If we’re being totally honest, most of us in QSR marketing have spent the last couple of years waiting for the consumer to cheer up.
And I get why they haven’t. Bills are up and budgets are stretched, and that’s before you turn on the news. The world seems to be on fire, sometimes literally.
A year ago, Bikky surveyed 50 multi-unit restaurant CMOs and 66% named the macroeconomy and consumer sentiment as their biggest worry for 2026. Shocker – we were all pretty miserable then too.
This autumn they went back to five of those CMOs to see how it played out, and their follow-up is well worth a read. The short version: traffic is still hard, value still matters enormously, and nobody expects 2027 to be much kinder.
Reading it, I couldn’t get Monty Python out of my head. Specifically the end of Life of Brian, where a group of people in about the worst situation imaginable start whistling Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. (If you know, you know.)
Daft and dark, yes, but weirdly good advice for QSR right now. Because tucked inside those five fairly gloomy conversations are some real bright spots, and the brands finding their own are the ones still growing.
Same consumer, very different results
Underneath the consensus, the five brands are a long way apart.
A 20-unit fast-casual brand is still growing. When it dips, it can point to something specific, like a food-safety news cycle or the World Cup. When it grows, it can point to a simpler menu and sharper digital merchandising. A 45-unit full-service brand has stopped chasing traffic altogether to protect its margin. Whilst a 15-unit CMO says, “We have damaged our brand by being too reactive and too tactical.”
It takes guts for a CMO to say that out loud, and it’s the most useful line in the whole piece.
At Massive Rocket, our team works with QSR brands on CRM and customer data every day, and that spread matches what they see. So what does looking on the bright side actually mean when you’re running a QSR brand? Here’s my take.
1. A broad discount is a tax you keep paying
When traffic softens, the reflex is a bigger offer for more people. It works for a few weeks, then it becomes the price, and you’re back in the same meeting with less margin to play with. Bikky’s 15-unit CMO called the industry’s value obsession a “race to the bottom”, and reckons the money would have done more good spent on the restaurants themselves. Hard to argue with.
I’m not about to tell you value is dead (I’d never write a “value is dead” blog, promise). Value still works when it’s specific. At the 50-unit casual brand, a $10.99 lunch deal, $4 Taco Tuesday and kids eat free are among the few occasions still driving positive traffic. Clear offers, tied to a moment, that a guest can actually remember.
The bright-side question is a narrower one. Who actually needs this offer to visit, and who was coming anyway?
A discount handed to a guest who’d already decided to come in is margin given away for nothing. Most QSR brands have never held back a control group to find out which is which.
2. Your averages are hiding the answer
This is where the bright side really lives.
One market at the 50-unit brand is up six to seven percent, with no demographic reason to be. Two of its redesigned restaurants are beating their pro forma by almost 30%.
Now zoom out to the chain-level comp.
Flat, or worse.
You’d never know either of them was there.
System-wide sales are brilliant at confirming you’re under pressure (thanks, we’d noticed) and not much use for telling you what to do about it. The useful detail only shows up when you break performance down by location, daypart, channel and guest, then ask why one of them is behaving differently.
But, most QSR brands hold that data in five or six places: POS, app, kiosk, delivery platforms, loyalty, web. Each one tells a partial story and none of them agree on who the guest is. Until that’s joined up into one clean view of the customer, the customer insights stay invisible and the decisions stay broad.
It’s not glamorous. Hardly sexy. But getting that single view right is how the bright spots stop hiding, and that’s a pretty exciting outcome, if you ask me.
3. Marketing can’t fix the four walls, but it can show you where they’re cracking
As a marketer, I’ll hold my hand up: the CMOs are right on this one. No campaign makes up for a dining room that doesn’t work or a team that can’t sell the menu. The 50-unit CMO put it better than I could: “There isn’t any kind of silver bullet we can offer on the marketing side.”
Good customer data still has a job to do inside the restaurant, though. If one store’s repeat rate drops after a staffing change, or digital orders from one location get a little smaller every week, your CRM data saw it first.
When was the last time a signal like that made it from your CRM team to the people actually running the restaurants? For most brands, it never does. Close that loop and marketing data becomes something your COO actually wants to read.
4. “Third-party” and “loyalty” aren’t single levers
Bikky’s CMOs found DoorDash and Uber Eats reacted in opposite ways to the same cut in ad spend. One loyalty programme grew sales while spending 25% less, and another watched its return fall as redemptions rose. Same line on the P&L, but with very different behaviour underneath.
So for each one, ask what changes behaviour for this guest, on this channel, at a profit. Some of the answers will surprise you, and a few of them will be bright spots.
What I’d do in the next 90 days
I’m not trying to paint a picture that’s impossible to act on. None of this needs a two-year transformation programme before you see anything. Here’s where I’d start:
- Pick your biggest promotion from the last quarter and ask how much of the revenue would have happened without it. If nobody can answer, that’s your first priority.
- Hold back a small control group on your always-on CRM and offers from now on. It’s the only way to know what’s incremental.
- Find your best-performing market or store and explain it with data before anyone copies it.
- Get one view of the guest across app, kiosk, POS and delivery, even if it starts rough. Clean data is the floor, not the ceiling.
None of it is rocket science (and I say that working at Massive Rocket).
It’s also the order our team works in with QSR clients: fix the data, fix the reports, and only then decide where to spend. That’s the backbone of our Agentic CRM framework, and it matters even more now that AI tools are starting to make decisions on brands’ behalf. Point an agent at messy data and it’ll just make bad calls faster, and with more confidence.
None of the five CMOs expects much help from the consumer in 2027. Fair enough. But the 50-unit brand’s best market and its two redesigned sites are already showing it where to look, and I’d bet most QSR businesses have the same bright spots sitting in their data right now.
If you’d like a hand finding them, start with our book, Agentic CRM: The Five-Step Method. It’s the method our team uses with QSR brands, written down properly for the first time. We’ll bring the method.
You bring the whistling.
