Facebook/Qdoba
So executives have come up with a new way to set the Mexican chain apart, and it involves an imaginary woman named "Quentessa," Fast Company reports.
Quentessa is Qdoba's idea of its ideal customer.
"Guys want her number, and girls kind of want it, too," Qdoba Marketing Director David Craven told Fast Company. "She's naturally magnetic, leads a story-filled life, and invites others to do the same. She's a personification of flavor in our lives."
Qdoba loosely based Quentessa on several movie personalities, including Jennifer Lawrence's character in "Silver Linings Playbook" and Uma Thurman's characters in "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill."
The company is now redesigning its restaurants and menu around Quentessa's wants and needs.
"We thought, what is the type of space, literally, that the Quentessa would want to invite people into," Craven told Fast Company. "How would she approach seating, art on the walls, bathrooms?"
For example, Qdoba has added distressed wardrobes and Gothic mirrors to its redesigned bathrooms to better suit the imaginary Quentessa.
Qdoba is based in Colorado.
It has just over 640 locations, making it about one-third the size of Chipotle.
Companies often create profiles of their ideal customers to help personify their brand.
Lululemon, for example, calls its ideal customers "Ocean" and "Duke."
Ocean is "a 32-year-old professional single woman ... who makes $100,000 a year," Lululemon founder Chip Wilson told the New York Times. She is also "engaged, has her own condo, is traveling, fashionable, has an hour and a half to work out a day."