Wendy's has appointed Tariq Hassan to the newly created role of Chief Marketing and Customer Growth Officer, effective immediately, as the Dublin, Ohio-based QSR chain works to reverse a prolonged sales slump across its more than 7,000 global restaurants.
Hassan reports directly to President and CEO Bob Wright and joins the Wendy's Senior Leadership Team. Outgoing U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Radkoski, who has held the role since 2024, will exit after a transition period spanning the coming weeks. Wright credited Radkoski's 15 years of service to the brand while signaling that the leadership restructure is part of a broader company turnaround plan.
Hassan's Marketing Résumé
Hassan arrives with more than three decades of brand-building, digital transformation, and customer-experience work behind him. Most recently he served as Senior Vice President and U.S. Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at McDonald's, where he helped modernize the chain's marketing stack, deepened digital and loyalty program engagement, and tied culturally resonant campaigns to menu innovation — a playbook QSR operators have come to view as table stakes in an era when app-driven frequency and personalized offers increasingly drive inside-sales comp.
Prior to McDonald's, Hassan held senior roles across consumer brands and agencies, with a record of repositioning flagging brands and using data-driven marketing to measurably improve customer retention. That background maps directly onto Wendy's current priorities: the chain has been navigating soft traffic and needs to sharpen its value messaging, foodservice storytelling, and digital activation to compete with both legacy QSR rivals and fast-casual disruptors.
What It Means for the System
"Tariq's appointment is another meaningful step in returning Wendy's to profitable growth," Wright said in the announcement. "He has demonstrated the impact that highly effective marketing, digital activation, menu innovation and culturally relevant brand engagement can have on restaurant performance and customer loyalty."
Hassan framed his mandate around reconnecting with the brand's core identity. "Wendy's is an iconic American brand that has something special most brands spend decades trying to build — a real point of view that our customers genuinely feel," he said. "My focus will be on reigniting that passionate connection with our brand to show up more powerfully in every experience, everywhere our fans meet us." He cited the food itself as the starting point for reshaping the brand narrative — a nod to Wendy's longstanding fresh-beef positioning, which the chain has struggled to convert into consistent traffic gains against heavily promoted value platforms at McDonald's and Burger King.
For c-store foodservice operators who compete with QSR on grab-and-go and prepared-food occasions, a reinvigorated Wendy's marketing engine raises the competitive bar on digital loyalty and limited-time-offer velocity. Chains that have invested in loyalty and digital programs and menu storytelling — areas Hassan is specifically tasked with accelerating — tend to capture a disproportionate share of impulse and commuter dayparts, segments where convenience retail also competes hard. How quickly Hassan can move the needle on Wendy's app engagement and culturally relevant campaigns will be worth watching for any operator tracking QSR-adjacent foodservice trends.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
