• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 13, 2024

Riding cultish enthusiasm for a brand is harder than it may look. We engaged this problem in two recent interviews with the marketing leads for fan-powered QSR properties, Dave’s Hot Chicken and Voodoo Doughnut. For both of them,  maintaining authenticity and customer experience in a scalable way may be good problems to have, but they are challenges that require creative solutions.

Both brands will be with us in November at our Brand Insider Summit: QSR. Ao, as a preview to that retreat in Santa Barbara we are giving you a summer rerun two-fer, back to back interviews with Dave’s Brad Haley and Voodoo’s Chris Schulz. 

Interestingly, both men are longtime veterans of the dining space and brought to these small, cultish brands years of experience with mass appeal icons that boasted massive footprints. And so they have learned a lot about recalibrating their sense of scale.