If buy a single cinema ticket on a Friday night, one ticket, clearly just me, obviously a spontaneous and possibly slightly tragic Friday night decision. Come Saturday morning my phone pings, an app notification, a QSR brand with a “bring the family” meal deal and a picture of four smiling people eating nuggets together.
Are they trying to rub my lack of a social circle in my face? My wife just doesn’t like going to the cinema, that’s all. Honestly. I think it’s just really lazy marketing, because the data was right there…
One adult.
One ticket.
Friday evening.
Yet, somehow the message that landed was designed for a completely different human being entirely.
This is the thing that drives me nuts about QSR marketing, and it isn’t really about the technology, or the budgets, or even the strategy in the abstract. It’s about the people. Because behind every database row, every send target, every campaign metric that gets celebrated in a Monday morning review, there’s a real human being. Someone who you’re genuinely trying to win over, someone you want to like you, not just tolerate you, not just click occasionally because a deal happened to be good enough. If we’re being honest, you want them to love you, above all other options, above the place across the road and the one that appeared in their feed ten minutes ago.
And what does a message like that actually say to them? Not the one you intended to send, but the one they received, the one that looked at their behaviour, had all the information it needed, and still decided to send them something that feels like it was designed for someone else entirely.
To me the message is clear: we see a number. We don’t really see you.
I’ve had some version of this conversation with marketers across QSR brands more times than I can honestly count. There’s a guy I know, let’s call him Steve, who I seem to bump into at every industry event going. He’s sharp, genuinely cares about doing this properly, has the instincts and the experience to know exactly what good looks like. And every single time I see him, he tells me the same story – the data is all there, we could be doing so much more with it, but the brief comes down and the deadline looms and they end up sending the same message to the same million people. There’s just never enough time, resource or organisational appetite to do anything else.
And Steve’s not alone.
Batch and blast persists not because people think it’s a brilliant idea, but because it’s considerably easier than the alternative. It hits the send target, it gets the quarter over the line, it delivers something – and something has always been easier to defend than a braver, more considered approach that takes longer to show results. And let’s face it, it usually does come down to time, and I understand that completely. I’ve sat inside those pressures and felt the pull of the path of least resistance, and I don’t think the people making those calls are wrong to feel it.
Does that make it a smart play? Well, you don’t have to listen to me, listen to your audience.
Over 70% of QSR customers say loyalty programmes influence where they choose to eat. 91% say they value a personalised loyalty experience, with half of them calling it extremely valuable. That’s not a niche preference held by a handful of enthusiastic app users. It’s the vast majority of the people sitting in your restaurants and tapping through your app, telling you clearly and repeatedly that relevance matters. They notice when it’s there and they notice when it isn’t. And yet the same research consistently shows that most programmes are still missing the mark on exactly that, still sending the same message to the same million people, still prioritising volume over the kind of signals that would actually make someone feel known.
Feel special.
Feel loved.
The gap between what customers want and what most brands are actually delivering isn’t a technology gap, at least not primarily. I think it’s more about belief. It starts with whether a team genuinely believes that a message which lands for the right person at the right moment is worth more than a message that lands for everyone at the wrong one. And, actually, whether that belief is strong enough to survive the first quarterly planning cycle where the easier option is sitting right there on the table.
The QSR brands that are starting to pull away from the pack aren’t necessarily sitting on bigger budgets or more sophisticated stacks than everyone else. Although big budgets never hurt. They’ve just started asking a different question – not “what do we want to say this week?” but “what does this person need to hear right now, and what do we actually know about them that should shape it?” They’ve stopped treating their audience as a volume play, and started treating them as a people they’d like to genuinely engage. It sounds simple, but in practice requires a fairly fundamental shift in how briefs get written, how campaigns get planned, and how success gets measured.
And the rewards for making that shift are not marginal. Personalised emails consistently outperform batch sends by significant margins. Triggered, behaviour-led messages perform three times better than their blast equivalents. Not three percent. Three times. That’s the size of the opportunity sitting quietly inside the data that Steve and his team already have.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. And yet…
Saturday morning.
Family meal deal.
One cinema ticket.
Steve will get there. Most of them will. The question is just how many nugget-family pictures they send to solo film-goers in the meantime, and how many of those people quietly decide that another brand understands them a little bit better.
And with younger generations, that decision is not always a quiet one.
If you work for a brand that’s ready to stop making people cry into their popcorn, let’s talk. At Massive Rocket, helping brands close the gap between the data they have and the people behind it is exactly what we do.
Get in touch and let’s make their experience a little better, together.
