The appointment of Tariq Hassan to the newly created role of Chief Marketing and Customer Growth Officer offers a useful glimpse at where the CMO function is heading, as brand building, customer experience, digital engagement and commercial growth increasingly become parts of the same job.
There is something more interesting happening at Wendy’s than a new executive arriving in the marketing department, because the title the company has created for Tariq Hassan tells us quite a bit about where marketing itself is heading. Hassan has been appointed Chief Marketing and Customer Growth Officer, a newly created position that explicitly connects the traditional responsibilities of brand marketing with customer experience, digital engagement and measurable growth.
That combination should matter to marketers well beyond the restaurant category, because it acknowledges something many organizational structures have been slow to recognize. Consumers do not experience marketing, ecommerce, loyalty, customer experience and the product as separate functions, so there is increasingly little reason for brands to manage them as though they were completely independent disciplines.
Marketing Is Becoming the Architecture of Growth
For decades, the basic division of responsibilities inside large organizations was relatively straightforward, with marketing responsible for generating demand while sales, operations and other commercial functions converted that demand into revenue. Digital technology complicated that arrangement enormously, because marketers suddenly gained access to customer behavior before, during and after a purchase while simultaneously acquiring tools capable of influencing each stage of that journey.
The result is that the modern marketing organization increasingly sits at the intersection of almost everything that determines whether a customer chooses a brand and returns to it. Advertising creates expectations, digital experiences facilitate transactions, loyalty programs create reasons to return, customer data informs personalization, product innovation creates new reasons to engage and culture determines whether any of those interactions mean something beyond their immediate commercial purpose.
Putting “customer growth” into the title of the person responsible for marketing is therefore not simply corporate semantics, because it represents a more useful definition of the function itself. Marketing is increasingly responsible for designing the system through which attention becomes behavior, behavior becomes data, data becomes a better customer experience and better experiences create additional growth.
Hassan’s background makes him particularly suited to that kind of mandate, having worked across global marketing, customer experience, digital transformation and brand building during more than three decades in the industry. His previous role at McDonald’s also placed him inside one of the most sophisticated consumer marketing environments in the world, where restaurants, apps, loyalty programs, menu innovation, cultural marketing and enormous volumes of customer data increasingly operate as interconnected parts of the same growth engine.
Wendy’s Already Has Something Many Brands Are Trying to Manufacture
The opportunity at Wendy’s is particularly interesting because the company does not need to begin by inventing a personality, which is a luxury increasingly few large brands possess. Wendy’s has spent years cultivating a recognizable voice and an unusually distinctive cultural identity, giving the brand an asset that competitors cannot simply replicate by increasing media spend or adopting the latest creative technology.
That distinctiveness becomes even more valuable as generative AI lowers the cost of producing competent marketing materials, because competence itself is rapidly becoming commoditized. When every organization can generate polished copy, imagery, video variations and personalized creative at extraordinary speed, recognizable brand character becomes one of the things technology cannot easily manufacture on demand.
Wendy’s has that character already, from the visual distinctiveness of the brand and its products to the irreverence that has become associated with its communications. The strategic question is how to turn that recognition into a more consistent engine for customer growth rather than allowing cultural relevance to exist as a collection of individual moments.
That is an important distinction for marketers because the industry has become extraordinarily good at creating moments while sometimes becoming less effective at creating momentum. A viral post, celebrity collaboration, limited-edition product or clever cultural activation can produce enormous attention, but attention has considerably less value when there is no system designed to turn it into preference, purchase, frequency or loyalty.
Culture Needs Somewhere to Go
The next stage of sophisticated brand marketing will consequently be less concerned with whether something generated attention and more concerned with what happened because that attention existed. Cultural relevance still matters enormously, but its commercial value increases when brands build mechanisms that allow customers to move naturally from awareness into participation and eventually into a deeper relationship.
Quick-service restaurants provide an unusually clear example of what that can look like, because almost every interaction can now become part of a connected customer journey. Someone encounters a piece of advertising, sees a new menu item, opens an app, receives an offer, places an order, joins a loyalty program, returns several weeks later and generates additional information that can make the next interaction more relevant.
What used to resemble a funnel increasingly behaves like a loop, with every transaction creating signals that can improve the next marketing decision. The most advanced brands are therefore not simply buying attention at the beginning of a customer journey but continuously learning from behavior throughout the relationship.
That changes what marketing leadership needs to understand, because the person responsible for the brand increasingly needs fluency across creativity, technology, data, customer experience and commercial performance. The CMO does not need to personally operate every part of that infrastructure, but someone has to ensure those capabilities are working toward the same customer and business objective.
The Product Is Part of the Media Strategy
One of the more encouraging elements of Wendy’s approach is the emphasis on beginning with the food itself, because marketing occasionally becomes so fascinated by communications that it forgets the product remains the most important expression of the brand. A restaurant can create extraordinary social content and culturally sophisticated campaigns, but customers ultimately form their strongest opinions while eating the food, considering its value and deciding whether the experience was good enough to repeat.
That principle extends far beyond fast food, particularly at a moment when marketers have access to an unprecedented collection of targeting, personalization and optimization technologies. Better marketing cannot permanently compensate for a weak proposition, while a strong proposition can make virtually every subsequent marketing investment more effective.
The opportunity for Wendy’s is therefore to make product, marketing and customer experience reinforce one another rather than treating them as separate strategic conversations. Menu innovation can generate cultural interest, cultural interest can drive digital engagement, digital engagement can produce transactions, transactions can strengthen customer understanding and that understanding can inform the next product or marketing decision.
When those pieces operate together, marketing stops behaving like the promotional department attached to a business and starts behaving like part of the operating system for growth.
Customer Data Makes the Brand More Useful
This also explains why first-party customer relationships have become so strategically important to restaurant brands, retailers and almost every other consumer-facing company. A loyalty member or authenticated app user is not simply another person to whom a brand can send promotions, because the relationship creates a continuous stream of information about preferences, frequency, responsiveness and behavior.
The temptation is to treat that data primarily as fuel for increasingly precise promotions, but its greater value may be organizational learning. Brands that understand why customers return, what combinations of products they prefer, what motivates incremental visits and which experiences produce loyalty can make better decisions across marketing, product development and operations.
AI will make that feedback loop substantially more powerful, but it will also make distinctive customer data more strategically important. As companies gain access to increasingly similar models and marketing technologies, proprietary understanding of customers becomes one of the few advantages that cannot simply be purchased from the same vendor as everybody else.
The strongest marketing organizations will consequently use AI not merely to produce more content but to connect more signals, identify more useful patterns and improve the speed at which customer understanding becomes action. That makes the relationship between marketing and customer growth even tighter, because understanding the customer and growing the customer increasingly become versions of the same problem.
The CMO Is Becoming a Different Kind of Executive
There has been endless discussion about whether the CMO is losing influence, whether the title is disappearing and whether responsibilities are being absorbed by chief growth, customer or commercial officers. Wendy’s offers another possibility, which is that marketing is not becoming less important but is instead being expanded until the traditional title no longer adequately describes the job.
That would represent a healthier evolution than treating marketing primarily as the organization responsible for communications and campaigns. The most valuable senior marketers increasingly need to understand how brand investment produces long-term preference while simultaneously understanding how digital experiences, loyalty, data and product decisions influence immediate customer behavior.
Those are not competing philosophies of marketing, because they are increasingly dependent on one another. Performance without brand eventually becomes expensive customer acquisition, while brand without a functioning commercial system risks becoming awareness that somebody else converts into revenue.
Wendy’s decision to explicitly combine marketing and customer growth suggests an organization attempting to bridge that divide, while Hassan’s experience across brand, digital transformation and customer experience gives the company an opportunity to test what that broader mandate can accomplish. The interesting question will not simply be whether Wendy’s produces better campaigns, but whether it becomes better at connecting everything the customer encounters into a more coherent reason to choose the brand.
For marketers, that may be the larger signal contained in what otherwise looks like another executive appointment. The future of marketing leadership is increasingly about connecting brand, product, culture, technology and customer experience into one growth system, and the companies that figure out how to organize themselves around that reality may discover that the most powerful marketing transformation has relatively little to do with making more advertising.