Maven of the Month: An Interview with Erin Duff

This month’s featured Movable Mavens Community member is Erin Duff, Manager of Customer Marketing and Loyalty for Inspire Brands, where she focuses on the Arby’s business. In this Q&A, discover how she uses Movable Ink to drive business value, and how the partnership has enhanced her own professional journey.

Favorite project you’ve worked on recently?

I’m incredibly proud of a recent keystone moment in Arby’s Rewards called Free Sandwich Month. For each week in April, Arby’s Rewards members received one free sandwich, adding up to four throughout the month. We had full support from the entire Arby’s marketing team, including a national TV spot during the March Madness final four basketball game. I’ll never forget that moment!

Our social media team really showed up to support the campaign in a truly creative and funny way. They found Arby’s haters who left mean comments about our food on our Instagram and invited them into a studio. We hooked the haters up to a fake lie detector test and had them try Arby’s sandwiches. The kicker? Their mean comment was printed on the bun, thus having them “eat their words.” Officially converted the haters! Check out the video here.

What is your greatest marketing superpower?

I do my best work in a hyper-collaborative environment where it’s a safe space to share ideas, fail quickly, and work together. I love being a part of our brand campaign ideation and working with fabulous marketers with all different skill sets. I’m a natural networker, and my greatest superpower is bringing teams together to bring great campaigns to life across advertising, product, IT, social, brand, digital, and more. Aren’t we all just marketers trying to do cool things?

What is your greatest efficiency hack for working smarter, not harder?

I always think about campaigns as playbooks when applicable. Working for a large corporation, it’s very common to hear the phrase “we need to pull a quick lever.” To move fast, we need off-the-shelf levers to lean on that can be supportive of the brand and drive performance without reinventing the wheel. This could come in a variety of forms based on the business need and the industry.

For example, we have a “New Menu Item Playbook” that can be used when we have a new item joining the menu. Some questions we ask ourselves that make up the playbook include: Is there evergreen content ready to go that we can use? Do we tie a new menu item into our loyalty program to drive trials? Are there banners we can create and insert into other existing campaigns during that window?

Having this playbook allows us to move quickly, A/B test, and spend less time coming up with net-new ideas when the same strategy will get the job done.   

How would you describe your growth as a marketer over the past few years, and what’s your proudest accomplishment thus far?

The majority of my career has been in the B2B tech space. Being a B2B marketer in the software industry looks very different than acting as a B2C marketer in fast food. But regardless of B2B or B2C, the CRM methodologies are the same in theory. Since transitioning from B2B to B2C a few years ago, I’ve seen exponential growth in my own career purely from being exposed to different industries and tackling different business problems. I’m proud of the wealth of knowledge I’ve gained and how I use that knowledge to grow great marketing programs.

What is one thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I’m an Atlanta native, with a little bit of Northern spice. I am very passionate about Atlanta’s culture and contributing to making the city a diverse and innovative place to live in. I’m proud to be from Atlanta and love staying close to the arts, music, restaurant, and fashion scene. On the weekends, you can find me buying a last-minute ticket to a show, traveling to another state or country, drinking an Aperol Spritz with friends on a patio, or hanging out with my cat, Bing.