NEW YORK — Dairy Queen, which built its reputation as a soft-serve ice cream pioneer, has hired MWWPR as its public relations agency of record, PRovoke Media can reveal.

With its focus on the US and Canada, MWWPR will handle the full range of communications for Dairy Queen (whose American stores are branded DQ) including media relations and influencer strategy, brand activation and consumer event support, corporate communications and crisis management, said executive VP of marketing Maria Hokanson.

MWWPR won the business in a multi-agency review. The quick-serve restaurant, which has roughly 4,500 franchises in the US, has switched its PR agency after a working with incumbent agency Pierson Grant for at least a decade. Other agency partners include advertising and creative AOR Barkley and media AOR Spark Foundry.
 
“We were blown away with the MWWPR team at every step of the review process. The team’s genuine passion for DQ clearly came through, and they married their excitement with smart, strategic, creative thinking that proved they really understood our brand,” Hokanson said. “In addition to great work, chemistry and trust is vital for a healthy working relationship, and our teams instantly connected — all the way from DQ franchisee leaders, to marketing team members, to members of our c-suite — all of which participated in the review process.”

At 80 years old, Dairy Queen has been a fixture in the US, particularly in small town America, since it opened in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois, as one of the country’s first soft-serve ice cream vendors and early adopters of the franchise system.

Since that time, Dairy Queen has grown into a $4.5b brand, with more than 6,800 stores in the US, Canada and roughly 25 other countries serving food in addition to ice cream.