El Pollo Loco has a 45-year legacy of serving authentic Mexican fare principally to a Southwest clientele who know the difference. So as the company looks to expand beyond not only core Hispanic loyalists but into younger demos, it finds itself balancing familiarity with novelty. At last month's MediaPost QSR Brand Insider Summit, CEO Bernard Acoca outlined the ways in which the company digitized quickly during this past Pandemic year. And in the process, this legacy brand found some unlikely digital paths to new customers - like a fast following on TikTok. Acoca was interviewed at the Summit by MediaPost's …

Adversity is the mother of innovation, especially if you have been a marketer in the QSR industry this past year. But as consumers flow back into eat-out mode, what online behaviors will they want to bring with them to physical dining experiences? McAlister's Deli is trying to answer that one with a new table-side ordering function in their mobile app. As we explore with Danielle Parra, Head of Marketing and Culinary, bringing tech into the on-site QSR meal ordering chain actually helps McAlister's increase and enhance personal interactions with its customers rather than circumvent the human touch.

Few brands were better positioned for growth during this year of lockdowns than Peloton. The home exercise brand has reported triple digit sales gains.

Chipotle was already ahead of many marketing curves that both the pandemic and social unrest accelerated in the last year. App ordering: check. Esports: check.

Who's Jenny? Well, she isn't Rite-Aid's traditional target consumer - that retiree who hangs around the prescription counter every other day. Director of Digital Marketing Joe Tertel says she is the brand's new target. Jenny is much younger and tasked with buying for more family and pets. It requires a revamped media strategy that connects her online and offline behaviors across store, site, apps, social media and other media. Email - that most resilient universal identifier - remains at the center of it all.

It's amazing how innovative a nascent brand gets when it doesn't have the luxury of spending other people's money. Bootstrapped since 2014, the JiMMY! Bar line of high-protein, low-sugar "bars with benefits" started with co-founder Jim Simon, his sister Annette and money chipped in by family and friends. They built a brand by staying outside the costly, complex grocery store supply chain.

Email is 50 years old this year. Its resilience is so familiar that we don't even bother joking about the many "Email is Dead" eulogies.

General Mills CMO Ivan Pollard brought us back a century to the invention of the Betty Crocker persona to illustrate how the company is trying to reassert the basics of consumer engagement by digital means. He demonstrated how a social interaction with a Saudi Arabian boy led to a massively successful Ramadan campaign that promoted men trying their hand at baking.

4th Ave. Market is a two-year-old D2C grounded in a century-old tradition and business model. The e-retail platform for hair, beauty and personal care products for consumers of color is recreating digitally the Black-owned and supported business districts that ran parallel to and in the face of Jim Crow. The model is simple: give and get support from your own community. Co-founder and CEO, Salim Holder, brings to the venture years of experience with legacy brand building while bringing out of history a very simple lesson: Don't "leverage" community, invest in it.

Do I really look like that? Staring at our imperfect mugs on ZOOM meetings for the last year drove many to seek professional cosmetic help. The problem for the medical aesthetics Med Spa retail chain was a ton of demand and no supply during lockdowns. But as Ideal Image's CEO David Prokupek tells us, the company quickly accelerated its emerging virtual consultation system that primed customers for the eventual return of physical engagements. The telehealth platform now serves over 25,000 people a month. And as retail slowly reopened, Med Spas are already performing 75,000 procedures a month. It is a …