Stop Building Your Marketing Calendar Around What's Trending

Most franchise marketing calendars are built backwards. Someone sees a brand doing something interesting, brings it into a meeting, and suddenly there's a budget line item for a tactic that has nothing to do with where the brand is trying to go. I've been in that meeting. I've probably run that meeting.

That's why my conversation with Brandon Rhoten, CMO at Dave's Hot Chicken, hit harder than I expected. We set out to talk about product launches and influencer strategy. What we actually talked about was discipline — and why most franchise marketing teams don't have it yet.

The process nobody wants to do and everybody needs

Brandon has spent nearly twenty years in restaurant marketing. CMO at Papa John's, CMO at Potbelly, built the digital and social program at Wendy's. So when he walked through how a product actually gets from idea to menu, I was taking notes.

It starts with a filter. Not a budget, not a brainstorm — a filter. What does your customer actually need? What does your brand stand for? Those two questions will kill most ideas fast, which is the point. Brandon put it simply: "It creates a filter at the front end of the entire process that lets you weed out thousands of ideas really, really fast."

Once something clears the filter, you ops test it. Not to see if customers like it — to see if the kitchen can actually pull it off consistently. Then you market test it in a representative set of stores. You want to know if it drives traffic, if it lifts check, and critically, whether it's incremental or just cannibalizing what you already sell. "If you can get to incremental and ideally incremental and traffic growing even better," Brandon said, "that lets you actually make choices on what to launch when."

Here's the part that stings: that full process takes about a year for a QSR or fast casual brand. You're testing next summer's products this summer. Most brands aren't doing this. And when they're not, they're rushing to launch things that didn't have a real chance, watching them underperform, and then rushing to launch something else to make up for it.

Brandon is direct about why it's hard to get organizations to slow down: "You have to have enough mistakes that people don't want to see more mistakes, or you have to have enough predictive power in your testing that you can actually forecast what will happen with the business." The second a marketer can predict what a launch will do and then deliver exactly that, everyone gets on board. Because what the C suite wants isn't new products — it's predictability.

The contingency no one builds

There's a second benefit to having a tested pipeline that doesn't get talked about enough. When something unexpected hits the business, you have options. A tested product sitting in the queue can be moved up. You're not scrambling to create something from nothing under pressure — which is exactly when the bad launches happen.

I'll admit I shared my own version of this on the episode. I once launched a product that had already underperformed in a pilot, with no real contingency plan, on hope. Sales were flat. We got lucky it didn't hurt us. The lesson I took: a contingency in the hopper isn't just nice to have. It's what separates reactive marketing from marketing that actually drives the business.

Culture isn't a channel — it's a point of view

The second half of our conversation shifted to the thing Dave's Hot Chicken is most known for: its cultural relevance. And I had to ask, because it looks effortless from the outside and I suspected it wasn't.

Brandon was clear that Dave's doesn't chase trends. They don't do TikTok dances. What they do instead is hold up a mirror. "We put our customers on big stages and big platforms," he said. "If you look at almost all of our work, it's rarely things we make. It's usually things that people do for us and then we project out into the world."

The through-line from Wendy's to Dave's isn't the tactic — it's the principle. At Wendy's, the positioning was challenger brand with charm. At Dave's, it's mirror to the customer. Different voices, same discipline: know what you stand for and don't deviate from it because someone else is doing something interesting.

Brandon made a point that I think franchise marketers need to hear more often: "I wouldn't chase any channel that isn't fundamentally important for the goals you have and how you're gonna build your brand." Social worked for Wendy's and Dave's because it was the right fit for those brands at that moment. He's had brands where it wasn't the right fit and they grew anyway. The channel follows the strategy, not the other way around.

For brands that feel boxed in — a focused menu, a single service category, a concept that doesn't lend itself to constant product news — Brandon's example of Dave's partnership calendar is instructive. They don't always need a new product to have a cultural moment. The X-Men 97 promotion, the Fallout collab — those aren't random. They're chosen because they connect to the niche Dave's serves, not because they're mainstream. "We're the kind of brand that wouldn't team up with Marvel for a new blockbuster movie. That's a little too mainstream for us."

Stop reporting on impressions

Brandon ended with something I'd put on the wall of every franchise marketing office. When I asked what franchise marketers should stop doing right now, he didn't hesitate: stop talking about vanity metrics.

"Franchisees, I mean, I'm a franchisee myself. I own restaurants. And what franchisees care about is are more people showing up and am I making money?" Impressions don't answer that question. Traffic does. Profitable traffic does. The moment a marketer shifts to speaking in those terms, the franchisee relationship changes entirely.

So here's the question I'd leave you with: if you pulled your last board presentation or franchisee marketing update, how many of the metrics you led with were things franchisees actually care about — and how many were things that are easier to report?

This post was inspired by a conversation with Brandon Rhoten, CMO, Dave's Hot Chicken, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in September 2026. Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/UzVlGIBo3CA