as favorite sports memory.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be the next Vin Scully. I have a passion for sports broadcasting and Vin Scully, for those of you who don’t know, is a very famous Dodgers announcer. If I wasn’t doing my job at El Pollo Loco, I would try to take Orel Hershiser or Joe Davis’ place as the play-by-play announcer for the Dodgers.

What is a brand whose marketing you admire most?

I like Spotify. I think that they were able to take the way that consumers listen, their habits, their interaction with the brand, and commercialize it in a way that doesn’t feel overly marketing to consumers. I think that people are excited about that every single year at the end of the year. I think they’ve done it for several years now. It’s something that’s very friendly on social media and a way that the brand can continue to be a part of the conversation. Hats off to Spotify. Its’ nicely done.

Finally, what is a cause that you’d like to support?

I’m part of a board called One Day to Remember. They’re based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was started by one of my close friends from undergrad, Rachel Antin. Their mission is to provide a family, specifically a kid, with a memorable day with parents who have a terminal illness. It’s equivalent to a Make-A-Wish type situation where you try to take the family out and allow them to have one enjoyable, memorable day, whether it be you go to a stadium, on a vacation, or an amusement park. It captures the essence of spending the time together, creating that moment and that memory. I’m very passionate about it. It’s a great cause. I encourage you to look it up and support it.

Andy, this was incredible. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks again for having me. I appreciate it.

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Thank you so much for reading. As a recap, we discussed modernizing your marketing strategy with the digital age, the why behind the loyalty program, the Uber Eats and McDonald’s McDelivery partnership and how failure is an essential part of growth. It was a great episode. See you next time everyone. Fight on.

Important Links:

• El Pollo Loco
• LocoGiftsAndGear.com
• Little Bets
• One Day to Remember

About Andy Rebhun

Andy is the Chief Marketing Officer at El Pollo Loco. He was hired to revamp their digital playbook just over 2 years ago and has been extremely busy since. Before making his mark on El Pollo Loco, Andy also played significant marketing roles at McDonald’s and the Ford Motor Company.