Is a Drive-Thru on Brand for Shake Shack?

The hot dog stand became Shake Shack, an upscale burger shop exclusive to just a few locales. The slow build-up was sensational. With the element of exclusivity to its advantage, consumers lined up when a Shack came to their city. Eventually, Shake Shack found a place on the U.S. Stock Exchange and achieved global scale. But almost 25 years since its humble beginning in the park, the brand’s still evolving.

In 2018, it reached a fork in the road.

We decided we could do it in a way that was uniquely Shake Shack.

Jay Livingston, CMO, Shake Shack

As food delivery services rose in prominence and more consumers tapped into digital ordering, Shake Shack’s leadership team wondered if it was time to explore an operational model more centered on convenience. This sparked the brand’s first interest in investing in drive-thrus, but they faced the challenge of how to implement them without marring the brand.

Like many businesses that go through similar evolutions (see: Starbucks), Shake Shack had to decide if and to what extent it should hold onto its hyper-local legacy, at the risk of alienating customers who expect a specific buying experience.

“Shake Shack never thought it would do a drive-thru,” CMO Jay Livingston told Adweek. “We had been on record saying it would be so challenging for us, because [of] the way we cook our food from scratch, the way we really prioritize in-line hospitality and a guest experience.”

Sometimes market disruptions leave brands with little choice but to take a leap.

Come 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, Shake Shack took action on the idea it conceived a few years earlier. It built its first drive-thru in at a new Shack in Maple Grove, Minn., that opened in December 2021. The next year, nine more drive-thrus followed. The total now stands at 12, and this year the brand is planning to open 10 to 15 more.

“We decided we could do it in a way that was uniquely Shake Shack. So, we decided to move forward, and we decided to move forward very quickly,” said Livingston. “That pushed us into the place of saying, ‘All right, how do we make the experience great for our guests?’”

The fork in the road

The business leaders contended with operational questions that became deeply intertwined with branding decisions. They pondered things like site selection, targeting Shacks off major transit routes as opposed to city Shacks. It redesigned its kitchens to cook food more efficiently, and it created digital menu boards while streamlining its mobile app.

There were risks.

Controlling the customer experience in a drive-thru, where there are fewer opportunities for store employees to rectify customer concerns, posed a potential problem. Imagine a customer swiftly driving off after receiving the wrong order, only to later face disappointment and frustration that the brand can’t easily fix.

Then, there’s the question of timeliness. While many of its competitors prepare food in advance and keep it warm for patrons who roll through, Shake Shack makes every order fresh. That can result in longer wait times than consumers experience at other fast-food restaurants.

Consumers familiar with the brand expect that—perhaps prioritizing fresh food over a quick wait time. A drive-thru could, theoretically, encourage consumers to expect speediness. With longer-than-average wait times, vehicles in a drive-thru could back up and create a service bottleneck.

“It’s a tightrope. It’s a tough line to walk. But the reality is that this is something that businesses forever have contended with,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, told Adweek. “You realize that if you open up different channels that allow people to access you, you’re growing the business. You’re just multiplying the ways people can interact with your brand … but that comes with its own set of challenges.”

A word-of-mouth strategy

Understanding how to address each channel’s unique operational issues should be the brand’s priority, according to Chatterjee.

Livingston drew some inspiration from competitors like Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out that pioneered operating efficient drive-thrus. “We looked at things like how they do line busting within the drive-thru to have several points of contact, so the guests never feel like they’re waiting too long without some kind of touch,” he said.

Once a brand smooths out those kinks, the marketing organization must pick up the mantle, Chatterjee said. It leaves Shake Shack’s marketers with an important job: creating messaging that conveys the food is worth waiting for.

While other QSR restaurants, like Wendy’s, rely on boundary-pushing marketing and social media strategies to generate brand loyalty, Shake Shack’s taken a different tactic.

Just last year it named creative agency Preacher its first lead creative agency and released its first brand campaign. Still, it eschews national advertising in favor of paid digital advertising campaigns on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. Consumers are unlikely to see Shake Shack commercials, splashy billboards or digital banner ads. The marketing strategy has so far complemented the brand’s cachet and exclusivity.

Delivering a new experience

As the brand finalized the drive-thru strategy, there may be opportunities for it to add to, rather than detract from, the customer experience. Livingston and his team decided to start with the design, incorporating canopies above the drive-thru that resemble the canopy above Shake Shack’s Madison Square Park kiosk.

“It’s got Edison lights underneath the canopy that mimic the streamlined experience that you would have at Madison Square Park, or a lot of our patios,” the CMO said. “That’s the first touch point you have in the drive-thru that tells you this feels a little bit different.”

The marketing team has experimented with other strategies: For one, integrating the brand’s mobile app with the drive-thru experience, so that customers can order ahead via the app and collect their food without ever leaving their car. The team also found that highlighting certain menu items on a digital promotions board actually proved effective and led drive-thru customers to order more of the promoted items.

“We don’t even quite know what the actual long-term view of the drive-thru could actually look like, right?” Charlie Frankievich, Shake Shack’s director of consumer insights and analytics, told Adweek at Qualtrics’ X4 Summit in Salt Lake City last month.

“We’re testing,” he added. “Continuing to develop this is really a big opportunity for us.” Frankievich is experimenting with new ways to collect customer feedback in the drive-thru line, like asking team members to ask customers CX questions as they take their order.

Though time will tell, the opportunity might outweigh the risks because of the sheer power of brand loyalty and finding the right target audience, Chatterjee acknowledged. The right customers may prove more forgiving than expected when issues arise.

“Let’s say you go through the Starbucks drive-thru, and something is not right,” Chatterjee said. “There are two ways you can think about it: You can say, ‘Hey, Starbucks sucks, I’ll go to Dunkin’ Donuts from now on.’ Or, you could think, ‘You know, the Starbucks drive-thru sucks, I’m going to stop [visiting] it and go into the store.”