Wendy’s Hires McDonald’s Marketing Chief Tariq Hassan

Tariq Hassan, chief marketing and customer growth officer at Wendy’s

Wendy’s has appointed Tariq Hassan as chief marketing and customer growth officer, a newly created role that puts marketing and customer growth under one mandate, effective immediately.

New role: chief marketing and customer growth officer, The Wendy’s Company
Reports to president and chief executive Bob Wright, and joins the senior leadership team
Previously: senior vice president and US chief marketing and customer experience officer, McDonald’s
More than three decades across marketing, customer experience, digital transformation and brand building
Lindsay Radkoski, US chief marketing officer since 2024, leaves after a transition period

What Tariq Hassan Has Actually Been Hired To Do

The role did not exist before. Merging marketing with customer growth into a single title is a structural decision, and it usually means the company has concluded that its marketing was not accountable for the numbers it was meant to move.

Bob Wright framed the appointment as a step in returning Wendy’s to profitable growth, and pointed to talent and capability building as part of the brief. That is a mandate to rebuild a function rather than to run one.

Hiring Straight From The Category Leader

Hassan comes from the equivalent job at McDonald’s, where the work covered modernising marketing, strengthening digital and loyalty engagement, and putting customer insight at the centre of campaigns and menu innovation.

Recruiting the marketing lead of the biggest player in your category is a specific kind of hire. What transfers is an operating model, particularly on loyalty and digital ordering, and what does not transfer is the scale that made it work there.

The Position He Inherits

Wendy’s is in the middle of a turnaround under Wright covering food quality and value, restaurant operations, store upgrades and digital sales. Marketing sits downstream of most of that, which sets a limit on what a campaign can fix.

Hassan has said his focus is on the connection customers already feel with the brand, starting with the food itself. Radkoski, who spent fifteen years at the company, stays through the handover. The useful thing to watch is whether the growth half of the new title comes with the budget and the reporting lines to mean anything.