Chester Bullock, Director of Technology at RentPath and a longtime email marketing maven, explains how the next normal will be about long-ball brand building. Bullock will be returning to the virtual edition of Email Insider Summit on December 7-8. Bullock previews his EIS presentation that shows one of the ways RentPath is trying to build brand by reducing customer friction in the lead-gen process.

The century-old White Castle brand was ahead of the curve on QSR delivery (in the 1930s), CPG extensions and even app-based advance ordering. CMO Lynn Blashford explains how a highly centralized structure of nearly 400 company-owned outlets helped White Castle make the necessary pivots in the last year.

The unpredictable path back to real-life interaction is especially acute for the telemedicine sector, where the hands-on doctor/patient experience goes back to the good old days when shamans made cave calls. Nurx CMO Katelyn Watson has been thinking beyond the Covid surge.

"We don't sell avocados, and we aren't from Mexico" is the inside joke at the Avocados from Mexico brand. Since its founding in 2013, the Texas-based nonprofit marketing group has been dedicated to increasing demand for hundreds of importers and distributors and thousands of growers and packers of avocados grown in Mexico. Yet, since 2015 the group has leveraged expensive Super Bowl ad space into exceptionally successful digital activations that have driven exponential growth in Avocado consumption. But Avocados from Mexico is passing on the big game of 2021. Instead, it is focusing on the three months of football season …

In the early days of the COVID lockdowns some restaurants and QSRs became makeshift grocery stores. They filled a gap for their customers when standard groceries ran low or just felt too dangerous to shoppers. But the self-descriptive brand Just Salad turned the idea into a new business to go alongside its 30+ store footprint in cities worldwide. This is but the first in a line of new business ideas CMO Andy Rooks and the management will be exploring in the next year. The impetus for all such innovation, Rooks says, is having genuine conversations with customers, not just harvesting …

It has been a wild ride this year for skincare maker Urban Skin Rx and its founder/CEO Rachel Roff. The company was launched around 2010 as an extension of her successful spa and laser treatment center in Charlotte, NC. It was driven by Roff's own passion for making skincare products more relevant to a wider range of melanin-rich skin. A decade into Urban Skin Rx, about half of sales are still D2C but its products are available at Target, Walmart, Ultra, CVS, and a number of other outlets. A surprise TikTok hit and the Covid-driven self-care impulse have helped sustain …

How many mattress brands can the world support? That is a perennial marketing question, usually aimed at the massive clutter of competing D2C brands across all categories. It seems to me the Purple mattress brand, however, always had going for it three important "P"s to differentiate it among the me-toos. They had Proprietary technology, a Puckish humor to their ubiquitous video advertising, and, of course, they were Purple. Even so, the brand still has to contend with rising customer acquisition costs, and a physical retail channel that has become constricted at best. But Omnichannel Marketing Director James Brohamer is cooking …

Every marketer wants to crack the code on younger demos and the ways that digital entitlement has shaped Millennials and Gens Y/Z. But not many CMOs with whom I have spoken plot it as out as specifically as Saladworks' Mark Mears. He has pored over the research, and folded in his experience leading the marketing for Cheesecake Factory, Noodles & Co. and Schlotzkey's to create a concise profile of digital natives that informs all of the fast casual restaurant brand's efforts. Mears is tweaking every touchpoint with these cohorts, even the terminology he deploys across the franchise. His "4Me Generation" …

While the COVID crisis ravaged the dining and restaurant sector, it was a very different story for many QSR brands within that segment.

Test and learn, gather data, repeat. That seems to be the formula for GM brands pursuing their prospects across an increasingly fragmented video landscape. David Spencer, asst. manager, audience buying strategy, had been test driving the major and emerging video screen platforms for years. Spencer joined Brand Insider this week to share his thoughts on the state of the new alphabet soup of video (SVOD, AVOD, OTT, CTV, et al).