Glenn Drasher is a 45-year senior marketing veteran with deep experience in the restaurant and hospitality industry, including roles with Carlson Hospitality Worldwide, Famous Dave’s and many others. Throughout his career spanning more than four decades, Drasher leveraged data to make informed, profitable marketing decisions to build some of your favorite brands.

Q: Tell us how you got into marketing and the roles you’ve held over the years.

A: About the time I was graduating from the University of North Texas with degrees in marketing and economics, casual dining was just starting to hit its stride. I went to work for Steak and Ale Restaurant Company as a marketing manager. They were a leader for their time, especially in marketing, and I was introduced to good marketing practices there.

From there I went to Chi Chi’s, Inc. as a senior vice president of marketing, food and beverage. They had a great concept and were a financial darling at the time. One of the cutting-edge ideas our team came up with was a retail line of products for Chi Chi’s. You can still find those products in grocery stores today.

Next I moved to Minnesota for a role with Carlson Hospitality Worldwide as an executive vice president responsible Country Inn & Suites, which was a start-up at the time, as well as Country Kitchen.

I’ve also held roles with Buffet’s Inc. as executive vice president responsible for all marketing and research and development initiatives, and vice president of marketing at Famous Dave’s of America. My last role was as senior director of marketing for Perkins and Marie Callendar’s, LLC.

Q: There’s so much information available today that it can be overwhelming for marketers to sort through it all and make actionable, profitable decisions. How have you seen the role of data change in marketing decisions over the years?

A: When I started out, traditional media (TV, radio, print publications) and data management went hand-in-hand. There was so much information on viewership, costs and what competitors were doing.

My first boss instilled in our team that whenever you spend a dollar, you need a return on investment (ROI). If you don’t see ROI, you need to look at that and ask, ‘Should I spend this again?’

Traditional media was usually the largest expenditure an organization had so you really had to be efficient and effective with your money. In the retail world, the number of locations you had determined if you could afford media – this was before digital media.

If you were a restaurant group with two locations, you weren’t doing a media buy because you didn’t have a budget big enough for TV or radio. In order to be efficient, you had to say no sometimes and some organizations struggled with that.

Today, the beauty of digital is that you can not only market to a tight trade area, you can also test offers in ways you couldn’t with traditional media. You can test it in digital and then roll it out more broadly. Digital is helping create quicker data pathways for a whole host of marketing decisions such as marketing campaigns, new product offerings and more. Here are just two examples of how digital data can play a big role and efficiently move your marketing forward:

• Product Development: The introduction of a new product or new feature of an existing product could take a long time to try certain product highlights with consumers and see what stuck. You would sift through the data to find those ideas your guests would have an interest in and then sit down with the research and development teams. Digital has made it faster to prototype products, test them and fine-tune the products before a broad launch. In one case, we learned all we needed was more cheese on our taco products to make them successful. Using such product data allowed us to fairly accurately predict which items were worthy of a promotion to put a media campaign behind.
• Marketing Campaigns: At Famous Dave’s, we did Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and it generated 4,500 calls. We learned people were searching online for caterers so we targeted ads for catering. We also learned we needed to devote resources toward training the call center staff to handle the calls resulting from the SEM campaign. The call center staff was not trained in catering and the training helped staff better answer questions right away and turn leads into sales.

Digital is wonderful because of its ability to track and provide richer data so you can determine more quickly if you’re getting a ROI. With all of this data, you can more accurately forecast and plan.

Q: Working with larger corporations it would be anticipated they rely heavily on research to inform marketing campaigns, have you found that to be true?

A: Yes. In terms of research and media, if you’re not looking at the data, you’re not optimizing your spend. Email campaigns were a great way to get a lot of data we were able to use to make big, operational decisions. For example, we used a group to analyze our sales mix, our menu mix, and the data turned out to be quite accurate. In fact, this data vendor could determine whether or not a certain store could absorb a price increase or not. We really relied on data to not only make better products for consumers, but to make the organization more profitable.

Q: What are your recommendations for smaller companies that may lack the budget to conduct large research projects or pre/post launch surveys? How can they collect and analyze marketing data to remain competitive and make informed decisions?

A: First, no one has as much money as they want for research and analysis – even the larger companies don’t. For small companies, I would look for partners who have the capability of helping you. Perhaps it’s an organization that can bring a value-added aspect to the partnership to help analyze the data or track the consumers who show an interest in our partnership.

In the restaurant field, you always had Coke or Pepsi as a partner. They provided data and research analysis services to partnering restaurants that carried their products.

If you’re the little guy, it doesn’t mean you can’t get some of the information the bigger guys get. Even the smallest of companies have ready access to data points such as web traffic, call volume, newsletter signups and social media engagement. It doesn’t have to be expensive to get data basics.

Rather than investing in an expensive, custom research database, smaller organizations can work with third parties that have easily accessible tools. Some vendors will have a dashboard to hold your data and you can analyze it based on key performance indicators (KPIs). When you find a value-added vendor like that, you’ll want to develop a long-term relationship with them because they’re giving you something you can’t afford to get yourself.

Q: It can be tempting to make snap decisions based on short-term analytics. How do you go about making data driven decisions for long-term growth?

A: First, you need to be honest with leaders of your organization on what the expectations should be because some leaders may present short-term information and want quick fixes. I’ve been with organizations that used short-term data to focus just on the next quarter and it hurt the business.

But you have to be honest about the big picture. Company leaders may want to go in one direction, but if the long-term data shows a different direction, you need to look at that and have the honest conversation.

Having enlightened leadership who understand where you are in the marketing process is so helpful. If your leaders only see you once a quarter and they’re pressuring you for more sales every quarter, that’s not ideal.

It’s all about having a plan and sharing and educating others. It’s an educational process to bring your leaders or clients along and help them understand data and why it’s important to look long-term. For example, if you have an ad agency, have their CEO meet with your CEO, to listen and to educate in a respectful way and to have a relationship with – that goes a long way toward the education process of understanding data as a long-term driver. You don’t want a situation where the CEO meets the agency folks at the pitch and at the firing.

Data can often drive long-term growth related to the brand basics. An example in the restaurant business would be your facilities. If your buildings look old and tired, and your competitors are opening new and vibrant locations, you’ve got a problem an ad campaign can’t solve. So you may need to spend money on the facility to bring it up to market level, and then look at advertising. Sometimes leaders don’t want to hear about spending more money. But you have to be truthful and use data to make your case for the long-term growth and profitability of the business.

I would never go to a CEO and say, ‘It’s my opinion the restaurants are old and tired.’ If we’re going to listen to someone’s opinion, we’re going to listen to the CEO. But, if you have research to show this is how competitors are ranking on brand imagery and here’s how we rank, and demonstrate other data points, all of a sudden it’s a lot harder for the CEO to say, ‘I don’t think we’re in bad shape.’

There’s an integration of all aspects of marketing within an organization that reaches the top. And that’s when an organization is most effective. Look at the restaurant industry right now during COVID-19. If you don’t have delivery or a good carry-out program, you’re likely seeing less business.

Q: How granular should a marketer get in conversations with organizational leaders or clients about the data used to drive recommendations?

A: There’s a deep skill involved from an agency or marketer’s standpoint to convey pretty complex data. You may have a client you want to get really specific with on the data, but you should also tell a story to convey the information.

Someone I knew at a beverage company used to do quarterly economic updates. You can imagine how dry that could be. But he told a story and made it interesting. We looked forward to those meetings and when you came out of the meeting, you were better off than when you went in. You learned something.

Make sure you take that big chunk of data and figure out what story it is telling. It’s not always something that is easy to share, and if it’s negative news, you still have to share it. Again, honesty is crucial and we need organizational environments where you’re not afraid to be truthful.

Q: Anything else you would like to add for marketers seeking to leverage data for decision-making?

A: The need for data utilization isn’t going to go away. It’s only going to increase and those who get there first are going to enjoy the rewards.

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