Buffalo Wild Wings parent Inspire Brands is aiming to put a keener edge on its business analytics—“the forefront of Inspire’s competitive advantage,” according to CEO Paul Brown—by promoting to Navin Sharma to the newly created position of chief commercial services officer.
In that role, Brown said in a statement, Sharma will lead the development of Inspire’s processes for turning data into actionable intelligence for the company’s restaurant brands, which also include Dunkin’ Arby’s, Sonic, Jimmy John’s, Baskin-Robbins and Rusty Taco.
“In a rapidly changing restaurant industry, Navin and his team are equipping the Inspire family with insights, analytics and customer personalization capabilities that will drive competitive advantage and long-term growth for all our brands,” Brown said.
He noted that the aim is to provide directional data-based “tools” that are “real-time, granular and self-learning.”
Part of Sharma’s mission is making those tools scalable so they can be used with further additions to Inspire’s portfolio, Brown added. The company ended 2020 with one of the biggest acquisitions in restaurant history, the $11.3 billion purchase of Dunkin’ Brands from its shareholders.
Sharma assumes his new role after serving as SVP of insights and customer personalization. In that job, he was responsible for functions related to loyalty, personalization and data analytics, along with developing the architecture supporting those endeavors.
Inspire was formed through Arby’s acquisition of Buffalo Wild Wings for $2.3 billion in early 2018. Brown, formerly the CEO of Arby’s, vowed at the time to make Inspire a different sort of restaurant company.
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