ADMA WA Guru Breakfast with Guzman y Gomez

What do Perth’s marketing professionals and burritos have in common? This morning, Guzman y Gomez’s (GYG) Chief Marketing Officer Lara Thom spoke about the importance of next-generation technology and marketing innovation at ADMA WA’s Guru Breakfast.

Held at Fraser’s restaurant in Kings Park, Lara shared how the Mexican Taqueria franchise’s innovative Drone Mothership concept and successful “Say my name!” and #bringcalhome campaigns have helped improve brand awareness, engagement and loyalty. The three key takeaways from Lara’s presentation are the importance of knowing your brand, “service first, marketing second” and innovating with purpose.

1) KNOW YOUR BRAND
At GYG’s core is a commitment to providing Australians with fast, authentic and fresh Mexican food. It can be difficult to gain market traction when the general public has trouble with the basics, such as saying your brand name correctly. Using this insight, GYG created the “Say my name!” campaign, where radio show hosts took turns pronouncing their name. The campaign successfully improved brand awareness and engagement in a relatable and entertaining way.

2) SERVICE FIRST, MARKETING SECOND
GYG is all about fresh food and fast service first, marketing second. They believe that the quality of their food speaks for itself. This means their marketing strategy, in particular, their approach to social media, is focused on being genuine and relatable. A GYG fan, Cal, posted on their Facebook page asking to be flown from London to his home in Brisbane and back again so he could eat a GYG burrito. How did GYG respond? They shared Cal’s original post and challenged him to get 3,000 comments and 1,000 shares to grant his request to #bringcalhome. The post went viral. By lucky coincidence, GYG had a new store opening that coincided with the campaign. Not only did the #bringcalhome campaign deliver explosive social media engagement but also helped drive sales at their new store, making it one of their most successful franchises’.

3) INNOVATE WITH PURPOSE
Lastly, Lara mentioned that part of GYG’s marketing strategy includes “innovation with purpose”. When they were approached by Project Wing (part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) to be their first partner to deliver burritos to customers via drone technology, they thoroughly vetted the process to ensure it aligned with their brand values and business direction. As a result, a custom kitchen called the GYG Drone Mothership was built and placed at the drone test site to serve testers on the border of the ACT and NSW. Not only has this concept generated considerable media buzz but also customer engagement.

Thank you to ADMA WA for organising the event, and Lara for providing fresh insights into GYG’s social media triumphs and technology experiments.

Bonfire is a proud ADMA partner, if you’d like to attend future events click here.