What’s on Your Plate?

Expect brands to use their own apps, as well as third-party apps, to drive visits through loyalty programs and incentives. The restaurant industry is continuing to use apps to create a brand buzz in the hopes of earning your loyalty.

Burger King recently accomplished this with a trolling late Q4,18 campaign that brought the #2 fast food burger chain to the parking lots of their #1 competitor. To promote the revamped app with a stunt tied to its arch-rival, McDonald’s, Burger King gave away 1-cent Whoppers to anyone standing within 600 feet of a McDonald’s while ordering from the BK app. The campaign worked! The stunt caught on like wildfire and mention of the promotion was all the more known attracting notable media attention. Not to mention, the app became #1 in the Apple App Store in the first few days of the promotion.

This trend for a personalized and fun way to interact with customers will continue in 2019 with big brands promoting delivery orders, loyalty programs, new menu offers, and LTO’s.

With minimum wage on the rise and advancements in wireless technology and cloud-based storage, you can expect to see more robots and self-serve mechanisms as a part of the food industry. From self-driving cars to burger-flipping robots to mechanical drink-making machines, automation is no longer going to seem very Jetsons-like when the reality from labor concerns are mounting in the industry. Automation is becoming a more viable and embraced option.

Look to the roads and skies! Market leaders such as Uber Eats, GrubHub, and Postmates look towards capturing greater market space. A differentiator in the space will be those brands that can add delivery through drones. Uber is already on the move, allegedly designing a drone delivery system called UberExpress that could be operational by 2021, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal.

Autonomous vehicles will also help concepts with robotic automation and on-route cooking. Advancements in research and development from companies like Zume Pizza, the food delivery startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, will help expedite accessibility and adoption for greater scalability.

Despite best efforts, it’s difficult to find the time to make New Year’s resolutions — and even harder to make them stick.

Every year we set out filled with the promise of fulfilling our personal resolutions, but why only apply them to the personal world? You should reprioritize those ideologies and allocate those principles to your professional life, where you live and die with quantitative measurables. The best way for your brand to reach your 2019 goals is going to be with a little collaboration.

Taking all of these new trends into account, the big buzzword that will drive you crazy this year is “agile marketing”. So, what does that really mean?

Agile marketing is exactly what it sounds
like. It’s assembling a team that can
adapt and change with marketing trends.
The need to be nimble is driving the
tactics in how marketers interact with
agencies. Many companies are looking to
agencies to provide skill sets not core to
their team (44% cited expertise as a top reason for engaging an agency), as well as the chance to expedite their scalability as new opportunities without the limitations of being locked with fixed assets, or overhead that may be antiquated. (In the same survey, 42% also cited flexibility and 42% cited ability to fill short-term gaps.)

When clients and agencies work synergistically it allows them to create a rapport that extends into all the work. It brings in a highly talented team that increases productivity across the board. A good partnership will allow an agency to take pride in their deliverables while maintaining flexibility in the collaboration process. It can improve the effectiveness of your organization’s entire marketing department.