Yum! Brands: building brands, building growth

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct 15, 2007

A strategic brand builder, Emil Brolick is a driving force behind the Yum! principle of insight marketing, and a firm believer that there is still a lot of growth potential in the company's five U.S. brands. Brolick, after 30 years in the fast-food business (most recently as president and chief concept officer of Taco Bell), was selected to head the newly created post of Yum! Brands' president of U.S. brand building.

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Brolick was named to his new position in December 2006 after six years as Taco Bell's president and chief concept officer where he led the restaurant brand to five consecutive years of sales, transaction and profit growth. Taco Bell is the second most profitable quick service restaurant brand in the U.S.

David Novak, chairman and chief executive officer of Yum! Brands, commended his qualifications with these words: "Emil Brolick has demonstrated he is one of the most talented brand builders in the entire restaurant industry. Under his leadership, Taco Bell has strengthened its differentiation and value leadership, and has become the second most profitable restaurant concept in the U.S. I'm excited he will leverage his tremendous experience across all our U.S. brands to build powerful and sustainable growth."

Brolick works with the U.S. brand presidents to build even stronger businesses and is responsible for ensuring brand, sales and profit growth through a unique brand positioning, a fully stocked pipeline of new products, driving branded service and training, and seeking major productivity gains. Several months into his new role, Brolick said that one of the major things that Yum! Brands is focusing on in the U.S. is building category-leading brands.

"Each of our brands has tremendous heritage and great strengths and we're making them even more powerful by building greater relevance, energy and differentiation for our customers," said Brolick.

Brolick said that Yum! is accelerating its innovation focus by sharing best practices and implementing a consumer and marketing insights process, called the Yum! Insights Marketing Model, across the brands.

"Taco Bell was the reference point to take the Yum! Insights Marketing model and apply it to KFC and Pizza Hut," said Brolick. Noting that the quick-service business is driven largely by advertising and marketing, the model, credited for leading to five years of same-store sales growth at Taco Bell, is being used to further his goal of achieving similar success with Yum!'s other brands.

Brolick hopes to continue or improve upon the 2006 financial results of 3-percent growth in operating profit in Yum!'s U.S. business and $1 billion in operating cash flow. In order to improve, he said Yum! is focused on process and discipline around brand building. "We have industry-leading innovation at our brands," said Brolick. "Our biggest opportunity is consistency--building consistent same-store sales growth, consistent operations execution and consistent best practice sharing among our brands."

He said he expects Yum!'s one-system mindset to guide future progress. Over the past 10 years, Yum! has reinvigorated all three of its major brands, he noted, and is continuing that process.

"The food industry is a high-excitement business and we have to produce the kind of food excitement and news that brings people into our stores. Brand relevance exists at moments in time, so we constantly have to give people reasons to come back to our brands," said Brolick.

Brolick added, "We have the brand leaders in four food categories in place to drive sustainable sales and profit performance in our U.S. business, and we're working hard to bring our brand essence to life for our customer in every restaurant."

Brolick said that a key part of building strong brands today is consistent brand delivery at the store level. Yum! is implementing a philosophy at all of its brands called the "Three People Rights," having the right people, the right number of those people and the right deployment. Although Brolick believes customers come to Yum!'s restaurants primarily for the food, he said they're more likely to come more often if they also get great service. "We're making sure that everybody gets a 'bring 'em back' experience," he said.

Yum! is also focusing on continuously improving its operating systems and is updating its assets to make sure that the KFCs, Pizza Huts, and Taco Bells customers see are excellent representations of those brand positions. "We are taking our assets to the next level," Brolick said.

Another continuing strategy involves multibranding, with the most successful being the combination of the KFC and Taco Bell brands. "This works very well in small markets of 10,000 people or less, where it's difficult to make the economics work, plus in the most expensive markets, such as in the Northeast," Brolick explained.

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Of Yum!'s three major brands, the company is the leader in the pizza, Mexican-style food and chicken categories. Pizza Hut has 14 percent of the pizza segment, Taco Bell holds a 65-percent share of the Mexican quick-service segment and KFC has 47 percent of the bone-in chicken market.