FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

WITH A NEW CEO BEHIND THE COUNTER, TACO BELL IS FOLLOWING A FRESH STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL CULTURAL DOMINATION, ONE TACO TUESDAY AT A TIME.

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, Wyomingbased

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 gorditosize 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 .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 drivethrough 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 quickservice 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