Flagship Restaurant Group

Kelli Pilkington is Vice President of Marketing at Flagship Restaurant Group, where she leads the company's marketing team and oversees brand growth across a portfolio of hospitality concepts. Her work focuses on connecting brand strategy, technology, and the guest experience to drive sustainable growth.

If you ask ten founders how they plan to grow, you'll hear a familiar answer: increase awareness, spend more on advertising, expand into new markets, launch another campaign.

Ask me the same question and you'll probably be surprised by where the conversation goes. We'll talk about operations, team culture, guest experience, technology, systems, leadership, product and quality. In other words, everything that most people don't consider marketing.

After years of helping grow hospitality brands, I've come to believe that growth isn't a marketing problem. It's an alignment problem. Marketing used to be responsible for getting people through the front door. Today, guests experience your brand long before they ever walk through it.

They discover you on social media. Read your reviews. Ask AI where they should eat. Browse your website. Order online. Watch someone review your food on TikTok. Drive past your building every morning on the way to work. To your customer, those aren't separate channels. They're one experience.

That's why I believe marketing has evolved beyond campaigns and promotions. Its greatest responsibility today is aligning every part of the business around a single promise: delivering an experience people want to come back to.

The brands creating the most momentum aren't simply running better advertising. They're creating better experiences. That shift changes everything. The most influential marketers in your company probably don't work in the marketing department. They're greeting guests at the host stand. They're expediting food from the kitchen. They're solving problems before anyone asks. They're your employees.

Every interaction either reinforces your brand or weakens it. When people genuinely love where they work, they naturally become advocates. They tell their friends. They recruit great people. They share moments they're proud of. Not because someone asked them to, but because they believe in what they're building.

Guests respond the same way. A recommendation from a friend. A five-star review. An Instagram story. A TikTok. A conversation that starts with, "You have to try this place."

None of those can be manufactured. They have to be earned. That's why my definition of growth has changed.

For years, success was measured by speed with more locations, more markets and more awareness. Today, I think the better question is much simpler.

Have you earned the right to grow? Before you dominate a city, become indispensable in a neighborhood. Before you become a regional brand, become part of the local community. Before you open another location, your guests should already be asking where you're opening next, and your employees should be proud enough to tell everyone they know where they work.

Expansion shouldn't create momentum. Momentum should justify expansion. That's intentional growth and technology has made this easier than ever. First-party data helps us understand our guests. AI helps us uncover patterns faster, automate repetitive work and spend more time improving the experience instead of reporting on it. CRM platforms help us build relationships at scale. Social listening tells us what guests actually think instead of what we hope they think.

Technology makes organizations smarter. It doesn't make them more hospitable. People still do that. The brands that define the next decade won't be the ones with the newest AI tools. They'll be the ones using technology to strengthen the human experience instead of replacing it.

That evolution has changed what great marketing leadership looks like, too. The best marketing leaders aren't campaign managers. They're business builders. They connect operations, technology, finance, product, hospitality and customer insight into one shared strategy. They translate guest behavior into business decisions. They ensure the promise made in the marketing is the same promise delivered inside the business. Most importantly, they protect what made the brand worth growing in the first place.

The questions I ask today look very different than they did ten years ago. I'm less interested in impressions, clicks and reach.

I'm more interested in questions like: 

• Are we creating something people can't wait to experience?

• Are guests naturally telling other people about us?

• Are employees genuinely proud to work here?

• If we opened another location tomorrow, would people already be waiting for it?

Those questions tell me far more about the future of a brand than any dashboard ever could. Technology will continue to evolve. Data will become richer and AI will become more advanced, but none of that changes the fundamentals. The brands that win the next decade won't be defined by how quickly they adopted the newest tools. They'll be defined by how intentionally they used those tools to create remarkable experiences, stronger communities, better cultures and businesses people genuinely believe in.

The next era of growth won't belong to the brands with the biggest budgets or the newest technology. It'll belong to the organizations that use both to create experiences people believe in, communities people want to be part of and cultures people are proud to represent.