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No one really knows who first came up with the idea of Taco Tuesday. One of the earliest references can be found in a newspaper ad for El Paso, Texas’s White Star Cafeteria from Monday, October 16, 1933, urging readers to come out and enjoy, ostensibly the next day, three “Mexican tacos” for 15 cents. In the decades that followed, the term began to appear explicitly in ads from Wisconsin to Arizona; in 1973, South Dakota’s Snow White Drive In ran an ad in the Rapid City Journal with the line “Stop In on Taco Tuesday.” But it wasn’t until 1982 that anyone put a legal stamp on the term. That was the year that Gregory’s Restaurant & Bar, in Somers Point, New Jersey, registered it as a trademark in that state. Seven years later, Wyoming-based chain Taco John’s claimed the trademark for 49 other states.
Then came May 2023.
That’s when Taco Bell filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the Taco Tuesday trademark across the country, asserting that the commonly used phrase “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat, and celebrate tacos.” The company launched a Change.org petition and recruited LeBron James—who had long celebrated Taco Tuesday with his family and fans on social media—to be part of a global multimedia ad campaign. (James himself had even tried to trademark the phrase in 2019 so he could use it across podcasts and other media projects).
The move—in which a gordito-size brand took legal action against microscopic competitors, mainly for kicks and publicity—could have backfired. This is America’s fourth-biggest fast-food chain, after all, with about $14 billion in annual sales across 7,200 restaurants. It risked being seen as a bully. Instead, the ad campaign drove more than 21 billion media impressions in just a few months, and succeeded. Taco John’s gave up its trademark in July, and Gregory’s relinquished its Jersey rights three months later.
To celebrate—and cement the effort as an altruistic act—the brand put a $5 million credit on DoorDash, picking up the tab for anyone to get a free taco from any of the delivery service’s 20,000 Mexican restaurants across 49 states. “It could’ve easily been, ‘Oh it’s trademarked, let’s move on to the next idea,’ ” says Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant, recalling the 2022 meeting where he (as the company’s chief brand officer at the time) and his team first came up with the idea to do something Taco Tuesday related. “Instead, it was, ‘Hey, we should liberate it.’ We saw that as a fun but important thing to do, but in order to work, it had to be for everybody.”
Last year was a tough one for the restaurant business: Customer traffic at American fast-food restaurants was only up by 0.5% over 2022, according to Circana analyst David Portalatin. Quick-service restaurants fared better, however, and within that group, Taco Bell roared back like a late-night chalupa craving. The brand’s same-store sales grew by 5% in 2023, with digital sales up 7% and loyalty users up 17%. David Gibbs, CEO of parent conglomerate Yum Brands, says that the majority of Yum’s U.S. operating profit for last year was driven by Taco Bell.
The chain has accomplished this partly by honing its operational strategy—expanding and evolving its menu and introducing new restaurant concepts, such as the two-story location in Minnesota that delivers food down to a four-lane drive-through via futuristic elevators, and Go Mobile, a smaller-format store it’s testing for drive-through and delivery. But under Tresvant’s guidance, Taco Bell has also grown the public’s appetite for its products via a dizzying display of marketing innovation. In the past year, fans have been able to wear Taco Bell x Crocs slides, giggle at NFL star Davante Adams’s description of how he attacks a Crunchwrap Supreme, behold new Taco Bell uniforms designed by Brooklyn artist Ricardo Gonzalez, and vote on the menu items they craved most through the Taco Bell app. Thanks to Tresvant’s understanding of what fans want, customers are engaging—truly engaging—with Taco Bell in a colorful spectrum of novel ways. Now the company is applying this approach to the rest of the world. Especially on Tuesdays.
Tresvant, 53, joined Taco Bell as chief brand officer in 2021 after 16 years at Nike—most recently as CMO of the Jordan Brand. On January 1, he took over as CEO.
“We shouldn’t just be a great quick-service restaurant brand, we should be a great global brand, period,” he tells me, sitting in his spacious fourth-floor office, in one of the countless standard-issue corporate buildings along the I-5 freeway in Irvine, California. “I put us in the same category as Google, Apple, Nike, and Netflix. All the great brands in the world—we should desire to compete with them.”
Wearing a purple knit crewneck sweater; purple, subtly branded Taco Bell socks; and white Air Max 90s, Tresvant calls his time at Nike a “PhD in marketing.” It’s clear there’s still some swoosh blood running through his veins. On one wall is a Shepard Fairey print of Tar Heels–era Michael Jordan, next to a painted portrait of Biggie Smalls. Another wall features tchotchke-filled offset shelves that contain two Taco Bell–themed customized Nike Dunks, a welcome gift from the brand’s creative team.
One of Tresvant’s first goals upon arriving at Taco Bell was to tighten the brand’s connection to its audience. Everyone knew of Taco Bell. Lots of people liked it, and that was the problem: It was too broad. He felt that it needed its identity to be more specific—not demographically, but psychographically. Tresvant zeroed in on viewing the quintessential Taco Bell customer as a “cultural rebel,” someone who craves something unconventional and speaks up for what they believe in.
Kim Getty, president of longtime Taco Bell ad agency Deutsch LA, describes an immediate shift. “This cultural rebel muse really became the center of our thinking,” she says.
The rebel sell is an age-old marketing strategy that has powered everything from Pepsi’s “Taste of a New Generation” and Apple’s Orwell-inspired “1984” Super Bowl ads to modern brands like Liquid Death and any label that has scrambled for a Supreme collab. Saying you’re a rebel is the easy part. The much tougher act is selling that idea of rebellious individuality . . . to as many people as possible.
Taco Bell managed to scale the idea in several ways. It brought back Mexican Pizza after the rapper and singer Doja Cat asked it to via an unsolicited tweet (and then worked with her to make a Mexican Pizza–inspired TikTok musical, costarring Dolly Parton). It revived the spicy 2000s-era Volcano menu with 2000s-era celeb—and sudden Gen Z icon—Paris Hilton, setting up an 844-THTS-HOT hotline that offered callers one of six prerecorded messages with personal advice. It incorporated music by lesser-known hard-core bands into its ads. And, of course, it liberated Taco Tuesday.
The company has also worked to make frontline employees feel a part of that identity. The first thing Tresvant did after arriving at Taco Bell was forge a brand collab with Los Angeles–based streetwear darlings Born X Raised, but with a twist: the limited-edition T-shirt wasn’t sold to the public when it debuted in 2022, but was given to every restaurant employee.
Former Taco Bell CEO Mark King, who ran the business from 2019 to 2023, says he identified Tresvant as his successor within the first 90 days of Tresvant’s tenure at the company, based on how he balanced the brand work with both a genuine care for people and operational diligence. “Taco Bell should have a world-class marketer as its leader,” King says, citing former marketers turned CEOs Brian Niccol (Chipotle) and Greg Creed (who led Yum Brands from 2015 to the end of 2019). “This brand really should have his pedigree,” King adds.
Tresvant’s feel for the power of brands—and for the work of the people building them—goes back to his very first job. Growing up in Seattle, the son of NBA journeyman John Tresvant, Sean, who played basketball for Washington State University, briefly had pro ambitions of his own. But by his sophomore year, the 5-foot-11 guard realized it wasn’t a likely outcome. Luckily, this was 1990, and there were other ways to engage with sports in a high-profile way. ESPN and SportsCenter were hot, and Tresvant, a communications major, thought he could be the next Stuart Scott. After graduating, he sent résumés to ESPN and local Seattle news stations and confidently waited for the offers to roll in. “My mom said pretty quickly, ‘You better get over yourself and get a job,’ ” he recalls. “So I started selling wine at Gallo Winery. I was a merchandiser who would drive to the convenience store, cut open the box, set up the shelf.”
One night during the holiday season, Tresvant was in a store setting up a wine display when he noticed a guy watching him. He figured it was some district manager checking in to make sure the job was done right. The man walked up to him and said, “Excuse me, do you like your job?”
Tresvant lied. “Yeah, I like it.”
“Well, if you ever don’t like your job, I work for Campbell’s Soup, and I was just watching you and you have an amazing work ethic,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you about working in sales.” He offered his card, then left. This was Tresvant’s first major career lesson: You never know who’s watching.
He made that call, scored a sales job for Campbell’s, and worked toward his MBA at Seattle University at night. During this time, sports, media, branding, and culture were colliding in all sorts of unprecedented ways. Spike Lee’s Air Jordan ads elevated sports apparel to high art. Wayne’s World winked at product placement. Tresvant, excited about the possibilities, moved to New York and worked for a variety of companies, including Reckitt Benckiser, PepsiCo, and Sports Illustrated, before landing back in the Northwest at Nike in 2007. He describes it as his dream job.
Tresvant’s fingerprints can be seen in the ways Jordan Brand used community and culture to deepen its ties to fans: becoming the first clothing brand to partner with Epic Games’ Fortnite, in 2019, and producing a companion series to Netflix’s 2020 megahit doc series The Last Dance that used interviews with NBA, music, and film superstars to explore Jordan’s influence on sports and culture. Tresvant left Jordan Brand in a good place: Revenues were up 31% from 2021 to 2022, to more than $4.7 billion.
He saw similar potential for Taco Bell: “Sports, entertainment, music, food . . . it was like the Beautiful Mind meme with the equations spinning,” he says. The possibilities were already there. “They just needed someone to put it on the wall.”
One of the most ingenious—some might say insidious—ways that Taco Bell cooks up hype is removing and returning items to the menu. McDonald’s may have originated the concept with the McRib, but Taco Bell has used its app and social media to turn it into an art form. Bill Oakley, the former head writer and showrunner for The Simpsons who is also a fast-food influencer, says that his musings on Taco Bell on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok are consistently his top social posts of the year. “They’re genius at manipulating the market by taking things off the menu to create this artificial scarcity,” he says. “People never seem to get tired of it. It’s just, ‘Oh my god! The Enchirito is back! The Mexican Pizza is back!’ And someone like me can say, ‘Well, they just took it off eight months ago,’ and the answer will be, ‘We don’t care! We love the Enchirito!’”
Taco Bell debuted popular new menu items last year, too, such as its Grilled Cheese Dipping Taco and Vegan Crunchwrap, and plans to introduce a new carnitas-style shredded chicken this year. The company consistently rolls out 10 new products a year, whittled down from hundreds of concepts, and tests out 40 to 50 with consumers annually. “We’re pretty restless,” says chief food innovation officer Liz Matthews. “We’re working on 500 ideas right now, talking to our fans to figure out what’s sticky, what’s not, and obviously, what tastes fabulous.”
That brand-to-fan conversation began in earnest in 2022, with Doja Cat’s famous Mexican Pizza tweet. The resulting campaign was a hit, primarily due to Doja Cat’s complete lack of formality. She talked constantly to her followers about the partnership, openly complaining about having to write a jingle on social media, and leaked a Super Bowl spot. “We allowed Doja to be Doja and that had a real impact on creating genuine connections with fans,” Tresvant told me at the time, describing the feeling of “relinquishing control and trusting the process and the partner. That can be hard,” he admitted, but “you can see the payoff.”
Then Taco Bell loosened up even more. At the end of that year, the company launched fan voting on its app: The Enchirito beat out the Double Decker Taco, getting 62% of the more than 765,000 votes. In July 2023, when the Beefy Crunch Burrito triumphed over Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco for a return spot on the restaurant chain’s menu, USA Today reported the outcome like a sporting event. “People don’t just want to buy your brand, they want to experience your brand,” says Tresvant. “Product voting gives people the chance to be a part of it.”
The company’s Taco Tuesday campaign has allowed the brand to take its connection with fans even deeper: Tuesday Drop gives members of Taco Bell’s reward program exclusive deals on food and merch, from $1 chicken quesadillas to free tickets to college football bowl games. Inspired by sneaker culture, that weekly ritual has become the brand’s biggest day in terms of attracting new loyalty members: Sign-ups on Tuesdays are up 64%, the company says.
Taco Bell has a long way to go before it reaches the level of global dominance that the cryogenically unfrozen cop played by Sylvester Stallone beheld in the futuristic 1993 sci-fi film Demolition Man. (The company has more than 1,000 international locations; McDonald’s has more than 3,000 restaurants in Japan alone.) In some ways, particularly in regions like Asia and India, Taco Bell is rewinding the clock back to 1962, when it was teaching burger-happy customers in Downey, California, how to say tah-co. “We don’t have to just go out and teach Taco Bell, we have to teach tacos,” says international CMO Amy Durini.
Yet worldwide expansion has become an increasing priority. Thirty percent of Taco Bell’s non-U.S. locations have opened since 2020, though Yum Brands said in its February earnings call (during which it reported slightly weaker-than-expected Q4 revenue) that this rate will temporarily slow as these restaurants get their footing. India and the U.K. now have more than 100 Taco Bell locations each, a milestone that represents a change in course. Yum CFO Chris Turner told an investor conference last June, “Our old strategy, we were opening a couple of restaurants here, a couple of restaurants there. But that lack of scale prevented us from doing the kind of marketing we needed to do to tell the Taco Bell brand story. That’s why we shifted the strategy to get to 100 units.”
Those marketing efforts have included partnering with popular U.K. drill artist and producer Fumez the Engineer in April 2023 on a jingle for the chain’s Naked Chicken Taco, while offering fans the chance to create their own Fumez-produced, Taco Bell–themed tune. And in July, the brand paired LeBron James with Hardik Pandya, cocaptain of India’s national cricket team, for a local Taco Tuesday campaign.
While every market demands a bespoke execution, the playbook is based on the cultural momentum Tresvant has built in America. On my second day of meetings with the CEO at his office, there’s commotion in the lobby when a crew from NFL Films whisks through, cameras rolling on a yet-to-be-announced show about L.A. Raiders wide receiver Davante Adams, who became a Taco Bell brand ambassador in 2022.
Hundreds of Taco Bell employees gather in the cafeteria, most wearing black Taco Bell x Davante Adams T-shirts made to commemorate the day. Tresvant launches into a round of Adams-themed trivia, doling out signed jerseys and other merch as prizes. “I’ve been here two years and I’ve never seen this many people in here,” Tresvant jokes with the crowd. “Free lunches don’t matter, I guess, but when you’ve got the world’s best wide receiver coming in, people turn out! You didn’t come here to see me. Without further ado, please welcome Davante Adams!” The room erupts.
Taco Bell had long advertised around football on TV, but never involved any players. Soon after arriving at the company, Tresvant began thinking about how it could change that. And it’s no wonder: 98 of the top 100–rated TV shows last year were NFL or college football games. Tresvant learned that Adams was a Taco Bell fan, and he knew Adams’s manager, Nick Robinson, from their days at Nike, so he called him. “They had a real relationship, and I had a real relationship with Taco Bell, so that’s how it got started,” says Adams. “Taco Bell was my favorite thing growing up.”
That dynamic might be the key to making a partnership with a top star in the most popular sport in America actually feel rebellious. Things have changed since Michael Jordan and Larry Bird played H-O-R-S-E in a 1993 McDonald’s commercial: Back then, no one assumed, or particularly cared, whether MJ and Bird were really die-hard Big Mac lovers. Today, there needs to be a genuine connection between a famous person and a brand. It has to be surprising. It has to feel spontaneous. It’s why Doja Cat worked for Mexican Pizza. It’s why LeBron James worked for Taco Tuesday.
Forty years after Apple made a Super Bowl ad feel subversive, Taco Bell attempted something similar. It staged an event over Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas called Live Más Live, which it livestreamed around the world. Under a giant tent, Adams and big wave surfer Kai Lenny greeted fans, who also learned about new menu items they could then go sample: Cheesy Chicken Crispanada, the Cantina Chicken Burrito, and the Baja Blast Pie, a key lime pie–meets–Mtn Dew creation that lit up social media all weekend with its neon blue-green hue.
Tresvant and Taco Bell CMO Taylor Montgomery had gotten the idea for the event following Apple’s WWDC developer event in June. Montgomery remembers wondering, “If Apple can do [an event like] that, with, like, a $1,000 iPhone made out of titanium that most of America can’t afford, why can’t we?”
Sitting in the tent after the festivities, Tresvant looks energized. He helped create a new facet of Taco Bell’s identity, pushing the brand into a new era. “If you don’t,” he says, “the consumer will.”
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