Dunkin’ Brands offers AI marketing to US locations with HubKonnect partnership

Dunkin’ Brands, the company which includes Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in its portfolio, is partnering with HubKonnect to offer marketing solutions driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to its franchisees around the U.S. as they consider what local marketing strategies may work best at a local level.

The partnership, which was announced by HubKonnect on Tuesday, will run for three years into 2026 and make its platform one of the tools available to not only the standalone Dunkin’ restaurants but also the 1,500 sites with combined Dunkin’ and Baskin-Robbins restaurants and over 1,000 Dunkin’ franchisee networks. 

HubKonnect’s AI-informed local store marketing (LSM) utilizes data related to consumer behavior and uses it to adjust tactics around demand and delivery, create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns and analyze the return on investment for each tactic at every location. 

HubKonnect CEO and co-founder Michael Koch told FOX Business, "The focus is leveraging our award-winning technology, leveraging the Dunkin’ brand in those communities, and really expand to leverage data to provide that to drive mobile app usage and their strategic initiatives from an executive level."

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HubKonnect’s AI system draws its insights from a variety of data sources, including demographic data, mobile data, custom consumer personas, plus the company’s proprietary data and more. 

Brands like Dunkin’ with multiple units can use that data to evaluate how various marketing strategies may work at the local level by optimizing turnaround times, spotting customer trends and preferences, and building community relationships. HubKonnect says that its system shows an average return on investment of 6 to 10%.

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Koch explained that when an individual franchisee or someone in their organization logs in, they have site characteristics for each location that help users understand the local competitive landscape and traffic-driving opportunities in the area.

"Through that platform with three easy steps, they select a location, business objective, the time period. And then with the push of a button, we then create – leveraging the data, the mobile data, understanding all that information – five marketing tactics that get overlaid on a consolidated marketing calendar for Dunkin’," Koch said.

"Now, these local tactics are also overlaid by the entire national marketing calendar, we have all the regional marketing calendars, so our AI brain takes all that into consideration when we make that local recommendation to be able to best activate that tactic."

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HubKonnect’s partnership with Dunkin’ also contains specific brand assets that match the data, demographics, and style set within each individual location. As more localized marketing campaigns are carried out, the AI system further refines its data sets and can make better recommendations.

"With every single tactic that’s done, the systems get smarter and smarter. So we’re not only building a unique local data set for that individual location, but we’re also building a unique data set for that [designated market area], for that region, as well as for overall Dunkin’. So the tactic that you would use in, let’s say Omaha, Nebraska, is different than you would use in downtown New York, based off of those individual trading areas," Koch explained. "So our system takes all that into place to provide them with those assets to be able to drive sales transactions, recruiting, mobile app usage. So that’s really what we’re driving."

Dunkin’ franchisees are also provided with assistance from HubKonnect advisors who are brand-centric for Dunkin’ and provide advice in choosing between the various marketing tactics at their disposal or to capitalize on a given event in their community and execute those plans through the platform.

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HubKonnect is a fully bootstrapped company that created its AI marketing solutions system in 2016 and has worked with other quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Bojangles, Wahlburgers and more. The company was initially brought in to review the Dunkin’ marketing ecosystem and will now serve as a tool to assist the brands' franchisees. 

* This article has been updated with clarifying information about HubKonnect's role as a tool in the Dunkin' Brands marketing network for its restaurants and franchisees.