Five Guys rolls out its halal offer city by city, backed by local influencers

Five Guys and Jin: a premium burger and an agency obsessed with impact

Five Guys started in 1986 in Arlington, Virginia, when Jerry and Janie Murrell offered their sons the chance to start a business instead of going to college. The burger takeout counter now has nearly 2,000 restaurants worldwide, and the formula has barely changed: burgers made to order, hand-cut fries cooked in peanut oil, 15 free toppings and more than 250,000 possible combinations.

Jin is an independent communications consultancy founded in 2012. Its 140-plus consultants cover influence, social media, public relations and corporate affairs, supported by data teams. The agency holds AFNOR certification for its responsible influence practices.

Jin has worked with Five Guys for three years. Pauline Cugnart, account director, took over the account two years ago to bring the brand into influencer marketing. “What we’re after is impact,” she said. “The hard part is measuring the impact of that communication.”

The challenge: a long-awaited offer nobody knew about yet

Five Guys moves fast. Its kids’ menu, the first influencer campaign Jin ran for the brand, went from idea to restaurant in two weeks, and the halal offer, already available in the U.K., followed at the same pace. “They had the idea, and two weeks later it was in stores. The halal offer was the same,” Pauline said.

The demand had been there for a long time. Jin, which also handles the brand’s community management, kept seeing the same messages. “We had comments like, ‘Oh, I can’t come get ice cream because it’s not halal, and I’d really love to try it,’” Pauline said.

That left explaining what the offer covers. At participating restaurants, the beef and hot dogs are halal. Bacon stays on the menu, cooked on a dedicated grill with its own utensils, the bacon milkshake is gone and alcohol is still served. So the offer can’t be certified halal, and Five Guys chose to say so. “We’d rather be honest,” Pauline said.

The brand knew the offer wouldn’t appeal to people who eat strictly halal, but a large part of the community accepts halal meat at a restaurant that doesn’t follow every rule. There was another hurdle: many people know Five Guys by name but have never walked through the door, often because they’ve heard it’s expensive.

The strategy: local influence, rolled out in three waves

The campaign followed the restaurants’ timeline. The halal offer launched first in five cities, then in five more, then in two others as demand held up. Jin built its campaign around that schedule, in three successive waves.

The approach stayed the same at every stage. The agency contacted influencers who eat halal and live in the cities where a restaurant was switching to the halal offer. Their content was first published organically, then boosted as dark posts with very precise targeting.

“The goal was really to get big visibility,” Pauline said. That meant announcing the offer, but also explaining clearly what it does and doesn’t include.

Influencer selection: casting vetted with Kolsquare

About 20 influencers were chosen on three criteria: legitimacy, geography and exclusivity, all checked in Kolsquare. Jin has used the platform for a year, after several years on another tool. “What I liked about Kolsquare was that it felt a bit more ahead of the curve in how it develops its data,” Pauline said. “It sounds silly, but the platform looks really nice, and it makes you want to work on it.”

Legitimacy, by keyword. “I absolutely needed influencers who eat halal so they’d have the credibility to talk about it,” Pauline said. Rather than starting from a name and then checking the audience, she ran a keyword search in Kolsquare. “I typed in halal, and it pulled up halal content. I was able to find influencers who were already talking about halal restaurants or making halal recipes.” Because the pool was limited at the city level, Jin also picked a few profiles whose friends and family eat halal.

Geography, by audience. Each piece of content featured a specific restaurant, so Pauline checked the city breakdown of each profile’s audience in its Instagram data. “Sometimes I’d find 20% of the audience lived in Toulouse. Great! We need people from Toulouse to come.”

Exclusivity, by content history. Any profile that had already worked with another fast-food chain was ruled out. Pauline went through their content in Kolsquare, looking for competitors’ names or simply the word “burger.”

Once casting was done, the influencers were paid and given a detailed brief on this sensitive subject, but the creative was left to them. “They know their own audience,” Pauline said. “The brief is there to guide them. But really, the creative comes from them.”

The results: from visibility to in-restaurant sales

Across the three waves, the campaign produced more than 20 pieces of content and topped 1 million impressions, with an engagement rate Pauline called “super high.”

For Five Guys, visibility was only one step. The goal was to turn anticipation into visits and finally bring in customers who had long wanted to come but couldn’t.

So Jin isolated sales for the campaign period alone. “Those sales match the dates the organic content and then the sponsored posts went live. Not before and not after,” she said.

Every restaurant measured saw growth, most of them in the double digits. In Toulouse, sales rose more than 15% over the period, and in Cannes the increase hit 30%.

Beyond the numbers, the campaign met a real demand: many customers could finally try something that had been off-limits to them. The rollout keeps expanding, with two more restaurants switching to halal and a new influencer campaign in the works.

“I think we’ll keep going like this because, as you can see, it’s working pretty well in terms of sales growth and visibility,” Pauline said.

A sensitive offer, credible voices

Five Guys’ halal campaign shows that a sensitive launch hinges on the credibility of the people talking about it and how close they are to the ground. By using Kolsquare data to check who is talking, about what and to whom, Jin was able to tie each piece of content to a restaurant, and each restaurant to its sales.

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