T-Mobile Serves Up Taco Bell in Latest Lifestyle Pop-Up Promotion
First it created a lifestyle-branded wedding chapel in Las Vegas, then took over a Palm Springs hotel for a pop-up stunt that quickly sold out its rooms. Now Taco Bell has teamed with T-Mobile to set up T-MoBell stores at some existing New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago locations of the wireless carrier, with free tacos and co-branded frozen drinks and merchandise aimed at getting those young phone customers through the door.
T-Mobile, based in Bellevue, Washington, said it selected "Signature" wireless stores in the three major cities that will be known as T-MoBell on July 23-25, offering free food, a limited edition "T-MoBell Freeze" drink and various other merchandise.
"People love tacos. And they love their phones," said T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere, adding that an earlier "free tacos" promotion it launched with the fast-food chain resulted in Taco Bell’s highest online-order day, and the T-Mobile Tuesdays app tied to that promotion was heavily downloaded in Apple’s App Store.
T-Mobile in recent years has been aggressively expanding its retail store presence and now operates more than 5,300 locations, second only to wireless industry leader Verizon with approximately 7,400 stores.
Taco Bell, based in Irvine, California, has more than 7,000 restaurants in 27 countries. Darren Tristano, chief executive of industry consulting firm FoodserviceResults in Chicago, said Taco Bell has had better success than most restaurant competitors in turning free-food promotions into greater in-store sales from its targeted customers. It’s done that with pop-ups and other unusual methods like its "Steal a Base, Steal a Taco" campaign during Major League Baseball games.
"They’re one of the few major chains that has actually been growing their locations and sales in recent years, and they’ve done it in part by being a little more unconventional than other chains," Tristano told CoStar News.
The partnership is the latest example in a growing pop-up trend impacting retail, restaurant and hospitality properties, estimated by consulting firm Pop-Up Republic to be a $50 billion industry that has extended far beyond temporary seasonal stores first seen in the U.S. during Halloween and Christmas.
The T-Mobile stunt with Taco Bell is more along the lines of the mutually beneficial "takeover" seen recently, for instance, when Netflix and Dunkin’ Brands temporarily transformed a Baskin Robbins ice cream store in Burbank, California, into a Scoops Ahoy shop like the fictional one seen in the streaming service’s "Stranger Things" TV series.
