Why this CEO thinks social-first is a powerful brand-building tool

Tory Bartlett, CEO of PopUp Bagels, is set to speak at our upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with him to hear his thoughts on the importance of brand loyalty and staying true to your product and experience.

What do you think most marketers get wrong in their branding today?

Trying to be everything to everyone. It’s easy to get distracted by the latest trend or the next shiny object, but if you don’t have a clear understanding of your brand’s DNA, you end up chasing relevance instead of building it.

The brands that stand the test of time know exactly who they are. They evolve, but they don’t abandon the qualities that made people care in the first place. At PopUp Bagels, we spend a lot of time protecting what makes us different. We don’t try to copy what everyone else is doing. We focus on delivering a consistently great product and experience, and then look for new ways to express that in a way that’s authentic to our brand.

Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave?

I think the biggest gap is between what marketers assume customers want and what the data actually tells them. Too often, strategies are built around opinions, comments, or a small group of very vocal people instead of the behavior of the customers who are actually buying product.

Every brand has access to more data than ever before. Transaction history, purchase frequency, repeat visits—those are the things that tell you who your customer really is. If you understand your core customer, you can make smarter decisions and grow from a position of strength. The mistake is chasing the 2% online because they’re the loudest, instead of serving the 98% who have already chosen your brand.

You’ve built PopUp Bagels around social-first brand building. What’s a bet you made that the data said was wrong, and how did it turn out?

We’re absolutely a social-first brand, and our growth reflects that. But one thing we underestimated was customer frequency. Based on what we were seeing across social, we assumed people were visiting us a handful of times throughout the year. When we looked at our transaction data, we realized the average customer was actually coming in roughly twice as often as we expected.

That was a great surprise because it changed how we viewed the business. Social is incredibly powerful for building awareness and getting people in the door, but it only captures the moments people choose to share. The transaction data showed us something even more important: customers weren’t just trying PopUp Bagels; they were building it into their routine.

Five years from now, what’s the marketing “best practice” of today that you think we’ll all look back on and cringe at?

Paying people to create advocacy for your brand. It’s never been a strategy we’ve built our business around. We believe the strongest brands create genuine demand by delivering a product and experience people naturally want to share. That kind of advocacy is more credible, more sustainable, and ultimately more valuable than something driven by a paid transaction.

Five years from now, I think the brands that win won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’ll be the ones that built real customer loyalty, because when people genuinely believe in what you’re building, they become your most effective marketers.

Name one brand or organization that’s putting out advertising you’re regularly jealous of. What makes it so good?

I’d probably say Pit Viper. It’s not the obvious answer, but I really admire their marketing strategy.

They’ve built a brand that creates energy beyond the product itself. They’re not trying to convince you to buy a pair of sunglasses every time you see the brand. Instead, they’ve built something people genuinely enjoy engaging with because it’s entertaining, self-aware, and completely committed to who they are…Everything they put into the market strengthens the brand first, and the product naturally benefits because of it. That’s a much harder thing to build than a great campaign, but it’s also much more sustainable over the long run.

The summit’s themes are “insights, intuition, and integration.” Which of those three is the most underrated right now—and which one are marketers leaning on too much?

I think integration is the most underrated. Everyone has access to data and insights today, and most leaders have confidence in their own intuition. Neither one is a competitive advantage on its own. The real differentiator is knowing how to integrate them. It’s easy to make a decision based on one data point or one strong opinion. It’s much harder to step back and connect your customer data, your team’s experience, what’s happening culturally, and your brand’s long-term direction into one cohesive strategy.

I think marketers sometimes over-index on individual insights or gut instinct. The best decisions come from integrating all of those inputs, not relying on any one of them in isolation.