Wendy’s has appointed former McDonald’s marketing chief Tariq Hassan to the newly created role of chief marketing and customer growth officer, effective immediately. He reports to President and Chief Executive Officer Bob Wright.
Hassan succeeds Lindsay Radkoski, who has led U.S. marketing as chief marketing officer since 2023 and will leave the business after a transition period.
The appointment arrives after six consecutive quarters of same-store sales declines at the chain, including a 7% fall in the second quarter of 2026.
A turnaround CEO buying marketing firepower
Wright joined Wendy’s in May, having spent more than five years as president and chief executive of Potbelly, where he oversaw that brand’s recovery. He has since named demand-driving marketing as one of five areas the business is acting on.
Announcing the hire, Wright described it as a step towards “returning Wendy’s to profitable growth”, citing Hassan’s record across marketing, digital activation, menu innovation and culturally relevant brand engagement, and the effect those levers have on restaurant performance and customer loyalty.
The job title carries the strategy. Attaching customer growth to the CMO remit pulls loyalty, digital ordering and repeat purchase into a role that in many organisations still stops at brand and communications.
What Hassan brings from the biggest rival in the category
At McDonald’s, Hassan was U.S. chief marketing and customer experience officer. He strengthened the marketing function, pushed digital and loyalty engagement, and moved the brand into cultural conversation rather than advertising breaks alone.
Two campaigns anchored that period. The adult Happy Meal collaboration and the Grimace birthday activation both lifted engagement and sales, and McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger publicly credited Hassan for putting the brand at the centre of culture.
Hassan resigned from McDonald’s early last year. His earlier career covers the agency side plus marketing roles at Petco and HP, which gives him retail and technology experience alongside quick service restaurant scale.
Awareness was never the problem
Wendy’s has not lacked attention. Around the turn of the decade its combative social media voice on the platform now called X became one of the most copied brand personalities in marketing.
Converting that visibility into transactions is where the model kept failing. Even high-profile tie-ins, including a 2025 partnership with Netflix’s “Wednesday” that combined a meal with a mobile game and rewards, did not produce sustained sales momentum.
Wright named the cause directly on the second-quarter earnings call, telling investors the brand has relied too heavily on a calendar of one-off promotions and collaborations instead of a consistent narrative grounded in its own equity.
That is an unusually blunt self-assessment from a chain whose marketing has been widely admired for a decade, and it sets Hassan’s brief in plain terms.
The Engage Positive view
We see the same pattern outside quick service, and it is almost always structural rather than creative.
A promotions calendar is easy to approve because every entry has a start date, an asset list and a measurable spike. A brand platform is harder to approve because its returns compound over quarters rather than weeks, so it loses every budget argument against the next collaboration.
The result is a brand that is famous and flat. Attention accumulates in the feed while mental availability at the point of purchase does not move, because nothing consistent is being reinforced.
Three things usually need to change together. The brand needs one narrative it repeats for years instead of twelve it abandons monthly. Retention and loyalty need to sit with the same owner as acquisition, which is exactly what the Wendy’s job title now does. And measurement needs to shift from campaign-level engagement to frequency, repeat rate and margin per customer.
For marketing leaders reading this as a category story, the transferable point is simple. Cultural relevance is a route to growth, not evidence of it. A brand can win the internet for years and still lose the aisle.
What to watch next
Campaign structure is the first signal. A move from monthly stunt collaborations to a repeatable brand platform would show the diagnosis is being acted on rather than restated.
The digital and loyalty stack is the second. Hassan’s McDonald’s tenure was built on app-led engagement, and any real lift in Wendy’s visit frequency is more likely to come from there than from creative alone.
The sales line is the third. With six quarters of decline behind it, Wendy’s needs the comparable sales trend to flatten before any turnaround claim holds, and marketing changes of this kind typically take two to three quarters to appear in the numbers.
