A Burger King restaurant.
Burger King has tilted at Wendy’s for years in an up-and-down battle for the spot as the world’s No. 2 burger chain after McDonald’s.
Now Patrick Doyle comes along to give the flagship property of Restaurant Brands International a major dose of expertise and capital in the hopes of making a decisive difference for the home of the Whopper. The highly successful former CEO of Domino’s and executive chairman of RBI is teaming with the new chief of the Burger King brand, Josh Kobza, to enact a multi-year plan they hope will put the chain firmly on the path to financial and franchisee success for the long term.
Doyle has got $30 million of his own money invested in the effort and a five-year contractual commitment to see it succeed. He’s also got a track record and a roadmap for navigating many of the issues he sees at Burger King because he already encountered them at Domino’s.
“I’ve done this before,” Doyle told me exclusively. “I understand the dynamics and what it takes to get a [QSR] business moving forward quickly and how to accelerate growth. Some of it is just experience. You can move quickly and confidently when you’ve done it before.”
What Doyle did before, over a decade at the helm of Domino’s, was display a strong concern for franchisee health, overhaul a weak product, break through with candid marketing messages, build a winning company culture, keep international operations growing apace, and create a groundbreaking mastery of ordering and delivery technology to catapult Domino’s to the No. 1 spot in the pizza industry worldwide.
But while the good news is that Doyle has been here before, the bad news is: So has Burger King. He faces big roadblocks, some of which are different than what Doyle faced when he became CEO of a beaten-down Domino’s in 2010. Franchisee health is a main thrust of Doyle’s plan, similar to the challenge he faced at Domino’s, but on a short-term basis it’s a strong concern for Burger King. The chain remains behind the leaders in important aspects of ordering and operations technology, and Burger King’s new leadership doesn’t yet have the bandwidth to overhaul some of the other fundamentals of today’s QSR business, including breakfast and coffee.
Finally, there’s still Wendy’s. Unlike in the fast-pizza business, where Domino’s faced no formidable competitor as it succeeded in taking control of the industry under Doyle, Wendy’s isn’t sitting still for any new broadsides from RBI. The Dublin, Ohio-based giant is moving forward with its own revamp, which includes targeting systemwide sales growth in the mid-single-digit percentages through 2025 as it embarks on a restructuring plan to streamline costs and to improve financial returns for well-performing franchisees.
After retiring from Domino’s in 2018, leaving the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based chain at the apex of the pizza industry, Doyle spent a few years with the giant Carlyle private-equity firm but didn’t engage in any major gambits there. Now with RBI, Doyle says, he’s drilling into “some big opportunities to create value here.”
His new company is helping Doyle out by pairing him with Kobza, who over 11 years already has served as chief operating officer, chief financial officer and chief technology officer for the Toronto-based operator and owner of Tim Hortons, Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, and Firehouse Subs.
Before Doyle’s arrival, Burger King already had launched an initiative known internally as “Reclaim the Flame”: a $400-million strategic-turnaround effort that includes substantial advertising and digital investments, restaurant remodelings, operational overhauls, and financial incentives for franchisees that successfully leverage what the parent company is doing for the brand.
“Their plans already seem to be hitting the mark in customer perceptions: technology, the store, quality — basically what Domino’s playbook was,” said Rich Shank, senior principal and vice president of innovation for Technomic, a restaurant-consulting firm in Chicago.
Nevertheless, Doyle is sanguine about the future of Burger King as well, in part because of the turnaround he led at Domino’s. When he was promoted to CEO of the company after serving as head of international operations and U.S. president for several years, Doyle immediately pivoted to making its pizza taste better, going so far as to apologize personally for Domino’s food quality in a TV commercial.
Just as important, Doyle prioritized the crucial matter of Domino’s franchisees’ confidence and health as the industry and the economy climbed out of the Great Recession, and he created a new growth arc for the brand on digital ordering and fulfillment technology that a decade ago was just starting to overtake the QSR business.
Says Doyle, “We’re putting additional dollars in, and assuming we get franchisees to certain levels of profitability, they’ll pick it up and invest more into the brand in 2025 and 2026.”
Kobza concedes that franchisees “needed a comprehensive plan for meaningful investment from us to get momentum in the business again and for them to believe we were putting their success front and center. We have that plan in place, and though it is early, the steps we took to emphasize their profitability” were important.
At the same time, Burger King has a challenging path ahead to get its digital technology up to par with the rest of the QSR industry. “We have a lot of work to do, but we’re part-way through,” Kobza says. Of the $400-million internal initiative, he explains, about $50 million is “just for franchisees to upgrade the technology in their restaurants: point-of-sale terminals, screens in the back of the restaurants, cabling — all will get a big push over the next year or so.”
It's a good thing, says Olivier Thierry, chief revenue officer for restaurant-tech provider HungerRush. “Burger King is realizing that they have to digitally transform their operations; that’s clear,” he says. “They have to build out a tech stack that brings them into the 21st century.”
At Domino’s, Doyle’s challenge with technology was more about ensuring the chain could become a leader in the digital ordering and fulfillment methods that were just becoming available, especially mobile apps. Domino’s lunged into the online future with hundreds of new tech employees and a flurry of moves to revolutionize customer convenience in ordering pizza and tracking its delivery, and its success in that arena was probably the biggest factor in its overtaking Pizza Hut for industry leadership in revenues near the end of Doyle’s tenure in 2018.
“It was a big revolution, because Domino’s hadn’t taken technology seriously prior to 2009, says Aaron Nilsson, chief information officer of Jet’s Pizza, a regional chain based in Sterling Heights, Mich., who was global in-store technology manager for Domino’s for about three years under Doyle. “It was a giant team effort. But the key thing he did is to take technology in house and recognize it as a strategic thing and make sure the finances were there to make it happen.”
It won’t be as easy for Doyle and Kobza to leverage digital technology into huge gains at Burger King, Shank says. “They need to make improvements in technology infrastructure, but the wide open spaces that Domino’s had — that opportunity has been erased for Burger King, because everyone has digital and mobile ordering now.”
Yet Burger King enjoys some big advantages over Domino’s back in the day, for instance, chief among them the Whopper. “The food is great, and it starts with the Whopper,” Doyle says. “It’s a terrific hamburger. And when you get people to try it, or try it again, and it’s well-executed in the restaurants, you’re going to have a customer that will stick with you.” Ultimately, he told investors in February, “that is how Burger King competes” with McDonald’s, not to mention Wendy’s and its fresh-meat positioning for hamburgers. Indeed, Curtis has referred to the Whopper as potentially a “multi-billion-dollar brand” on its own.
Consequently, Burger King’s new ad campaign emphasizes the Whopper. Its new jingle starts simply, “Whopper Whopper Whopper Whopper.” The first ad put a hip-hop spin on the chain’s classic jingle from the 1970s, “Have it your way,” also changing the tag line to, “You rule.”
“Burger King has to try to catch up with McDonald’s loyalty program,” says Shank of Technomic, and how they leapfrog it will have to be through some creative investments in innovation — not just in food, but in marketing programs. The Whopper jingle has created the earworm they needed to have.”
Kobza says the new advertising “is a smart and thoughtful approach and builds on a lot of our greatest strengths. And it makes sense to our customers.”
