Taco Bell has always been a successful and popular fast-food chain. As a division under the parent company YUM Brands, Taco Bell is a unique Mexican eatery. While yes, you may have your ordinary burrito, your basic taco, and nachos & cheese; Taco Bell strives on constant new innovational products.
One of Taco Bell’s first notable innovational product was their famous exclusive Mountain Dew Baja Blast. In 2004, Taco Bell teamed up with its partnered brand PepsiCo and developed an exclusive green soft drink that would to be poured only at Taco Bell locations only. This exclusivity idea was brilliant on both ends as it showed in a sales boost.
Taco Bell knows that they are a special niche in the fast food industry and they are always trying to figure out ways to be different. In March 2012, Taco Bell launched the brand’s most successful product to date, The Doritos Locos Tacos (DLT). This launch did incredible numbers for Taco Bell and outdid McDonalds sales in Big Macs with selling over 100 million in the first ten weeks while McDonalds took 18 years to sell 100 million burgers.
The joint partnership of Frito-Lay and Taco Bell showed to be so strong that the two companies decided to launch two additional flavors to the menu. Currently, Taco Bell DLT sales have reached over $1 billion dollars!
Taco Bell created a marketing campaign based around DLT and kept the public very curious as to what the next flavor of DLT will be. After the original nacho cheese one, they released the famous Cool Ranch Dorito Loco Taco. Advertisements were aimed at their target audience via sports games, social media, and contests. Any important championship game or twitter newsfeed you would see all this hype for the newest DLT. This created a lot of excitement around the launch and got the attention of their customers and new ones too. Finally, Taco Bell had one more DLT launch that created a lot of buzz, The fiery DLT. This final DLT had ads run with people asking what the next flavor will be while in the background there were subliminal messaging of anything related to fire. ie(Firemen, hot air balloon, a movie set with flames in the background). This continued the excitement for Taco Bell’s consumers and really helped them drive the remarkable sales that this one product launch has done for them.
Taco Bell has and will always maintain their focus on product innovation and successful marketing strategies. Taco Bell is always thinking outside the shell and just like their tagline says, sometimes you gotta Live Mas.
Austin Foulds 