Taco Bell chief executive Greg Creed has been a force behind some of the brand’s most memorable moves.
As chief marketing officer in 2001, he helped develop the “Think Outside the Bun” slogan, which the 6,000-plus-unit chain used for over a decade. Later, as chief executive he led the introduction of the “Live Más” ad campaign and the expansion into new dayparts with late-night Fourthmeal and the rollout of a breakfast menu. Most notably, he oversaw the debut of Doritos Locos Tacos, which at more than 800 million sold has become the most successful product launch in the chain’s history.
He has said his goal is to double the chains systemwide sales to $14 billion by 2022.
Creed’s reputation for innovation, marketing acumen and sales building over his 20-year tenure at Taco Bell parent Yum! Brands Inc. led to his latest promotion to chief executive of the Louisville, Ky.-based company, effective January 2015. In that role he’ll oversee Taco Bell, as well as KFC and Pizza Hut, which together comprise 40,000 locations worldwide.
David Novak, whom Creed will succeed as chief executive, has called Creed a “breakthrough thinker.”
Creed recently spoke with Don Fox, chief executive of Firehouse of America, parent to the Firehouse Subs chain, about the power of simplicity, the importance of giving back and the upside of making mistakes.
An excerpt from their conversation follows.
Don Fox: [What] would say you were really proud of in your four years of great success at Taco Bell?
Greg Creed: We’ve definitely changed the way we market to our customers. I mean, I think we were a very early adopter of the mobile, social, digital world and I think we’ve done an amazing job … of really connecting with our Millennials. We’ve been on the cutting edge of customer engagement, and sometimes for a big brand that’s not easy.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the last four years really focused on how to enhance the team member experience, and there’s one area in particular I’m very proud of, which is education. We can have the greatest marketing in the world, but why would we expect our team members to treat our customers any better than we treat them?
DF: As you now take on leadership of all of the brands within Yum, if you could just wave the magic wand and transplant [an element of Taco Bell’s brand and culture] into all the brands, is there anything that you might put on your wish list?
GC: I think the thing I’m going to take from Taco Bell most is I want to fill Yum with people that are smart, have huge hearts, [and] are courageous to make the big decisions. The world’s becoming even more competitive and it takes a lot of courage of conviction. That’s what I think is going to be the key to success.
DF: The earlier part of your career was rooted in marketing. What advice might you have for other marketing professionals who might aspire to branch out into other areas of executive management?
GC: It’s a question I get asked a lot. And my answer is this: You won’t always be right, but you always have to be clear. As customers and audiences fragment, there’s the risk that you go chasing everybody, and what happens is you lose what the brand stands for. What are the values we stand for, not just what are the products that we sell? Brands that go chasing every whim and every customer’s peculiarity end up being very diffused [and] are the brands that won’t be successful.
Less is more
DF: I often tell my own team if I can’t concisely articulate the culture of our brand and company, both to our customers and to our employees, I’ve got a huge problem.
GC: We have [a] phrase at Taco Bell, “Less is Mas,” — less is more. I had a chance to go to Apple in the Steve Jobs era for the day and meet their executive team. My takeaway was this idea called addition by subtraction, which is [that] you make the idea clearer when you subtract all the periphery. What tends to happen is a marketing person does this and the next person thinks they have to come on and add something, then the next brand manager adds another thing and then you’ve added so many things you’ve lost the identity of what you started with.
DF: When you look at the [social and] economic factors that impact our business, what do you see as the key challenges?
GC: Youth unemployment is a huge issue. Even though unemployment in total may be improving … youth unemployment has not shown the same sort of improvements. In our UK KFC business, we’ve partnered with Barnardo’s [children’s charities, and] we have a Barnardo’s kid working in every KFC in the UK.
At Taco Bell we’re working with the Boys and Girls Club to say, ‘Okay, how could we employ at least one Boys and Girls Club [youth] in every Taco Bell?’ At Taco Bell we’ve been really maniacal around helping teenagers graduate high school and get an education. Because we employ so many people around the world, I really do believe that Yum can have a positive influence on youth unemployment.
DF: Things like that are tremendous for the way our industry is viewed because so often we are, to put it kindly, unfairly demonized.
GC: People forget that we are usually a lot of people’s first job. We teach them skills beyond how to make tacos, pizzas, chicken sandwiches or hamburgers. The principles of — you’re a part of a team, you need to turn up on time, you need to be engaged when you’re there. I think that helps makes people a better member of society.
DF: [Many] people would agree that our most valuable lessons come from mistakes that we make. Anything that stands out that you’d do differently or have learned from?
GC: Mistakes are dots, and one day they’ll come back and you’ll be able to [connect] that dot to help you make a better decision.
[While at Unilever in the early 1980s], I had a soap promotion and I put twelve bars of soap in this huge box. [It sold so well that] we made too many. It doubled in share and I thought I was this hero … and then all of a sudden people stopped buying it. I had forgotten the fact that 12 cakes of soap times the number of people in Australia times how long a cake lasts … People didn’t [need] to buy any more soap. Because even if I sell you more soap, you don’t decide to shower more often, right? The last few hundred cases or a thousand cases, we had to bury in a landfill somewhere. The lesson I learned was don’t let my enthusiasm get in the way of the economics, the underlying math.
I used it when we launched the Doritos Locos Taco. I was just maniacal about understanding how much had been made, how much was in the warehouses, how much was shipping, how much was going out in consumer demand. It took me 30 years to learn. But it’s a just a dot. One day that dot will become a positive dot, when you learn the life lesson and you don’t make the same mistake twice.
Don Fox is chief executive of Firehouse of America LLC, parent to the Firehouse Subs chain. He has been with the brand since 2003 and has been CEO since 2009. Fox won a Golden Chain award in 2011, and was also named Operator of the Year, the highest honor given by Nation’s Restaurant News, that same year.
