Dunkin’ Brands, the company which includes Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in its portfolio, is partnering with HubKonnect to bring marketing solutions driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to all of its over 10,000 restaurants in the U.S.
The partnership, which was announced Tuesday, will run for three years into 2026 and cover not only the standalone Dunkin’ restaurants but also the 1,500 sites with combined Dunkin’ and Baskin-Robbins restaurants and over 1,000 Dunkin’ franchisee networks.
HubKonnect’s AI-informed local store marketing (LSM) utilizes data related to consumer behavior and uses it to adjust tactics around demand and delivery, create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns and analyze the return on investment for each tactic at every location.
"The partnership that we’re announcing is a highly strategic partnership where we’re in this for the long haul with them as a partner providing them best in class, local store marketing solutions where they can really win their community," HubKonnect CEO and co-founder Michael Koch told FOX Business. "The focus is leveraging our award-winning technology, leveraging the Dunkin’ brand in those communities, and really expand to leverage data to provide that to drive mobile app usage and their strategic initiatives from an executive level."
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HubKonnect’s AI system draws its insights from a variety of data sources, including demographic data, mobile data, custom consumer personas, plus the company’s proprietary data and more.
Brands like Dunkin’ with multiple units can use that data to evaluate how various marketing strategies may work at the local level by optimizing turnaround times, spotting customer trends and preferences, and building community relationships. HubKonnect says that its system shows an average return on investment of 6 to 10%.
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Koch explained that HubKonnect’s system is now live across all Dunkin’ locations. When an individual franchisee or someone in their organization logs in, they have site characteristics for each location that help users understand the local competitive landscape and traffic-driving opportunities in the area.
"Through that platform with three easy steps, they select a location, business objective, the time period. And then with the push of a button, we then create – leveraging the data, the mobile data, understanding all that information – five marketing tactics that get overlaid on a consolidated marketing calendar for Dunkin’," Koch said.
"Now, these local tactics are also overlaid by the entire national marketing calendar, we have all the regional marketing calendars, so our AI brain takes all that into consideration when we make that local recommendation to be able to best activate that tactic."
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HubKonnect’s partnership with Dunkin’ also contains specific brand assets that match the data, demographics, and style set within each individual location. As more localized marketing campaigns are carried out, the AI system further refines its data sets and can make better recommendations.
"With every single tactic that’s done, the systems get smarter and smarter. So we’re not only building a unique local data set for that individual location, but we’re also building a unique data set for that [designated market area], for that region, as well as for overall Dunkin’. So the tactic that you would use in, let’s say Omaha, Nebraska, is different than you would use in downtown New York, based off of those individual trading areas," Koch explained. "So our system takes all that into place to provide them with those assets to be able to drive sales transactions, recruiting, mobile app usage. So that’s really what we’re driving."
Dunkin’ franchisees are also provided with assistance from HubKonnect advisors who are brand-centric for Dunkin’ and provide advice in choosing between the various marketing tactics at their disposal or to capitalize on a given event in their community and execute those plans through the platform.
"All of their vendors integrate into our platform, so when they have the idea they need to order things like counter cards or different things that go along with the campaign, they’re able to order it. So we really become the hub and the centralized point for all their local store marketing needs," Koch said.
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HubKonnect is a fully bootstrapped company that created its AI marketing solutions system in 2016 and has worked with other quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Bojangles, Wahlburgers and more.
The company was initially brought in to review the Dunkin’ marketing ecosystem, and following its analysis of the network’s resources and vendors, which resulted in the partnership that will now see HubKonnect manage and run the Dunkin’ local store marketing system.
