Inspire Brands on Thursday said it is realigning its corporate structure around three business areas, in the process expanding the responsibilities to a pair of the company’s top executives.
Scott Murphy, who heads Dunkin’, was named chief brand officer for the Atlanta-based company and will now oversee all the company’s brands in the U.S., including Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’, Jimmy John’s and Sonic. Each of those chains’ brand presidents will now report to him.
Dan Lynn, Inspire’s chief commercial officer, was named chief commercial and restaurant officer. He will now oversee the 2,200 company-owned restaurants in the system in addition to existing responsibilities overseeing a commercial group that includes demand generation, product management, data and analytics, customer marketing and digital retail.
Christian Charnaux will continue as chief growth officer and will be responsible for accelerating growth both in the U.S. and internationally.
The company said the goal of the realignment was to improve coordination among the brands within the core business areas.
Under Murphy, for instance, the chains will keep their distinctive positioning and dedicated leadership teams but the new structure will help improve coordination among the brands. And Inspire hopes that aligning company restaurants with the commercial group will improve the company’s ability to use its own restaurants as a “testbed for innovation.” That, in theory, could speed up operational improvements that could benefit the entire brand.
“This revised organizational structure positions us for accelerated growth and will further enhance the advantages of our tightly integrated shared services platform,” CEO Paul Brown said in a statement.
The company said that the new structure went into effect in mid-November.
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