Guests: The North Star: Melting Pot CMO Ana Malmqvist stays Customer-Centric

Ana Malmqvist is CMO of Melting Pot (part of Front Burner), a role she first stepped into in early 2020. The experienced marketer, who describes herself as “consumer-centric,” is leading the charge behind the marketing efforts at the fondue restaurant brand that now has more than 92 locations in 31 U.S. states and Canada. 

Her experience in marketing and brand management, along with her focus on developing strategic marketing solutions to drive business results, have been the hallmarks of her career in the restaurant space. She held several senior roles at Bloomin’ Brands, including vice president of product marketing at Outback Steakhouse, where she was responsible for the brand’s food and beverage strategy. She also spent time with Carrabba’s Italian Grill as senior director/director of product marketing, overseeing all aspects of the brand’s food and beverage strategy.

Since coming to Melting Pot, Malmqvist has focused on building customer experiences and building a loyal fan base. The brand now has more than two million active subscriptions to its Club Fondue loyalty program. In addition, a recent remodeling initiative introduced romantic booths and designated spots for wine tasting.

Successful marketing begins with a “deep, deep understanding of the guest,” she says, adding that it requires “establishing KPIs across all of the different tactics we use.”

The end game is to drive awareness and traffic, so consumers have the chance to become loyal fans. 

Describe your role as CMO. As CMO of Melting Pot, I see myself as the steward of the brand and everything it represents. My marketing team and I truly are the voice of the consumer and the guest across all divisions we work with. I oversee all divisions from a marketing perspective, including our restaurants, our proof of concept (which is Melting Pot Social), and our retail brand.

What’s the most challenging part of being a CMO today? It’s the ever-changing guest and guest dynamic. I believe many people would agree that there are three distinct periods: the world pre-Covid, the world immediately post-Covid, and the world today.

Immediately post-Covid, there was pent-up demand in the restaurant industry, especially for a brand like ours. Spending reached historic proportions with people eager to get out, celebrate, and spend the savings they had accumulated. However, that demand has cooled off and traffic has softened industry wide. Navigating this has been challenging both during Covid and in the current post-Covid world.

How has Covid impacted the way you have led your brand’s marketing efforts? I joined Melting Pot as chief marketing officer in January 2020 after doing some consulting with them in Q4 of 2019, pre-Covid. This presented an interesting opportunity to implement things the brand had never done before and was probably resistant to doing pre-Covid.

When we reopened, we had a menu that was supposed to launch in March 2020, which was obviously postponed. The new menu, along with new programs and promotions that the brand typically had not done, became relevant and motivating to guests looking to start going out again.

Between 2020 and 2022, we introduced new ways for guests to engage with the brand. Post-Covid, we still face challenges, such as rising costs and inflation, which affect guests’ willingness to use their disposable income in other ways.

What are the three most important keys to being an effective CMO today? The key is staying in touch with the guests. It’s easy to be distracted by chasing the shiny object, but staying true to the guests and their needs is critical. Audience relevancy is also important. You need to be relevant to your audience across all the different mediums you use. Staying on top of technology is crucial as well. Technology moves very fast, and it’s easy to bury your head in the sand and ignore it. However, technology is your friend. If you stay on top of it and understand how to best leverage and use it, it can be a game changer.

How do you prepare a marketing plan and execute the strategies? We always start with the guests. Aided by the technology we have, we take a deep dive into the consumers and their needs. About a year ago, we conducted a detailed segmentation of our guests, which allowed us to better understand what they were looking for. 

How do you measure marketing results and effectiveness? First and foremost, we have KPIs at the company or brand level. We consider things from a consumer standpoint as well as from operational and financial standpoints. Additionally, we have specific marketing KPIs related to digital media, social engagement, email effectiveness, and so forth.

Discuss your core consumer marketing strategies and objectives. As a brand, we don’t have tremendous penetration. Typically, we have only one location in a major city, and it might be the only one in the entire state. Therefore, we don’t have tremendous awareness, and we always need to drive that along with traffic.

How do we convert guests who are aware of us into trying us more than just once? They might come to us for a special occasion, which is what we’re known for, but they don’t necessarily come to us more than once a year or once every few years. Our objective is always to drive awareness and traffic. We base our strategy on the intersection of consumer need states and the occasions they use us for. Research shows that guests use us for exceptional occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, and national celebrations, like Valentine’s Day and holidays. We know we hold a special place for these occasions, but we also understand that guests want to use us more often than just for these exceptional celebrations. For example, guests have expressed interest in using us for more frequent date nights. 

How do you go about creating a customer-centric marketing and brand philosophy? The marketing team understands that being consumer-centric is our job and career. We’ve done this at other companies, both restaurant and nonrestaurant. Here, it’s crucial to ensure that all stakeholders, including franchisees, also understand this.

We try to remove any subjectivity and focus on the guests and the brand. By holding this as our North Star, we can get people to buy into it. We drive traffic and increase revenue by taking a consumer need state, matching it with an occasion they want to use, and creating a program or promotion to meet that need. Connecting all those dots demonstrates that being consumer-centric works. 

Describe your marketing team and the role each of them plays. We have a team of about 10 people. When you think about Melting Pot restaurants, we have two distinct areas that we call design and delivery.

The design team owns the strategic calendar and comes up with the objectives and strategies behind it. This includes the creative team working closely with our R&D and operations teams to develop the promotional campaigns and the menu ideas that support those campaigns. They manage the creative agencies and the overall concept of the campaigns, ensuring they are relevant for guests.

The delivery team consists of the digital team, the PR team, and the local marketing team. They are responsible for communicating the experience we’ve developed to the guests. 

Why is it so important for the marketing department to have a personal touch when it comes to helping the brand connect with franchise prospects? We get a lot of prospects coming into the building. First and foremost, they love the brand. They come to us because they are brand users and feel a connection strong enough to invest in it as their business. Most of these prospects are family business owners taking a big leap and putting their trust in the brand.

It is all about trust and ensuring they understand what we are doing, so they don’t have to know all the details themselves. We provide a strong infrastructure from a people, team, marketing technology, and research perspective. Some things we handle at a national level, so they don’t even have to worry about it. 

However, we do expect them to handle some marketing at the local level. We help them get to that point, but they need to know they are taken care of. When they sign on with us, they are assigned a local marketing manager who will guide them from a marketing standpoint. This guidance starts many months before opening and continues through the opening, leveraging all our systems, partners, and technology along the way.

How does this help your franchise sales and development effort? Now they feel they have a massive support team and infrastructure behind them, so they’re not on their own. They don’t have to find their own digital agency or PR firm, and they don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting; we handle that for them. They can focus on specific tasks that we can’t do for them, like building local relationships and identifying key figures in their community. These are crucial tasks they must handle themselves.

What ways/tools do you rely on to do this? From a people standpoint, our local marketing managers are the ones who create that human connection between the franchisee prospect and our team. That personal touch is essential because it lets them know they’re not just sifting through websites and documents on their own; instead, they have someone they can onboard with, which is the most important way we assist.

Do today’s prospects expect more from the franchise marketing department? What, and how do you provide it? Pre-Covid, there wasn’t necessarily much of a national marketing effort backing the franchisees’ efforts. Each location pretty much did its own thing, and the opportunity that Covid provided was a way to come at this from a brand standpoint and have more of a national voice. With that, franchisees do expect more because these things aren’t necessarily under their control. When we market nationally, we’re the ones who determine the strategy behind that.

We have to stay on top of everything that they can’t possibly stay on top of. For example, from a digital marketing standpoint, we have a co-op that we started when we came out of Covid. From that co-op, the expectation is that franchisees provide a set amount of funds that they’re going to put against their digital media, and 100% of the money that they invest goes to driving traffic and sales to their locations. 

How is today’s consumer and marketing data helping you fine-tune your marketing initiatives? We gather more data than ever before. The key question becomes: What’s the most crucial information we need now as opposed to simply collecting data? For us, it’s about gaining a deeper understanding of our guests. We’ve invested heavily in segmentation to better comprehend our guests. Segmentation factors include recency of visits, spending habits, and the psychographics of our various target groups.

Describe the evolving role of social media in your brand’s marketing efforts. This is actually my first experience working with a brand where there’s both a national Facebook and Instagram page alongside individual location-based pages. This dynamic creates a unique situation where we manage national messaging alongside specific local messages. TikTok has emerged as a new platform, almost like the new Google, particularly popular among younger demographics.

Our approach also includes influencer strategies, leveraging social media to amplify our reach. As social media platforms evolve, so do their algorithms, impacting how we engage with our audience. Changes on Instagram, for instance, prompt us to rethink our strategies for national versus local pages.

How do you work with other internal departments and does technology help? I work very closely with our head of technology, and we constantly collaborate to identify the relevant data and information needed to create the insights we require. We recognized the necessity to better understand our guests, particularly by leveraging the intersection of POS data, reservations data, and email database information. By combining these three sources, we began to observe distinct behaviors emerging in the data. This allowed us to gain insights into how specific guests engage with us and prompted us to ask further questions about their lifestyles and preferences. To answer these questions, we conducted additional research to identify existing guests and to find look-alikes—people who resemble our current guests but have never visited a Melting Pot location.

Which technology tools are most valuable to you and why? We’ve put a lot of effort and investment into technology that helps us segment our consumer base to better understand our guests at a deeper level. This segmentation is made possible through the integration of three key tools: our POS data from Toast, reservation data from OpenTable, and our email database managed through Salesforce. 

How do you stay on top of changing technology? I continuously collaborate with our head of technology to gather relevant data and insights that drive our marketing strategies. This integration of technology and data collection helps us better serve our guests and quickly adapt to evolving digital landscapes.

How do you manage costs and budgets for the marketing department? It all comes back to the KPIs, which we set at both company and marketing levels to ensure alignment with our consumer, operational, and financial objectives. We also have our co-op program for digital media. 

Do you see vendors as business partners? Why/why not? They are our strategic partners, and they know that’s how we view them. When we hire a creative agency, a digital agency, or a PR agency, it’s crucial for us to understand how they operate and how we prefer to collaborate. In past experiences where there wasn’t this partnership approach, it often felt like orders were given without a deeper understanding of our business, which I find inefficient and ineffective.

Drawing from my years at Procter & Gamble as a brand manager, I learned the importance of having a trusting relationship with agencies. They were seen as strategic partners who understood our business goals from high-level vision down to campaign execution and beyond. Having a partner who comprehends your business deeply can bring invaluable insights and perspectives, challenging you to think differently and make connections that might not otherwise be apparent. In our approach, vendors are suppliers and strategic partners who collaborate closely with us. 

How have marketing strategies/tools changed over the past decade? How have you adapted? We’ve adapted by integrating comprehensive data analytics into our segmentation strategies to personalize guest experiences. We are always monitoring and adapting to changes in technology and social media to stay competitive.

How is your marketing/branding strategy developed and how does it flow through the system? Our marketing and branding strategy is based on deeply understanding our consumer through insights derived from data. For example, the segmentation analysis I mentioned previously helps us identify distinct guest profiles and their preferences, which, in turn, informs the development of targeted campaigns and promotions crafted by our design and delivery teams. These campaigns are executed across national and local digital platforms, supported by strategic partnerships.

What advice would you offer to aspiring CMO executives? To aspiring CMO executives, I would emphasize the importance of building strong partnerships and fostering a collaborative work culture. Strategic alliances with agencies and cross-functional teams allow you to leverage expertise and achieve marketing objectives. Embrace data-informed decision-making and use technology to understand consumer behaviors and adapt quickly to market dynamics.