When Holly Smith was offered the chief marketing officer role at P.F. Chang’s last year, all of her friends and family said the same thing: “I used to love to go to P.F. Chang’s,” she recounts.
This made her curious: why did people used to love the brand? As a marketer with experience revitalizing legacy brands she was up for the challenge. “I just realized PF Chang’s has that place in everyone’s hearts and if we can figure out how to reinvigorate that feeling, we have a big opportunity,” she says.
She’s not changing what P.F. Chang’s stands for, instead she is tapping into that nostalgia and love but evolving and building a unique identity to bring the brand to life. The company’s recent Summer in Tokyo campaign is a great example. The effort highlighted classic core menu items Chang’s Chicken and Mongolian Beef, while introducing the Smoking Sushi Boat – a new experiential menu item that uses dry ice and water to bring a theatrical flare into the dining room.
“This is a reminder of why you come to P.F. Chang’s,” explains Smith.
The brand is balancing its in-restaurant dining experience with a solid delivery business and aiming to reach different customers no matter where they are in their lives. Whether it is bringing them in on special occasions for flaming sushi boats to offering value propositions like half off wine bottles on Wine Wednesdays to consumers on a budget.
“From an executive strategy point of view, we’ve landed on a barbell strategy,” says Smith. “On one end of the barbell, we have a value proposition that includes Wine Wednesdays with half-priced wine bottles, which is our best day of the week by far. But then on the other end of that barbell, you can get a $50 sushi boat for that big night out. It’s about balancing those two to be able to meet the customer’s needs.”
Prior to joining P.F. Chang’s, Smith held senior roles at Rosa Mexicano, Yardbird & Shell Shack and TGI Friday’s. Brand Innovators caught up with her from her office in Scottsdale, Arizona to talk about the dining experience, reaching Gen Z and a partnership with Below Deck. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you’re thinking about the dining experience?
About 30% of our business is takeout and third party, which is amazing, but we really wanted to figure out how do we bring those people back into the restaurant? What can we do in restaurant that you can’t get at home? We realized it’s really these theatrical dining moments. It’s an experiential, activation of a sushi boat or maybe it’s a smoking Kung Pao Dragon Roll or some really great beverage offerings.
The Gen Z consumers are not all young 22 year olds anymore. Some of them are 29 years old. They have families. They have jobs. They want to go out. They also lost essentially five years of dining experience to COVID, so they’re longing for these really fun in-restaurant experiences.
We can smoke like an Old fashioned and put a giant bubble on top. What are those unique offerings that you could only get in the restaurant? Then once we get them into the restaurant, how do we really wow them? What really drives people into restaurants to spend money and time with us? It is really creating those experiences, creating those memories, to be a part of somebody’s birthday or anniversary is such a meaningful responsibility that we take really seriously.
Can you talk about what you’re doing to encourage word-of-mouth?
We are heavily focused on an influencer strategy that’s really paid off for us. We’ve worked with over 125 creators at this point. We have more than 250 million views across all of our social channels. We really wanted to focus on coming across as organic, authentic. We don’t necessarily want to jump on every single trend. We want it to feel distinctly P.F. Chang’s and authentic to who we are, while also being humorous and funny and that persona that you want to follow that’s interesting and has a point of view. For instance, with Summer in Tokyo, we partnered with the cast of Below Deck. We had Captain Sandy and another member of their crew, Aesha, come to P.F. Chang’s. They got a sushi boat. We got a People exclusive from it.
We really try to focus on being cross-generational because. Although we want to go after Gen Z, we do have our core base that leans more towards Millennial, Boomer. As we create our content strategy, what we put on Facebook is different from what we put on TikTok. We are just cognizant of who our audience is and what they’re going to care about.
Tell me about your loyalty strategy and what you do to keep customers coming back.
We have focused a lot on rebuilding our loyalty program. Loyalty is an efficient way to talk directly to our guests. A lot of legacy brands found themselves in a position between, we have an email club, we have a loyalty club, how do you sort through all of the noise? We are in that process. We’ve launched a lot of new initiatives this year and we’ve actually improved our loyalty percentage of traffic significantly by over 300 basis points in the past four months. We’ve really seen an increase in those loyalty members. Now you’re just trying to figure out how to talk to them. We are looking at our tech stack. We are working really closely with operations, IT and all of the departments. The ultimate goal when we all work together is to create that frictionless experience for the guests in the restaurant.
Can you talk about your experiences at other brands that have helped you in this current role?
The history that I’ve had with other legacy brands has really taught me the importance of cross team collaborations, especially with the operations team. Working hand-in-hand with that team to make sure that the ideas that we have in marketing are able to be executed in the restaurant down to the experience: are we creating dishes and plates that take four or five stations that the kitchen can execute? How can we work really closely with the operations team to make sure that we’re delivering a product that they can then in turn deliver to the guests? The cog has to work and everyone has to push the water in the same direction. It takes every department working hand-in-hand. I’ve worked in organizations where things were really siloed and it was hard to get things done and everybody had their own priorities.
Jim [Mazany, CEO of P.F. Chang’s] has done an excellent job level setting within the organization. We have certain strategic pillars and strategic goals across each department. We’re all rowing the same direction and that’s proven to pay off for us. In Q4, we were dead last in same store sales compared to everyone in the industry. This quarter, we moved up to 3rd place. Same store sales were up 7.7%.
What are the marketing trends on your mind as you look towards 2027?
We’re definitely looking for inspiration and how we can create moments at the table so fans have reasons to come into the dining room. We also have a lot of conversations on how we also make the delivery experience great for guests? What does our packaging look like? How are we delivering, executing correctly and making sure that all of that data is in place? When I look to the back half of the year, it’s how do we get bold in our new campaigns? We have an upcoming campaign called Autumn in Kyoto featuring a really fantastic Wagyu egg roll. We also have duck wings and duck fried rice. How can we have interesting menu offerings that stand out preserving those pork classics, but introducing our guests to a little bit more aspirational food, reminding people that P.F Chang’s offers something different. It’s not a neighborhood Pan-Asian restaurant. There is always something different and new for you to try. Then as we move into holiday, reminding guests that we are a place to come in and celebrate. We’re doing a Peking duck. We’ll have that available for catering as well. Then of course, Lunar New Year is a really important holiday for us both domestically and globally. Holidays are really the time for us to shine. You come in with friends and family and order a bunch of food and have that shareable experience.
