‘You carve out lanes of responsibility’: How Dunkin’ gets its agency, consulting and tech partners to work together

Business Insider/Jessica Tyler

Dunkin’ North American marketing chief Tony Weisman described how Dunkin’ uses the "kitchen table" model to work with a roster of partners.
Under this model, brands have multidisciplinary teams drawing from design, PR, creative, social, mobile and technology.
Weisman said while orchestrating this model can be a challenge but that it produces healthy competition.
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While most marketers are toying with taking more of their marketing in-house, Dunkin’ is bucking the trend. In fact, the brand credits its agencies for their collaboration on one of the most visible outputs of its recent rebrand.

When the chain launched espresso in its stores, it opted for orange cups emblazoned with an exclamation point on the side — modeled after an espresso machine’s portafilter when viewed from the top.

The idea came from Dunkin’s design agency JKR, and then was embraced by BBDO chairman and chief creative officer David Lubars, whose team followed JKR’s lead, according to the chief marketing officer of Dunkin’, Tony Weisman.

Dunkin’ subscribes to the "kitchen table" model pioneered by former Mondelez marketing chief and Medialink exec Dana Anderson. This model has brands using multidisciplinary teams of design, PR, creative, social, mobile and technology staff, depending on their needs.

"The ‘kitchen table’ has an enormous benefits, which is access to great talent," Weisman told Business Insider in a recent interview. "We get ideas from a bunch of partners, which is something you can never replicate in-house."

Weisman said this model instills healthy competition, even though orchestrating it can be challenging.

"You carve out lanes of responsibility, and make sure that there won’t be a lot of jump balls, because when you do that, you’ve turned collaborators into enemies," he said. "I’d rather have that headache than the headache of everything being at one agency or in-house. Because the really good people don’t want to work on one thing, and you get compromising quality."

Weisman thinks more agencies will be swallowed by consulting firms

Wiesman also said it was tough time to be an ad agency. Accenture Interactive’s recent acquisition of creative agency Droga5 wasn’t the first time that a consulting firm came after an ad agency. It won’t be the last, he said.

"I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it," he said. "Deloitte, IBM, and Cognizant all looked at what Accenture is doing and probably thought, ‘What are we going to buy?’"

But Dunkin’ will work with a range of partners, at least for now, he said. The chain’s partners include BBDO, JKR, Publicis Media, Accenture, and Google, Facebook, and Adobe.

"At this moment in time, the ecosystem of professionals from ad agencies, tech partners, and consultants, is better equipped to serve us," he said.

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