Local loyalty: Make customers feel like regulars

Justin Ulrich
That’s pretty interesting that your parents had the forethought to give you that last name. Very forward thinking. Unicorn emoji.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I disowned them. I was inspired by Cher, Beyonce, and who else has a name.

Justin Ulrich
That’s right. 

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Drop them. My first name is unusual enough, so I don’t think I need a last name.

Justin Ulrich
I know I was thinking about going by Justin and it’s like, yeah, that wouldn’t. The one of the greats that come to mind is, you know, often referred to as Tay Tay, which, as I understand, you’re a low key Taylor Swift fan.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I’m a high key Taylor Swift fan.

Justin Ulrich
High key. Very good. Well, in light of that, I’m going to try to weave in as many Taylor Swift song titles into my answers as possible for my questions. So you ready for it?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Love it. I’m ready.

Justin Ulrich
There’s number one. All right, so why don’t we start off with you just telling us a little bit about yourself and kind of how you went from being, coming up in the restaurant space and now you’re a founder of a tech company and where you’re at today.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Yeah. So professional journey starts with the personal one, which is, I’m an immigrant, came here when I was 15 from Kuwait and learn English, watching a lot of mafia movies, and also getting a job as a busboy at 17. So I got a job as a busboy at 17 at a burger joint here in Queens and fell in love, absolutely fell in love with the hospitality industry. 

Left my awesome internship at Apple at 17, said, I’m just going to do this. This is great. This is so much harder, but this is great. And fast forward ten years. I was their CMO and we opened dozens of restaurants, 50 ish restaurants in five countries. We closed restaurants. We had so many wins. We had our losses, and it was just such a fun journey to be a part of. 

And that was my undergrad or my grad school, if you will, to starting Lunchbox, which started five years ago. And I was just like, there has to be something better for the restaurant industry. Just like Toast is an incredible second mover in the point of sale system. We need a second mover for off premise, for all things delivery. We need a second mover to the company we inspire and has built this industry. Olo, we want to be a second mover to them. 

How do we do that? How do we give them sweet green tech without sweet green money or Domino’s tech without Domino’s money? And that was the inception. We were saying that one too many nights in a row and it became our vision. It became like something we wanted to see through. And that’s how launchbox was born. And we’ve been doing it for five years. And, yeah, that’s a quick recap.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Now you seem to just be taken off, which is incredible. You mentioned a couple of failures, but it looks like you were able to just shake it off. Taylor Swift, number two.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
That’s number two. Listen, restaurant people are the hardest working people in the world. Restaurant operators are so entrepreneurial. I’m shocked we don’t have more entrepreneurs moving from restaurant to tech. I’m not saying tech is easier, but it’s not as hard as restaurants. 

And you have to get used to number of challenges we face as our industry. May that be every time the interest rate changes, or may that be food cost or may that be labor cost. We’re just so used to dealing with adversity. I think that’s played a big part in us designing Lunchbox and being able to grow Lunchbox.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, absolutely. And it was kind of a blank space.

Nabeel 🦄Alamgir
Yeah, third, that’s number three. Listen, I feel like a lot of people actually did bits and pieces of it. Right. We wanted to consolidate it or consolidate the core components of delivery, and that was our position, which is we can’t be all things to all people. But we think there’s core features such as app web catering, order aggregation, loyalty and call center. 

We need to take those six components and we need to go ahead and help restaurants, especially enterprise restaurants, and help them get their customers back. Help them win their customers back.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. They spend so much money, especially that level on marketing, to try to drive people in the doors for the first time. It’s like throwing good money after bad if you’re not doing things to engage them while they’re there. Develop loyalty, bring them back in. Definitely a solid cause. 

What are some things that you think you would identify as? Talk a little bit about your past. And coming up in the marketing space, what would you identify as being one of the most important things from a local marketing perspective?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I think the most important part of as I was scaling Bareburger was, how do we tell a story that this community wants to hear? Right?

You can go ahead. And this is what enterprise customers do really well, which is they tell a national story, and that can be done very well. In terms of what Dunkin’ did with Ben Affleck and all of those guys, that was a great national story that everyone resonated with. 

And how do we now take that, which is great? We need to tell national stories. How do we also tell local stories for our communities? How do we make sure this Bareburger was the neighborhood burger joint? If we can do both really well, we can win. And that’s what we tried to do. 

So we had playbooks. We literally had playbooks of what the managers needed to do to succeed in their community. So it was very community-based marketing, which is support local schools, support local sports teams, sponsor the local X and Y and Z. It was very grassroots. It was very community-based. 

And if you do that well, if you give, give, when it’s time to ask the community for help, they will return that favor, because you’re no longer a restaurant that came from New York, and you don’t belong in Connecticut or Jersey or Chicago or Toronto. Those are all the places we open locations. And when we did that right, that location succeeded and thrived. 

When we did that wrong, we struggled and we struggled. Like our Santa Monica location, we struggled, we struggled there, and we had to close our restaurant because we could not really become part of that community.

Justin Ulrich
What do you think was the challenge there in that Santa Monica location that made it so kind of the barrier for you to become part of the community?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Everyone knows this. In the restaurant industry, Santa Monica locations don’t work unless you’re from Santa Monica. I was being humble. It’s Santa Monica’s fault. I want to blame them for all of it. 99% of the blame goes to them. But not knowing that was also on us. Right. 

So picking locations is location, location, location. That old adage doesn’t change, which is, if this is not a place where we can really be part of this community, we should reconsider and come back here later. Right. Let’s continue to win the east coast and come back here later.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Very good. Yeah. It is interesting. You could talk all day about understanding your audience and knowing how to create content and marketing pieces that resonate with them. But sometimes, like you said, if you’re just not part of the community, it’s hard to break in. I’m sure that there’s that struggle, and plenty of other places other than just Santa Monica, that’s just where you guys kind of experienced. 

We’ve had a couple guests actually talk to the importance of. In fact, most of them talk the importance of community engagement and engaging with the football teams, the basketball teams, little league, like, local churches, all sorts of different groups that are nearby and becoming really ingrained into the community. It seems like that’s the right approach, for sure. 

But are there some things that maybe you’ve tried that maybe you didn’t see success with, whether it’s with community engagement or otherwise.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Did not see success with? I mean, marketing is trying 100 things, and 20 things work, and you rinse and repeat those 20 again and again. So, so many things we have tried that haven’t worked. But our second location, we opened in LaGuardia Place, NYU campus in New York, and it did not, for some reason, the first location was crushing it, hence why we opened the second location. And something was off. Something was off. Folks were not coming in, and we were like, what’s going on? What’s happening? What’s happening here? 

And I remember our CEO had this epiphany where he looked at the location and he said, you know, it’s because no one knows what the f we’re doing or what we’re selling. So what he decided to do is he decided to change the awnings, and he wanted the call to action to be super clear. So he put up new awnings. 

And the awnings, I remember it was very simply just said, “Organic burgers, organic shakes, organic salads”, and it just literally spelled out in very beautiful design what we sell. And I remember sales doubled in a month. It blew my mind. And I was very young at this point. I was 18, 19, and I just saw this one tweak, this one adjustment he made that made this restaurant from not working to working really well. 

It was just simple call to action, basic marketing, which is, what do you offer that you want people to opt into? Right. So the call to action was unclear the way that location was designed, and he just changed the awning, and it completely changed the trajectory of that location. To this day, that’s one of our more successful locations.

Justin Ulrich
Wow. That’s incredible. Yeah. It’s like any sort of marketing that you do, your message has to be extremely clear for folks to understand. A lot of times when you have a brand that is unknown like that, or maybe not very well known in the area, and maybe the name of the brand doesn’t convey enough what it is doing. Little tweaks like that can be super helpful. Yeah, very cool. 

I guess if you were to give some examples to folks who are listening today who maybe are trying to drive more traffic to their location or maybe they’re struggling to get more online orders or whatever it might be, what’s a suggestion you would have for them to do today or maybe sometime this week to help turn that around?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Yeah, I think if you are exploring deliveries because let’s say your dine in is at a good place or you’re happy with, I think the first thing you need to do is study your dine in sales. What are people coming in and what are they enjoying? Right. And that’s where delivery starts. It starts with your dine in crew or your pickup crew. If you study them, you can find a lot. 

First thing you need to do is first understand what are the things they’re ordering more for pickup versus dine in. That’s something very fairly easy to study with any point of sale system. The second thing you want to do is you want to go ahead and build a fantastic online ordering menu promoting those delivery friendly things, because not everything is meant for delivery. 

So promote those things, make sure they’re up top. And what you also want to do is now convert your first party, your dine in sales to your first party sales. You want to convert your third party sales to your first party. Right. And there’s different ways to do it. If someone is coming in and they’re always coming in for lunch, that’s a crowd. You should retarget online either via social or directly. Let’s say you collect text. Let’s say you collect email, but you need to retarget them and you need to convert them to being a digital lunch customer. 

The same thing you do for third party sales. You can take your third party sales as a SMB restaurant and you’re not going to get a lot. You’re not getting phone numbers. Oh, you’re getting phone numbers, but you’re not getting their email addresses. You’re not able to contact them. But what you can do is you can go ahead and take all of that data you have and get around 40% conversion in terms of finding them on Facebook as lookalike audiences. 

You can either find them or their friends and that’s the opportunity as well. So a lot of what you need to do is already coming to your location. Happy customers lead to more customers. So that’s where I would go ahead and have the first set of campaigns. What regulars, more than anything else want to do is feel like they’re a regular, that they’re special. 

I go to this diner downstairs in upper east side, and whenever I have a work meeting, they always will mention like, oh, everyone knows you here. And I love that feeling. I love that even though this is just a regular diner, that I feel like a local and everyone knows me by name. And when I meet an investor or someone traveling to New York and wants to meet, I get that treatment, and that is great for me. That is awesome. 

That is better than any 10%, 20% cash back on any app. If we can take these amazing experiences that are regular fields and digitize them, that’s what your community is looking for. As you convert them from dine into first party or third party to first party. You can’t convert all of them because everyone is not going to be a regular. But the regulars just want to be in the loop. They want to feel special. They want to feel exclusivity. They want to have access to things others don’t. So that’s where your first initial crowd is in terms of conversion.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that’s a very good point. It’s funny when you talk about people wanting to feel like exclusivity and like they’re in the know. Having a secret menu is something that I always love when folks do that. And if you have your audience and you’re segmenting them like you’re talking about and you have your regulars, then that’s something you can communicate to the regulars to help them feel in the know. 

And then that’s going to start an upswell of them wanting to communicate to their friends that they know about this secret menu. And now you’re driving more folks to your location.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
100%. And that way, when things go wrong, because we’re in the hospitality business, things will go wrong. That customer is more forgiving because it’s irregular. You’re a regular here. This is your location. 

You don’t go on Yelp. You communicate to the restaurant very politely, and you tip extra heavy that day because you share some criticism. I think there is no negative to building this community, whether that’s digital or in store.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. And when you get into hard times, like we experienced with COVID the community is going to be what helps keep you on your feet, keep you from shuttering the doors.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Absolutely.

Justin Ulrich
So who would you like to shout out for someone who you think is doing an incredible job from a marketing perspective, whether it’s local or national or delivery, whatever it may be?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I’m such a big fan of so many groups out there. Who do I love from our system? I love our customer Clean Juice. What they do, they have the subscription program on our app where you can be a subscription user and get juices on the regular, almost like a Netflix subscription. 

And we were able to enable that tech and enable that program. But I love that they wanted that program. It’s called their cleanse program because they believe so much in this lifestyle, this lifestyle where you should really care about what you’re putting into your body, whether it’s organic or the few things you need on a daily basis in terms of getting all your regular veggies and fruits and et cetera. I think they do a great job. 

And for us to be able to enable that program was fantastic. And they do tons of awesome marketing there. 

We love what Walk-On’s does. They do a lot of great stuff. That’s one of our customers as well. They have TVs in their locations, and it’s a vibe in there. It’s awesome in there. And they have built a great in store experience. Nothing to do with the tech, but they have built a wonderful in store experience. And they’re just connected to, some know, NFL stars, Drew Brees, I know they did a campaign with him and others, so they do really cool stuff. 

Who else? Who else? My local diner, once in a while, he has a tray full of OJs, fresh squeeze OJs. And he goes around the room, gives it to everyone. I mean, that’s great marketing, right? What’s wrong with that? Who else is great things that we really appreciate and always am. I love everything Dunkin’ did this year. I don’t know if anyone has. Ben Affleck has become a part of cultural zeitgeist now. No one’s had a better PR 180 turnaround than Ben Affleck. So, I mean, he is the one to consider.

Justin Ulrich
It was so funny. And what’s crazy is it wasn’t just an ad. It was a full campaign where you could buy the actual swag. And they sold out of the jackets and stuff.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
They did everything. They nailed it. They did the custom Nike dunks. They did. They did the ads. They had the wifey in there. They had Brady in there. They said, you know what? We’re going all out.

Justin Ulrich
What’s funny is it’s like, that’s everything else aside, just focusing on the ad. That’s exactly what you want to see when you watch a Super Bowl ad. Like, they nailed it.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I think Geoff from Wow Bao is incredible.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, yeah.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
He’s a pioneer. I’m so inspired by him as I’m very inspired him as a human at home and how amazing he is as a dad and a husband. But then you see him as a leader and you’re like, is this guy for real? He is constantly taking risks. He is constantly pushing the ball forward and he’s doing a service to the rest of us. 

He’s doing things first and he’s doing it at cost to himself so we can all learn from him and add it five years later. And he’s done that with being the first mover in loyalty, first mover in gift card, first mover in NFT technology that he’s using to build his loyalty program now. I think he’s incredible and I think he doesn’t get enough kudos for how early he pushes forward.

Justin Ulrich
And CBG, I had him on the show. He was one of the first, probably ten episodes I think that we had in this podcast. Absolutely fantastic guest. The first one that I actually, we were just cracking up laughing because he’s just such a good dude. But afterward he sent like, I shared a little love with him on LinkedIn and then he sent me a huge swag box and then like a week later I got multiple two big boxes of Wow Baos. I’m like, I don’t have room in the freezer for all of them. And it was like, we ate Wow Baos for a week.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I have to buy my own Wow Baos from Amazon. Good for you.

Justin Ulrich
It was awesome. Yeah, he gets it. But that’s the thing. He understands marketing. He gave an example, too, from a local marketing perspective. Whenever a new business comes into town near one of his locations, they run over, they give him some food when they’re busy during the holiday season or whatever it may be. And whenever anyone asks for a recommendation where to go, they always say, yeah, go over here to Wow Bao. 

Because they created such a moment of surprise and delight that they win people over and they stay top of mind because they do it consistently and to then go and turn around and put it into action and send a moment of surprise and delight to me. Now he gives me more stuff that I’m in, right? I got to do some free marketing and turn around and share some love back. 

And I said this before, he operates out of Chicago like you’ve seen the mob movies, I can’t get out, right? He’s just going to keep sending me stuff. I got to keep creating free marketing for him. But that’s good back and forth where it’s low cost but you’re getting, like, user generated content is some of the best content that you can get created.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Yeah. Because you don’t know where, like, this is the beauty of meme culture. You don’t know where the meme will become. The best memes are things that you didn’t mean for it to be a meme. It became a meme. Right. For example, let’s go back to Ben Affleck. He became a meme because he just has a resting face at award shows that doesn’t look like he’s having fun. He didn’t mean for that to happen. 

It happened because that’s how the world is. Things take over. You don’t know who people will find interesting or what people will find interesting. So when that was interesting, what you do with that is what matters. And what Dunkin’ did with that was like, hey, we’re going to take the fact that he has this resting face and also he’s a big fan of Dunkin’. 

There’s paparazzi photos of him always picking up Dunkin’ from his front door. And we’re going to make sense of this and we’re going to take advantage of this and kudos to them. But similarly, I think what we can do as a hospitality industry is put it out there and be brave and test things out and see how the market reacts to it and what takes over and lean in.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. 100%. It’s one of those things that the moment comes and goes, and if you don’t have your finger on the pulse of things, you miss out on massive opportunities, for sure. 

Well, shifting gears a little bit, when I was doing a little digging to try to find what could I make an AI image of Nabeel doing? And I reached out to your team and they were gracious enough to give me a little insight into what you love. And apparently you love James Bond movies. Is that correct?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I love James Bond movies. He’s great. Daniel Craig. Oh, my lord.

Justin Ulrich
Daniel Craig. I’m talking the Nabeel unicorn.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Whoa. I like it. I love it. I love it. Look at the gray, the gray beard.

Justin Ulrich
Little bit of pepper. You can’t be 30 under 30 forever.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
This is great. I’m no longer. I promise you, I’m aging.

Justin Ulrich
And when I saw this, I was like, oh, man. I knew you were in trouble when you walked in.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Is that four?

Justin Ulrich
I think I’m done. I don’t want to cause any bad blood.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Five.

Justin Ulrich
I removed you, sir. What did you say?

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
No worries. No, I said we leave it at five. Five is a great way to go.

Justin Ulrich
It is.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
That’s amazing. How’d you guys make that?

Justin Ulrich
I use a program called Midjourney.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Midjourney.

Justin Ulrich
Okay. Yeah, it’s fun because you have to kind of have an idea of kind of what you want it to be because you have to give it prompts and direction. And then from there, I use Photoshop. And that Photoshop is actually, with their generative AI added the car right in there. It’s crazy what tech can do.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Now it looks like a Aston Martin.

Justin Ulrich
I tried doing Aston Martin. I’ll show it again. It gave a couple different types of vehicles, but it did not quite recognize what Aston Martin.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
I love Geoff’s. I love Geoff’s when he had the headband, that was iconic. Iconic.

Justin Ulrich
It really was. Anyways, hey, it’s been a lot of fun having you on. How can folks who are listening follow you? Follow Lunchbox.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Go to our website, lunchbox.io. Follow us on LinkedIn. We’re active on LinkedIn. And, yeah, if you know, enterprise restaurants connect us. We love hanging out with them. Eventually SMB many moons from now, but we help enterprise restaurants right now.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Yeah, give Lunchbox a follow. They’ve got awesome content. You guys have great awards right now. You have the recognizing 30 women in the restaurant industry.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Yes. That’s our longest running thing ever we’ve done. And huge kudos to Savannah, our head of marketing, who started that while she was like a marketing manager, just joined a company. I don’t know why she started it. I think she knew she was going to become a head of marketing soon, and she was just.

Justin Ulrich
She wanted to be on the list.

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
No, I’ve tried to put her on the list every year. She said no to me every year. But I think it was her way of celebrating the women of our industry, getting to know them and getting to learn from them. And it’s been incredible. It’s been incredible. 

Like, for example, someone on our list early in its inception was Amy Ham, who’s become a friend of hers now and mentors her. And it’s been amazing to watch that. Right. To watch this list not just become a list we do, but also something more intentional.

Justin Ulrich
No. Very, very solid way to give back to the community, for sure. It’s a thing that I think needs to be recognized more often. And you guys taking the lead in that is incredible. 

Nabeel 🦄 Alamgir
Thank you for everything you do, man. You do awesome stuff. Just highlighting the community, highlighting incredible people for the community. Big fan. So thank you for having me.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, you bet. Thanks for joining us.

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. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

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.