Digital + local: The perfect recipe for business growth

Justin Ulrich
Pizza and marketing, very good topics. I happen to be fortunate enough to join you last night for a happy hour down at Emmy Squared, which is fantastic. What areas are you located in?

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, so right now we operate 28 restaurants, everywhere from New York to Nashville, Atlanta, Coral Gables down in Miami. We recently opened up in Vegas, Louisville, Charlotte, Athens, Georgia, and so we’re in a lot of cool, hip places, but originally started in Brooklyn in 2016. 

And so we’ve slowly but surely started to spread some of our love across the country and have plans to expand even further. So we’ve got some news coming up in the next couple of weeks around openings that will be happening across, again, some popular neighborhoods around the country.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool, and what is Emmy known for?

Sergio Pérez
We’re known for our Detroit-style pizza, our award-winning burgers and our elevated cocktails. Detroit-style pizza’s a little bit different, right? It’s a square-shaped pizza that is baked on a blue pan, and we take a lot of pride in doing pizza the right way.

We use the best ingredients you can have from King Arthur’s flour to Esso Pepperoni, which is some of the best pepperoni you can find in the country, and so we do the things that are a little bit hard for a lot of other folks to pull off of, but again, I think we focus on an elevated culinary experience using the best ingredients and the best techniques.

So every time you take a bite out of, whether it’s one of our burgers, whether it’s one of our signature pizzas or a salad, you’re getting a bold flavor experience, and so that’s a little bit for what we are known for. And you know something about that. You’ve had a chance to try some of our food.

Justin Ulrich
I did, I’ve had it a couple of times. The bold flavors, like, you are not kidding. I never thought I would’ve taken a bite of, was it like a Brussels sprout salad?

It was fantastic. I’m like, that’s how you know you’re no longer a teenager, or maybe even in your 20s when the Brussels sprouts taste amazing, but that salad was incredible. Yeah, very cool.

Well, I guess let’s jump in, and you know, you’ve had tons of experience working for a really, really, really well-known brand, so I think that your insights will be super helpful for our listeners today. If you could start a little bit, maybe tell just a little bit about your journey, and then kind of how you ended up over there at Emmy.

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, I’ll keep the story short, because it’s a little bit long, and there’s a lot of moving parts, but I’ll take you back to how I grew up. So I grew up in the U.S.-Mexico border in a town called Laredo, Texas, and I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that owned restaurants and operated restaurants, and so from an early age, I remember sitting in a kitchen with my grandmother or working at the family restaurant. 

And so that initially gave me some interesting perspective around just how operations work and sort of how restaurants work and how, you know, the mechanics of all the pieces that come together, and as I think about my career now, it really made me appreciate franchisees, for example, that are quite relevant to the local marketing conversation here. 

And so I never really thought I was gonna end up on this side of the business, but fast-forward college, getting through that, I got an opportunity to intern at Church’s Chicken from a marketing perspective, and it was a very transformational experience in terms of recognizing what goes into making a restaurant experience happen, right? 

Like, oftentimes, you come into a restaurant, you order your food, you have good service, you leave, and that’s about what you think about from a consumer perspective, but somebody thought about the plating and the lighting and the music, and there’s a method to the madness, if you will, about creating a moment in an environment that allows you to have an experience, right?

And so that was a big aha moment for me to recognize that, look, it’s not just food and a couple plates or whatever, there’s a real science behind the work that we do, and so from there, I ended up getting a full-time local marketing coordinator position there at Church’s. 

And if there’s any advice I would give any person who’s wanting to start in the industry or is coming right out of college to think about what a career in the restaurant space will look like, I would always start in the field, just because it gives you a wide perspective to really running your own marketing department at a local level, right?

Like, you have to wear the PR hat, you’ve gotta wear the digital hat, you have to activate, you have to be brand, you have to wear all those different hats, and so it gives you really vast perspective as to all the areas from a marketing standpoint, but most importantly, it gets you plugged in to where the customers are, and it gets you plugged in to how restaurants operate. 

Oftentimes, you are creating a program in your office or you are thinking about a big activation, but it’s not real until it happens at the restaurant level, and you have to recognize that execution and making it easy for operators and for crew members to execute is critical, because if you don’t have good execution, if they don’t believe in the program, very hard for you to get any momentum with any activation from that standpoint, and so understanding how restaurants work is critical. 

And then the final piece, it also gives you a bit of an acumen for the economics of the business, right? Because it’s not just looking at a comp sales number and a percentage change, but you’re actually living and breathing as to how those economics work and how your work on a local level makes an impact there, and so really good school to then hone in as to what you wanna do from a marketing perspective. 

And so anyway, after my time there, I took a digital role at Johnny Rockets, and so one of the most fun brands I had an opportunity to work with, it was burger, shakes and fries, and dancing, and we had an incredible team there, and it was really the early start of digital. This was 2015, and I remember having a conversation with an online ordering provider about online ordering in 2015, and at that time, it felt like a bit of a foreign concept for a fast casual brand.

I remember we were one of the first brands to get on delivery, so before you had integrations, you had to build menus manually on a platform by restaurant. There wasn’t like take one menu, and so when you had 200 domestic locations, menu changes were a whole lot of fun in terms of proofing and pricing and photography and you name it. 

We were one of the first brands to actually be on Amazon Restaurants, which was going to revolutionize the world, and here we are today, but anyway, spent some time at Johnny Rockets, and then I left there to a concept called, or it was Garden Fresh Restaurants, which operated as Sweet Tomatoes and Soup Plantation, and it was a soup and salad concept, really focused on health, and so there, a lot of my work was really, again, digital transformation, online ordering, engagement content.

From there, I took a move back to the south in Atlanta, and so I came back to Ascent Hospitality Management with Hara Hassan Perkins. There, it was a very similar exercise around digital transformation, building an ecosystem, launching an app, launching a loyalty program, digital media, and so anyway. 

From there, I joined Bojangles in December of 2020. Yeah, December of 2020, I joined the brand to lead probably the most aggressive and fast-tracked digital transformation the brand had ever seen, and so we built everything from custom apps and websites to engagement programs to evergreen delivery promotions. 

But all that to say that a big headline of my entire career has been really focused, I think, around two things, leading digital transformations for brands and how we redefine the way people engage and transact with us, and then the second piece is really understanding customers from really the ground up and really getting a sense of what the neighborhoods and the trade areas are and how you leverage that to then be able to put programs in place that are gonna help move the needle from a business standpoint.

Justin Ulrich
That’s incredible. I appreciate you taking us through that because as a guest, most of the guests that I have in the show don’t come up in the digital space, so your insights are gonna be relatively unique and, I think, impactful and valuable. 

If you could talk through, on the digital side of things, what do you think is the most impactful marketing thing to go after? What really moves the needle most from a digital perspective?

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, I would say relevance and context is critical. Oftentimes, the digital program that a lot of the mid-size to enterprise brands build are sort of more national program focused and forget the need for local relevance and context, and what I mean by that is, I’ll give you an example. 

From Evo Django’s perspective, has partnerships with about 17 or 18 different universities, so during college, there’s a lot of programming with these schools, and so if you open an app, for example, being able to show local content that’s relevant to that particular school, for example. Being able to have a local deal or promotion that’s specific to that restaurant or that neighborhood. 

And so for me, I think one of the things that is missing from a lot of digital programs is that local context and relevance of what is happening around the restaurant to put programming in front of customers that will ultimately shorten your time from a conversion perspective, which will be to sales, and so recognizing what deals at a local level make sense, recognizing what kind of content is relevant for customers at a local level make sense. 

Because personalization should be more than just what your location you go to and what your name is, right? You should really think about menu and context to be able to, again, put programming in front of consumers. 

And local partnerships, there might be a local event, there might be a local charity component to what you’re doing, and a lot of those elements tend to be difficult to execute from a national infrastructure perspective, and so my headline and recommendation would be looking at ways in which you can find context and relevance to be able to put programming in front of consumers for maximizing conversion.

Justin Ulrich
It’s very interesting that you bring that up. Bojangles has, do they have like 1,000 locations?

Sergio Pérez
A little bit over 800. They’re getting close. They’re getting close.

Justin Ulrich
How do you scale, like how do you scale the localization of all the content? Because if you have all these different schools, and I’m sure you guys are putting out like university-based content, like stuff around like game wins and stuff like that, how do you scale that?

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, great technology partners. That’s how I would frame it up is really having the right tech stack that can support dynamic content is how I would frame it up from a top-line perspective, but it also means having really good relationships at the franchise and local level to make sure that you are receiving and curating that content to be able to bring it to the top from a data perspective. 

But it really is great infrastructure from a tech perspective, and then having a good mechanism in which you can receive that content to then be able to push out to whatever channel you need to push that out to.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah, I mean, tech, realistically, like tech’s really the only way that you can scale stuff like that. I mean, you’d have to, otherwise you’d have to think you have to have somebody at each location potentially doing all these things, and it’s just not feasible. Although, if you are an operator at a single location, that’s not to say you shouldn’t try and you shouldn’t start doing something, right?

You can then test to see what works and then move forward from there and then find a tech partner to help the entire organization roll out the wins that you’ve found. What are some things that you could talk to that you’ve tried that maybe didn’t work?

Sergio Pérez
Oof, that’s always a tough question. I would say partnerships are always tough, and what I mean by that is, sometimes you sponsor a local event, sometimes you sponsor a local team, and generally those deals tend to be around like signage, for example, right? Like sponsor the little league and we’ll put your logo on the uniform or we’ll put your logo in a stadium.

And while those help from a visability perspective, when you’re a big enterprise brand that has brand recognition, those elements don’t mean as much, right? 

And so for me, I think local partnerships and sponsorships are an area of opportunity for sure and how we should think about those moving forward is particularly from a digital perspective is how do you put together maybe a digital exclusive, right, where if you’re sponsoring a local team or an event, you can say, hey, get the Carolina Panthers combo and here’s the code that you can redeem, right?

And so finding ways in which you can leverage that partnership to drive new consumers primarily is sort of where the partnership should start versus let’s talk about logo placement and those kinds of things.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, the other thing to consider too is how do you really make the most out of the local engagement? Because a lot of times you will see that with a little league or any type of sports team locally, folks will just buy the sponsorship and put their logo up. But really to maximize it, some ideas of what you could do is like get there, not only give samples of your food and whatnot, but tell the stories of what’s happening there at the location, at the event, right?

Highlight people within your community and then you can then take that content and share it out on your social channels. So now you’re getting eyeballs and awareness, but then the people that you’re highlighting are gonna feel special, they’re gonna feel VIP, they’re gonna wanna show their friends and that creates a level of local virality that you aren’t gonna get just from getting your logo on the back wall at a baseball game.

Sergio Pérez
For sure, and I think one of the things we are quite proud of here at Emmy Squared is from our inception, being the neighborhood spot has been what the brand has been about and what I mean by that is being able to really understand the neighborhood that you serve and being able to integrate yourself in a meaningful way as a community partner and a contributor to the community. 

So I’ll give you a couple examples that I think are interesting and that have given Emmy this local flair. A lot of our restaurants are, for example, second generation spaces and are designed specifically to feel like they’re a part of the community and so whether it’s local art or design, we need to make sure that we feel as an integrated part of that versus this separate part of the community or from the neighborhood standpoint too.

We take a look at local wine and beer as an opportunity to, again, work with local partners and make that community connection in supporting other local small businesses that help from just an overall pride in your community perspective that I think are helpful. 

Three, it’s also thinking about local flavor and sort of how do you localize the Emmy experience at a local level. So for example, we’ve done like a Nashville hot pizza in the past or a kimchi pizza or a birria pizza to think about the relevance of the neighborhoods in which we’re in.

And so as I think about sort of the next evolution of local marketing, I think more of those local collaborations and partnerships are gonna be critical. Doing things like donating a dollar of every pizza to a local charity, like those things matter. And local marketing isn’t just about, okay, what is the transaction at a local level?

But it’s really around investing in the community that you are a part of and being an active participant in that. And so whether it’s a local festival, whether it’s the neighborhood association is doing X, Y, Z, you need to be a part of that and be connected to that, but also make sure that your space and your restaurant serves as a hub for community for community to happen, right? 

And so if there needs to be a meeting space, if there needs to be an opportunity for people to come together, our restaurant should be an important part of that.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. You did a really good job last night of bringing folks from the community together. So as I mentioned earlier, Sergio hosted a happy hour at one of the Emmy locations, which is a gorgeous location, by the way.

I’ve been to two of them now just in Charlotte. They’re similar feel, but they’re totally different in feel. Like you can tell they’re part of the same brand, but they’re very unique in their personality in each of the neighborhoods that they’re in, which like what you’re talking to.

But one of the things that came up with one of the folks that I was just kind of networking with and I said, hey, what should we drop Sergio into AI to make an image of him? And immediately the word sheriff came up. Why was making you a sheriff so important to this individual?

Sergio Pérez
I think, look, as you can see in the background, I’m quite proud of my Texas roots. And some would say that the minute you think about a sheriff you think about Texas. And so I think it’s the spirit of Texas that was part of that conversation.

Justin Ulrich
I should, well, I did just that and I dropped you in as a sheriff, Sheriff Sergio. However, saying that now I was like, man, I just had a thought. I should have put you in there with Chuck Norris. That would have been a good move.

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, I guess running for office at some point in the future is in the cards for me.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, there you go, there you go. You’ll know how to run a good campaign. That’s for damn sure. You guys are growing so fast. So what is it that you’ve been there for a few months? What is it that you’ve really focused on to help drive growth in such a short time?

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, so I think it goes back to, I think that relevance portion of it. Emmy has a rich history of high quality ingredients and good culinary experiences and having this local flair. And for us, it’s really about telling that story more often at a local level, making sure that people recognize that.

We serve one of the best burgers in the world, not just we’re saying that, but we have a number of awards from local to national publications talking about or ranking us as one of the best burgers in the country. We, in fact, our restaurants in New York, we have people that travel from overseas just to have a bite of that burger. And so for us and for me, the focus has been how do we double down on our food story? How do we double down on the equities of the brand? 

So people recognize that it’s not just good food, but there’s a love and care to our Detroit style and Brooklyn soul that we bring to every neighborhood that we’re a part of. And so everything from local paid media to local PR to enabling our delivery partnerships to better create it from a storytelling standpoint, we are building, instead of building a big national marketing plan, we’re building individual restaurant plans that are thought about in terms of what does the trade area look like?

Who are the customers? What are the drivers here? What are the kind of partnerships that should be thinking about?

And so it’s really building this from a restaurant to restaurant standpoint versus starting at the top and then localizing it. And so I think for me, this has been quite an interesting exercise because typically you start from the top and then trickle down. In this case, we’re building from the bottom and trickling up to make sure that, again, we focus on this hyper-local portion of the business.

Justin Ulrich
Very good, very good. Yeah, that’s gotta be a totally different approach because you came from such a massive org to starting. I mean, you’re able to now build those individual plans because you have the bandwidth because the volume isn’t quite there yet.

It will be there, I know, because you’re leading the marketing team. So I’m definitely watching it. One last question for you.

If you could give somebody a shout out who you think is doing their local marketing really, really well, who would it be?

Sergio Pérez
I’ll be biased to my previous group, but I think folks at Bojangles do an incredible job at a local level. If you’re in the Carolinas, primarily you see that the brand means something to people. And there’s a real good cultural tie to, what Bojangle’s says, one of the most interesting things about the brand is, particularly during this holiday period, people post on social and they say, I’m finally home, I had my first Cajun filet biscuit.

And so there’s, again, that great local aspect of it, but also lots of local charity work to support communities. Recently, with the hurricanes and the floods that happened in Western North Carolina, did an excellent job of raising money to help support that community. And so anyway, they’ve got a great local game and there’s a reason why they’ve been quite successful.

Justin Ulrich
Very good example, very good example. Yeah, it’s also being in the area, I know that there’s many locations. There’s like 125-ish locations just in Charlotte area.

Sergio Pérez
That’s about right, yeah, that’s about right.

Justin Ulrich
It’s insane, that’s like more than Starbucks.

Sergio Pérez
But soon we’ll have hopefully as many Emmys, maybe not in Charlotte, but across the country.

Justin Ulrich
I will say, I live in a small town North of Charlotte. We have two Bojangles and just got our first Starbucks. So that’s saying something, that’s saying something.

So awesome, well, let’s wrap things up. But before we do, how should folks follow you? How should they follow Emmy Squared?

Sergio Pérez
Yeah, so if they wanna get in touch with me, you can find me on LinkedIn at Sergio Pérez. But more importantly, follow Emmy Squared on Instagram at emmysquaredpizza. Also, whether you’re in one of our cities or you’re not, we also ship nationwide through Goldbelly.

And so if you go to goldbelly.com backslash Emmysquaredpizza you’ll be able to get some of the best pizza and burgers you can have shipped to you just in time for the holidays.

Justin Ulrich
Very good, I would definitely give it a shot if you haven’t, it’s fantastic. I could see why it’s award winning. So shout out to landing that role over there.

Well, cool, this is a lot of fun, Sergio. I just wanna thank you, thanks to our listeners as well as thank you to you for joining us in the lab and giving us your time and insights today.

Sergio Pérez
Thank you, I appreciate it. I hope you have a great holiday.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, happy holidays as well.

As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

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And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.