How self-deprecation is fueling Cava’s growth

It might not sound like a winning marketing strategy for a restaurant to refer to its most-popular dish “slop.” But it’s working for Cava.

“Our guests lovingly call it that [online],” Rachel Karten, a social strategist who works for Cava, told Marketing Brew about the fast-casual restaurant’s Mediterranean bowls, which can tend to look slop-like when mixed up. “They’re saying it in a way that’s nice, so we use that word too and show that we’re in on the joke.”

Being tongue-in-cheek is part of Cava’s broader approach to social marketing, which also includes posting memes and working with comedic creators like ironic song-mixer DJ Mandy and Alex Hartman, who parodies certain lower Manhattan residents on his Instagram account Nolita Dirtbag.

According to Karten, being self-deprecating and taking on the tone of a friend has resonated with the brand’s social audience, which tends to skew younger.

But as any social manager knows, edgier social strategies don’t often happen without the blessing of higher-ups: “They have a lot of creative license,” Andy Rebhun, Cava’s chief experience officer who oversees brand marketing, told us of the brand’s social team. “I very much am a believer of letting creatives create and making sure that it reflects the way we want to be perceived in the world.”

Cava, which has more than 300 locations in the US, is preparing for its first Midwest location opening this spring in Chicago as part of a larger growth of its physical presence in the US. The expansion has prompted Rebhun and his team to think about growing as a brand while maintaining its “passionate fanbase” and rewarding customers on social and in-app.

Un(pita)ble strategy

For now, Cava’s marketing is “primarily digital,” Rebhun said, with a focus on making “guests feel seen,” according to Karten. That’s where the memes and inside jokes come in. Since some trends and memes could pose potential copyright or trademark issues, the social team—which consists of Karten, another strategist, and a social director—often opt to use stick figures and pictures of Cava ingredients in posts, rather than “celebrity likenesses or any of that kind of stuff,” she said.

Brand partners have included well-known creators like Emma Chamberlain and Meredith Hayden (aka Wishbone Kitchen), who both made custom bowls for the brand. According to Rebhun, Cava is intentional about who it works with, and evaluates whether potential partners have an engaged fanbase and are existing customers.

“You look back with the partnership we did with [Chamberlain] and Nolita Dirtbag, these are people who have very much expressed interest in the brand and…sent us direct messages or specifically called us out in an Instagram post,” he said.

When working with creators, Karten said she considers them to be “almost extensions of the social team,” providing content that the in-house team can’t. In the case of working with DJ Mandy, that was apparent: “No one on our social team can DJ—or fake DJ,” she said.

Sometimes, social content for Cava doesn’t involve a creator at all. Karten said one winning strategy for content has started by imagining what a Cava fan might fantasize about, like a giant pita chip, and making content out of that. Another thing that’s worked well for the brand, she said, is posting TikTok carousels to Instagram: one recent post, “how to become a pita chip,” has racked up nearly 50k likes in a month.

‘We see customers create TikTok videos about our pita chips [and it’s] very much frequently liked and commented on in our Cava social media posts,” Rebhun said. “To me, that’s just an example of doing social listening, understanding what the customer wants, and ultimately positioning it in a way that makes sense for our brand.”

Sharing is caring

Beyond simply listening to customer feedback, Cava’s social account often reposts customer-created content. According to Karten, the brand’s photo dumps that compile user-generated content (which are often reposts of photos customers have shared of their Cava orders) have been some of the brand’s more popular posts.

“We’re very lucky we have a very passionate fan base,” Rebhun said. “You see a lot of organic TikToks, a lot of organic Instagram videos…and it’s been something that I don’t take for granted because in many of the concepts I used to work with, you had to pay people to do that.”

Earlier this month, Cava debuted its “custom contest,” in which customers are encouraged to share photos of their custom bowl orders. (Winners will receive a Cava app credit and a chance for their custom bowl to be featured on Cava’s menu.) Not only are contests like these UGC opportunities, but also a way to further engage with customers, according to Karten. “Memes are great, they’re shareable, they make people feel seen,” she said. “But how do we connect with our guests on a more personal level through social media?”

According to Rebhun, Cava plans to reintroduce a loyalty program later this year while continuing to focus on guest experience and connection, “whether that be through loyalty points or emails,” as part of its continued efforts to boost engagement.

In the meantime, Karten and her team will continue posting and seeing what resonates.

“In my work in social media, the best social teams are often the ones that have fewer approval processes or [don’t have] too many minds thinking about it, so I’m grateful that Cava seems very open to experiment” she said. “If there’s a mistake made, they move on, and it’s all part of learning.”