Yelena Kozubskaya

Yelena Kozubskaya is recognized for one of the most consequential digital commerce transformations in Central Asia — leading the rebuild of a full-scale consumer brand and digital ecosystem following the exit of McDonald’s from Kazakhstan.

When the business relaunched under the national identity I’M Restaurants, Yelena was at the center of everything that made it work commercially: the mobile app, the loyalty platform, performance media, delivery partnerships, and the CRM infrastructure that turned a disrupted customer base into an engaged, growing one.

The results speak plainly. App orders grew nearly five times between September 2025 and January 2026. Sales rose 45% year-over-year following the rebrand. Delivery orders expanded by close to 500% between 2023 and 2024. Within six months of relaunch, I’M Restaurants reached second place for top-of-mind awareness among all QSR brands in the country.

What made this possible was how Yelena approached the challenge — not as a sequence of marketing functions to execute, but as a single growth system to design and run. Brand building, first-party data, lifecycle automation, media, and partnerships were developed together, calibrated against each other, and measured against commercial outcomes.

For Central Asia, this is a benchmark case. Very few businesses in the region have replaced a globally recognized brand with a local identity and come out on the other side with stronger sales, higher digital adoption, and deeper customer relationships. Yelena Kozubskaya is a central reason this one did.