Melting Pot's Ana Malmqvist Takes a Customer-centric Approach to Marketing

Franchise Update recently spoke with Melting Pot CMO Ana Malmqvist. Since joining Melting Pot in early 2020, she has dealt with Covid's impact on the restaurant industry and is now focused on building customer experiences and growing a loyal fan base. The brand now has more than two million active subscriptions to its Club Fondue loyalty program.

Malmqvist shared her thoughts on a wide range of topics affecting consumer marketing strategies, such as social media, technology, and taking a consumer-centric approach to promoting the Melting Pot brand.

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, a nniversaries, 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.

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.

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 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.

You can read the rest of the interview with Malmqvist in the upcoming Q3 issue of Franchise Update magazine.