Good morning,

So by now it is clear that a lot about American cities has changed since the pandemic.

You hear about this most in terms of the rise of remote and hybrid work, which is emptying downtown office buildings, with plenty of knock-on consequences.

But consumer habits have also changed, and some of these changes are also reshaping our cities. This week: a study that shows just how much our pandemic-era love affair with drive-throughs has stuck around—with consequences for walkability and more.

Plus: what happens when a brand has five different identities at once? Well, according to Kellogg’s Tim Calkins, “It is a bit like having several musicians named Taylor Swift all recording and performing at the same time.”

We learned to love the drive-through

It’s perhaps not surprising that, in the height of the pandemic, customers switched from dining in fast-food stores to ordering from drive-throughs. But Kellogg professor Sunil Chopra and his colleagues Partha Sarati Mishra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos wanted to know if the switch was short-lived or long-lasting.

To find out, the researchers analyzed cell-phone movement data from 2018 to 2022 for more than 17,000 stores in three chains: McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks. They found that, by a large margin, people are sticking with drive-through orders as opposed to sit-down meals. And that change in preference is driving a huge amount of the post-COVID recovery at fast-food stores. Average monthly visits to stores with drive-throughs were only slightly down in December 2022 compared with December 2019. But in stores without drive-throughs, visits were down nearly 50 percent.

“The data is pretty stark,” says coauthor Ioannis Stamatopoulos, who got his PhD from Kellogg and is now at the University of Texas at Austin. “People really did change the way they go about getting fast food.”

These changes have implications not only for fast-food companies but urban planners as well, says Chopra.

For instance, an increase in drive-throughs can increase traffic in an area. The stores least likely to have drive-throughs, meanwhile, tend to be in city centers, further compromising their recovery. And as The New York Times recently reported, “the hottest commercial real estate in most cities is known as the “end cap,” the far-end corners of a shopping center or strip mall that allow for a cafe and drive-through to be built.”

You can read more about this research in Kellogg Insight.

5 Taylor Swifts

I’ve really been digging Tim Calkins’s StrongBrands blog lately. Here’s a recent take on the once-mighty GE:

The problem is that nobody owns the brand. There are at least five different companies with rights to use the GE name. Each one has different interests, strategies and motivations.

Great brands stand for something distinctive and consistently deliver it. Coke, Apple and Google all have clear meanings. The firms carefully manage the brands, shaping the associations over time.

But with GE Healthcare heading in one direction and GE Aerospace in another and GE Vernova in a third, he argues, customers will be left with a muddled sense of what the brand stands for, while the companies themselves may have less incentive to invest in the brand’s future.

You can read more in his blog StrongBrands.

Jess Love, editor in chief
Kellogg Insight