Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Evan. Evan, welcome to the show.
Evan Pardue00:04 — Thank you for having me.
Benjamin Ard00:05 — Evan, I'm excited. This is going to be fun. I think this is going to be a cool story to tell. And obviously, one thing I've noticed is in our pre-conversation, just like the passion for this subject, I'm excited for the audience to hear it. But before we dive in, let's let the audience get to know who you are, your background, all that kind of fun stuff so they know who we're talking to today.
Evan Pardue00:24 — My name is Evan Pardue. I'm the director of brand and CX at Condado Tacos. I've been with Condado for going on four years now, leading the brand and creative teams across social and CRM and art direction. And before that, I worked for a group of Chick-fil-A operators across the Houston metro area. And so now I live in Columbus, Ohio, and Condado is a casual dining taco joint across 10 states. We have 52 locations and rapidly growing, which I think will be a topic of conversation today of how a brand can grow rapidly and what can happen when you do so.
Benjamin Ard00:58 — I love it. That's so cool. And I'm trying really hard to convince Evan to get some locations in Utah. We'll see. Maybe one day I might have to wait a little bit or just travel out to Ohio or something like that to go try it out. One day I'm holding out. This will be good.
Evan Pardue01:03 — One day, yeah, come see us in the Midwest.
Benjamin Ard01:16 — Okay, deal. I mean, you guys just went through a massive rebrand and we're going to talk about that and dive into that today. Like really the whole process from start to finish. And then also what that really entailed. Cause I think that there is some level of intimidation when it comes to doing such a big change. So to kind of kick it off, what sparked the conversation in the first place? Like what happened? Where the light bulb went on and said, hey, maybe a rebrand is in order. Like maybe we should switch things up a little bit. Like what sparked that conversation? What led to that decision?
Evan Pardue01:49 — Yeah, it, you know, we grew really rapidly. Condado doubled in size since I started four years ago, and any business that grows that quickly, the one thing that maybe I don't think a lot of brands fully appreciate is that the brand foundation has to be laid before you grow that quickly. Because when you do, the cracks in the Brown foundation are amplified when you double in size. When we talk about the rebrand, I call it a brand refresh, which we'll dive into. But in the brand refresh, it was actually hearing from our guests, hearing from prospective guests, that they were confusing Condado for a furniture company. They didn't know what we were selling because truthfully, we weren't showing up with one voice consistently across all channels. And that includes exteriors of restaurants. It includes advertising. It includes how we hire people, right? Because brand is bigger than just the logo. And so it was hearing from our guests that we weren't showing up consistently. It's actually what kicked us off, and what our CMO, Sarah Keir, led, was beginning this process of, okay, we have an issue with identification. It's actually deeper than that. It is that people maybe don't know what we are and what we do. We're not a traditional Mexican restaurant, right? We are an unusual taco joint. We celebrate the alchemy of unconventional combinations. How do we project that out to the world so that when guests show up to Gondotto, they're not showing up for a traditional Mexican restaurant experience. They're showing up for an unusual adventure, a flavor rebellion.
Benjamin Ard03:15 — I love that. Just to get a little spice of what is going on here, like talk to me about like what some of your tacos are, signature dishes, just so people can kind of understand a little bit of like the context here.
Evan Pardue03:25 — Yeah, so, Candado, the thing I would say we're signature for is our double decker tacos. So a soft shell, a flour shell with a hard corn shell, and then usually either queso, guac, maybe refried beans, or Thai chili sauce in between the two shells. And they're packed, right? Our tacos, we always say one, if you're a little hungry, two is a meal, three, if you, can't even eat three of our tacos. They are so large. They're really, they're almost like a burger. They are so large. And so they're so different from your normal street taco that we've really invented our own category to play in where tacos become your whole meal. So I'd say our Lucy's fires are our number one seller. It's a fire cracker shell. It's got kind of like a spicy Doritos shell. It's got chicken and corn salsa and aioli. It's absolutely delicious. Right now, I think what we're really celebrating is our street corn obsession menu, where everything is street corn, from the taco, which is unbelievable, to a street corn Marg, which is the first of its kind. No one has ever done a street corn Marg. We invented it, and it's actually made with street corn. We've distilled street corn into a margarita. So, one of a kind. And that's what you can expect from Condado, something that is unusual and yet insanely delicious.
Benjamin Ard04:39 — I love that. Man, I'm already going to book my tickets out there. That sounds so good. All right, so now we understand like 100 percent. I get this idea. I get like the uniqueness. This is who we are and like the passion, the celebration, the uniqueness, like the opportunity to be different. So you started noticing it and you decided, okay, let's do this brand refresh. Now, when people hear brand refresh, a lot of times you said the magic words, okay, great, we'll fix the logo. Like what was the full encapsulation of the actual brand refresh for the entire business?
Evan Pardue05:11 — Yeah, it is. It took about 18 months, which, you know, in my mind, when I kicked this off with our boss, I was expecting this to be much quicker, right? And so it was also a learning experience for me too, of, wow, this is an ongoing change management process. And so when we think about the brand refresh, and why we don't call it a rebrand, is we all, we call it our coming out of the closet moment, our celebration of who we are. So much of what came out of the brand work were things that already existed in Condado. You know, our purpose statement, we create a sense of joy and belonging. That's been there since day one. That has not changed at Condado at all. It wasn't like we magically came up with that. That sentiment has always been there. And it's not just from our guests of welcoming everyone, having a great time. It's actually with our teammates too. Teammates, everyone is welcome. Please come work at Condado. Please build your career at Condado, and please have a good time while you do it. Same thing with our values. Our values were always there. They were never documented. No one ever wrote them down, and they were constantly changing. So we never had one core mission to rally around. And so as you're building the brand architecture, right, that's really what it's all about, is having a singular mission from the teammate to the executive to rally behind. So that's really clear, who we are, what we're doing, and why we're doing it.
Benjamin Ard06:31 — Okay, I love this. Like the idea that the brand is just an outward representation of the authentic culture, the mission, the values, the whole point of the business. The refresh was just to say, hey, let's make sure people understand this externally. It's already in our DNA. Let's make sure it just fits on the t-shirt. Let's make sure it fits on the website. Let's make sure if you've never engaged with us before, you kind of understand it from the very get go. I think that's so cool. So Evan, this podcast, we focus a lot on content. So how did it impact your content? How did it impact that whole strategy as well? Again, it wasn't just this logo change. How did it impact like the words you were saying and how you presented yourself?
Evan Pardue07:16 — Yeah, it's fundamental, right? Of moving from purpose to action. So I always think brand is the residue of purpose. And so how do we take that and run with it in a brand pillar, for example? So it's actually having brand pillars so that we can create content pillars around them that ladder up, again, ladder up to brand. So, you know, Condado's content before we went through the rebrand, we hopped onto every meme, we hopped onto every trend, every sound clip, anything that was trending, we hopped on. And the truth of it is, is that that is not how you build a brand because we were showing up in every which way except who we were deep down. And so when we say like how, why were guests confused? Well, we were also confusing them as well. And so how do you change that? We flip it around. I'll give food as an example, right? How do we think about food? Honestly, we made posts in the past that were probably disrespectful to our product, right? We would put it in a green screen or we would, you know, kind of be more obscene with the food instead of actually laddering up to flavor rebellion, is our food pillar. So how do we express that through content? Well, we started making an innovation series with our head chef, Trace and Maria, so that he could explain how we actually make our food. What are the recipe inspirations? And now we have a whole content series for innovation, so that it all ladders up to cravable, delicious food, which is why you come to Condado. You're not coming to Condado for a meme. You're coming to Condado because you're having an amazing craving for something that you can't get anywhere else. And so how do we express that through content? One great example is our mystery mark campaign. It ran from February to April. We had a mystery mark. It was a white margarita inspired by airheads, the mystery flavor. Yeah, and so we did not
Benjamin Ard08:59 — I was going to say it sounds familiar, yeah.
Evan Pardue09:04 — tell any of our teammates what the flavor was for the first week. They had to guess. Very quickly, our guests were trying to guess and trying to figure it out. And so we started making content celebrating that guessing game. So rather than us creating a meme about it being a mystery, we brought our guests into it. We said, hey, if you're the first five people to guess the correct flavor, we'll give you free tacos for a year. We had thousands of suggestions of what people thought was in the margarita. And so it's bringing that content with innovation, with product, all connected to tell one story. And so we ended up not telling the flavor until after the product was off the market, because our guests were so involved in trying to guess what it was. And so it was that great combination of telling that brand story, telling that product story, telling that innovation story together through social.
Benjamin Ard09:56 — I love that. That's so cool. Like I love all of these different pillars and how it makes decisions where you're present, how you're present, when you're present, things like that. I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curveball. I didn't prepare you for this question in any way or form. With an organization, especially as fast growing as your team is and spread across geographic different areas and all that kind of stuff, how has the refresh been incorporated across the entire organization? So individuals are empowered to tell your unique story in the right way. Like you talked about, there's always these cracks in the foundation, and if you don't really have a solid brand story or brand element, people go in a lot of different directions. How have you like incorporated either training or reinforcement or anything along those lines to just kind of help the team really embrace the true authentic nature of the company.
Evan Pardue10:50 — That is such a great question because it leads to the heart of what brand is. Brand is not a marketing function. Brand is a business function. And where I think so many businesses miss opportunities is mistaking that. That, brand, it's the logo, it's with marketing. No, brand is every part of Condado. It is IT. It's how we set up phone trees, for example. How we answer the phone is actually a part of brand because that's how our guests are experiencing us. It's the same thing with our people. Why we're holding town halls, our CEO hosts walk talks with GMs consistently so that we're constantly having a conversation so that idea of belonging and joy, right, are constantly reinforced from the support center, but also with our field, so that when we talk about walk talks, when we have a mystery mark, it is engaging our guests because that's creating fun. Fun is one of our values. Have fun with our guests. Here's how to have fun with them, have them guess what the flavor of the mystery mark is. So it's every touch point from menu to IT to training to finance, making sure that our finance is committed as one of our values, and they are the most committed department. Having everyone working together under this common purpose and common set of values, that's how I think organizations succeed. And it takes leadership to also buy into that. And our leadership is completely bought into the fact that we are a brand led business. And it is our brand that is strong and the brand architecture that is going to keep us propelled.
Benjamin Ard12:19 — I love that. Plus the why, it sounds like the why is so clear for the company of what you're trying to accomplish. And obviously the food is a major portion of this, but it's the feeling, it's the experience, it's the emotional connection, it's the friendship, it's the fun. And you've really said, okay, cool, this is who we are. And I love like the example of like the calling tree and all of this stuff. Like it has to resonate everywhere. And I think that's so cool. And it sounds like the business has empowered you to really go into each and every element. Anything that touches a teammate or a customer, you can go and say, awesome, is the patron experience as good as possible? And it sounds like you've been enabled. Like, how did that enablement happen?
Evan Pardue13:05 — I think it takes great leadership and it takes great trust. I think there's a tremendous amount of trust that our leadership and our executive team have for those of us who are making the work possible, is here's a clear set of guidelines, make this happen, right? Surprise me. And so I think having a boss, my boss, Sarah Keir, who is the most visionary, trusting leader I've ever worked for, she trusts us so much to be able to make decisions quickly because we're all rooted in that common sense of purpose and that common set of values so that we can move quickly. We can be scrappy, right? We're still a young, you know, we only have 52 locations for a young scrappy brand, but we can still operate like a bigger one. We can have ambitions. Can say, hey, I can't, you know, I'll give you an example. When it, this is a piece of content, you know, in the CRM space, we really wanted to put music on our app. We don't have app developers. Well, how do we do that? We figured out how to make rich messages look like Spotify playlist. And then we built a Spotify playlist for our top tier loyalty members. So now our loyalty members can stream our playlist in our app without us having a developer, right? It's how do you be scrappy? And that wasn't a directive from my boss. It was my boss saying, what can we do to make our loyalty program more innovative? And we said, okay, what can we figure out with the toolbox we have? And that's really what it's all about. The leader that I always try to be is that leader that trusts our team to make great decisions because we're all rooted in that same purpose. When I say, let's make some really fun content, they know now through the brand refresh, what are the bounds of that fun because we know who we're talking to and we know what we won't do.
Benjamin Ard14:46 — I love that. And I think that last point is really important. More so than just what you will do. There has to be a component of like here are the things we have to avoid because that's truly like not us. We're going to say no to a lot of things because that's authentic. Okay, Evan, we're almost out of time. This has been amazing. I genuinely feel like this is a master class on how to do a brand refresh and how a brand can really permeate throughout the entire organization. And I love how focused like again, the calling tree, all that kind of stuff. I think that's so cool. For anyone listening who's thinking, okay, maybe I need to start thinking about maybe incorporating a refresh or maybe just getting my existing brand into more of the business to make sure it's all aligned. Where would you start today? Where, what advice would you give on a tactical level to say, today, next week, whatever it is, how do you kind of get the motion going and figure this out and make something happen?
Evan Pardue15:41 — You know, tactically, I would say know who you're talking to and why you're talking to them, right? And so if you don't have that clear purpose and clear audience, you're always going to be distracted and be confused. And I think what having the architecture of brand really does is it makes decision-making easy because it's no longer personal, emotional, or contextual. It becomes objective and goal-based and brand-led. And so having that common sense of that common architecture to work from makes decisions easy. Now, getting there is a challenge. And so how to get there? What I would say is lean on each other. Even if you're a small team of two, lean on each other and you're going to have fierce conversations. They're going to be fierce conversations through a brand refresh. No doubt. And what you have to do is you have to have those fierce conversations and then you have to say, hey, we may not agree, but we're going to be aligned on this decision. If that decision is brand voice, content pillar, be aligned on it and the conversation moves forward. Right? Because it's ultimately not my vision. It's not, you know, Joe or Ben's vision. It is the brand vision that we all are going to align on. So lean on each other. My boss had a great metaphor when we got started with this. She said, we are all going to learn and teach each other new choreography at the same time. And so we are going to step on each other's toes. We're going to make each other grumpy sometimes, but we are going to learn this dance together. And so having, putting your ego aside, saying, hey, I'm teaching this dance, but I'm learning it too. You can figure it out, but it's really about leaning on each other and having fierce conversations and then moving forward with alignment.
Benjamin Ard17:19 — I love it. That's amazing. Evan, this has been amazing. I really do appreciate it. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect online, how and where can they find you?
Evan Pardue17:28 — You can find me on LinkedIn, Evan Pardue. Happy to connect and thank you so much for having me. This has been a real pleasure.
Benjamin Ard17:32 — You bet. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. Evan's LinkedIn profile will be linked right there. Click on the link, connect with Evan, say hello. Say you came from the podcast, all that kind of fun stuff. Thank Evan for all of the great insights. Again, this has been incredible. Evan, thank you, thank you, thank you, and have a wonderful day.
