Fast food was fun when it began. It was emotive. It was a treat. Over time, it became cold and functional, and Wendy’s fell by the wayside in the American imagination. For the last four years, Wendy’s standing brief has been “Make America fall in love with Wendy’s again.” While older generations have fond memories of Wendy’s, 18- to 34-year-olds — fast food’s most frequent consumers — knew the brand as a hamburger restaurant their parents and grandparents liked. We had to grow relevance and distinction among this younger, digitally savvy audience so vital to our future. We needed to build credibility among the next generation of fast food eaters.

Most brands pay influencers big bucks to borrow their credibility and reach new audiences. Wendy’s has taken the opposite approach. Instead of buying into culture, we’ve helped create it, becoming a cultural influencer in our own right.

To be a cultural influencer, you have to push the boundaries of accepted culture. So we redefined how brands can act online, deciding to behave more like a human than a staid corporation. After all, people don’t love businesses; people love people. Our task was to make people love the Wendy’s brand, and our idea was to act more human. We would become a brand that people wanted to like by acting like a person they would like.

Prior to Wendy’s, most brands used social media as a customer service channel or to post safe and expected GIFs and photos. Wendy’s wanted to make people fall in love with its brand, and we operated from the simple truth that people don’t love businesses. They love people. So, we used social media like a person would and the way creators they admire online would. Our goal was to evolve Wendy’s from a great voice on Twitter to a celebrity influencer that was embedded in US culture; our strategy was to act more like a celebrity influencer. Today we not only connect with digitally savvy 18-34 year olds but audiences of all ages in America.

Wendy’s grew famous for its sassy Twitter, becoming an exemplar of digital culture in the popular zeitgeist. We released a chart-topping mixtape. And we’ve kept it up. We became a top 1% streaming gamer on Twitch. We released our own fully immersive tabletop RPG Feast of Legends (think Dungeons & Dragons, but in our own fully developed fast food game world) that got a quarter million downloads and still has its own cult following. We got our followers and other brands to make their Twitter profile pictures and logos our logos, turning themselves into our Twitter street team and their profile pictures into Wendy’s newest media spaces.

To earn credibility with the next generation of fast food eaters, Wendy’s became the kind of cheeky, sassy creator and cultural influencer they loved.

People liked us. They even loved us. Mainstream entertainment outlets — “Good Morning America,” “The Daily Show,” Netflix’s “Space Force,” “Dave,” to name a few — name-dropped us for cachet among millennial and social-savvy audiences.

We even got referenced where you can’t buy an endorsement: inside an NFL huddle.

Wendy’s fashioned itself into a famous digital icon that other entities, even other brands, wanted to associate with. In the process, Wendy’s became a cultural influencer and reached new audiences with our entertaining, norm-defying creativity. Wendy’s doesn’t buy credibility, we earn it — billions and billions of impressions and millions and millions of followers earned. Our audiences bought our credibility, though, and they bought our food. While we’ve worked to make America fall in love with Wendy’s again, Wendy’s experienced 15 straight quarters of sales growth, becoming the No. 2 fast food hamburger restaurant in America.