Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash
The challenges that private education institutions face in communicating what, in other circumstances, we’d have little hesitation to call Return On Investment.
Our work in recent years has led me to believe that when the going gets really tough, the toughest can do worse than to look first to their employer brand for help, rather than the knee jerk slashing and spinning of the business on a sixpence that usually ensues.
Back in October 2021, we wrote about what the “New Normal” for retail brands might look like in the post-Covid era. But even since then so much has changed that it seems appropriate now, in June 2022, to revisit those predictions and adapt them for where things are today.
Specialists in UK breaks designed exclusively for adults, Warner Leisure Hotels, has appointed Mimo Brands and Carter Wong to undertake a comprehensive brand identity refresh.
Following hot on the heels of our Lunch Truth no1 –food that feeds your mood, comes Lunch Truth no.2: MOOCH. SHOP. LUNCH.
We all know convenience is one of the biggest influences in retail, but what does it really mean when you unpack it... and it's not about closeness. What’s convenient today may be deeply inconvenient tomorrow.
Our bespoke research tells us that often it’s about what else is on our ‘mental lunchtime checklist’-findings here call into question received wisdom on A.I.D.A! How we decide what we eat for lunch isn’t a linear process, many other factors come into play, interrupting the customer journey, in fact we often mooch, shop, lunch.
‘I needed to collect a parcel from the Post Office so I went to M&S nearby and just had a mooch about, I kind of just grabbed a salad in the end’ 20 something London
Having nothing in the fridge to eat for supper that day can in fact be as big an influence on what we eat for lunch, as what we actually feel like eating. We’ll take convenient short cuts where possible, which is where retailers like Tesco’s, Sainsburys, Lidl even Esso come into play, whilst heading out to complete other essential shopping tasks -lunch is almost an afterthought rather than a key driver.
‘I picked up a meal deal from Esso as I was low on petrol in the morning’ : 30 something Manchester.
‘My wife gave me a shopping list with stuff for supper so I had to get a sandwich from Lidl, it’s easiest to just kill 2 birds with one stone’ 40 something Manchester.
Have we become a nation of lazy lunchers? Looking for time saving shortcuts, or is it just that are our days merging into one hard to plan, think about, let alone purchase set of meals?
‘I needed some bits and bobs for dinner, so I thought I’d wrap in all up in one go’ 20 something London
So with this multitasking mind-set at the forefront for consumers what does this mean for food and retailers in general at lunchtime? Should more people sell stamps and a sandwich (like McColl’s) or even offer key cutting & coffee, shoe repairs & soup.
Should more food retailers on the high street locate themselves next to the Post Office and dry cleaners to be in the optimum position for lunchtime traffic. What new combinations and customer Journeys can we imagine if we really aim to fit the consumer mind-set as they SHOP. MOOCH. LUNCH?
HUNGRY FOR MORE? Get in touch.
Smart brand thinking : nicolette@mimobrands.com
Clever research: helenn@monkey-see.co.uk
Look out for the next instalment of ‘The Truth About Lunch In 10 Bite-Sized Chunks’ coming soon. Lunch Truth no 3 : DEATH OF THE SANDWICH…
Lunch. It’s been eating us up for a while. So we decided to unpack this much misunderstood beast to find the truth about what’s really going on. In people’s heads, in their mouths and on the high street. We’ve dug deep for insight beyond the usual standard fare. Then neatly packaged it up into our own MIMO FUTURECLASS series - The Truth About Lunch In 10 Bite-Sized Chunks.
All days are not born equal. Like a mini year, each week begins with a resolution. 'Yes I will eat well and move more' on a Monday through to Celebration Friday - 'yes it’s the weekend round the corner, haven’t I done well navigating the multitasking, working, playing, not-much-resting week. Hmmm must be time for pizza (insert burger, burrito, other calorie-laden food).'
As I sit and munch through a chocolate bar on a Thursday I have decidedly fallen off the wagon!
Monday was good a healthy soup from Eat.
Tuesday was fine - Boots Shapers calorie counting.
Wednesday in Pret wavering ‘healthy’ crisps and chocolate popcorn bar added to the mix.
Thursday I’m in denial of my healthy intentions.
Goodness knows what Friday will look like given that I’m out with friends this evening.
Yes there is a gap between my image of myself as a healthy eater and the reality of the mid week/end of week slump and I’m not alone. Bespoke research from Mimo Brands & Monkey See designed to uncover the sub-conscious as well as understanding the social norms of lunch, shows a very similar pattern.
The same people have radically different mind-sets dependent on the day of the week, which potentially calls into question the majority of segmentation studies, where we are supposed to exist firmly within one state of mind.
So what does this mean for retail brands who want a slice of the lunch market? Whether it’s food to go, or casual dining, should brands and retailers be helping people stay on track, or finding food to feed their mood by day of the week?
There are clear implications here for retail brand portfolio strategies and structures. Should ranges be presented by day of the week rather than day part for example - with retailers offering all healthy Mondays vs Indulgent Fridays? How do pizza and burger brands survive outside of Fridays? How do light, healthy-biased retail brands stay relevant throughout the week? What about the infamous ‘meal deal’?
Look out for the next instalment of ‘The Truth About Lunch In 10 Bite-Sized Chunks’ coming soon. Lunch Truth No. 2 : MOOCH. SHOP. LUNCH.
The Value of Time
A recent Thursday served up a salutary reminder that it matters little how good your product is if your level of service is so poor it leads your customer to share the miserable experience on social media.
To set the scene, my precious laptop was suffering from an intermittent fault, and my reassuringly expensive raincoat was leaking. I was unable to work, and was wet to boot.
Scene 1: Phone call to Apple Careplan helpline. Characters involved are an automated message, Darren the Apple advisor, and me.
The phone rings twice before being answered with an automated message:
Automated message: “Hi Giles. Are you calling about the same problem you contacted us recently?”
Me (stunned at the personalisation of a pre-recorded message): “Yes”
Automated message: “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll put you through to an advisor right away”
2 minutes holding.
Darren (real person): “Hello Giles, my name is Darren, how can I help you today?”
Me: “My laptop drops wi-fi access frequently and randomly”
Darren: “I’m so sorry, that must be really annoying. We’ll do everything we can to get you back up and running so that you can on get on with your life and back to work”
Darren continues to empathise, tries hard to solve the problem, and ultimately provides a Genius Bar ‘fast pass’ to get the problem resolved in a store of my choice within 24 hours.
I put down the phone feeling once again that a world without Apple would be a poorer, unproductive, less enjoyable place.
Scene 2: Barbour shop in Carnaby Street, Soho, some 20 minutes later. It’s raining outside. I’m standing in a soaking shirt beneath my nearly-new leaking Barbour outwear. Characters involved are Sales assistants 1 & 2, a customer and me.
Me: “Perfect weather for a Barbour”
Sales assistant 1: “It is isn’t it”
Me: “I bought this jacket from you a few months ago”
Sales assistant: “I know. I recognise it”
Me: “The trouble is, it leaks…”
At this point I peel off the outwear to reveal the sodden shirt beneath. As product demonstrations go I felt it was pretty convincing, given I was clearly soaked to the bone due to the jacket having the rain protecting qualities of own-label kitchen paper.
Me: “…& I’m wet”
Sales assistants 1 & 2: (Silence)
At this point they glanced at each other with the look of a couple of young rabbits who have just seen headlights for the first time, and who instinctively know they’re not good news.
And they did what the rabbits generally do. They froze.
I decided to help them.
Me: “Perhaps you could suggest how we could resolve this?”
Sales assistants 1 & 2: (Silence)
It hadn’t worked.
I tried again.
Me: “I think you’ll agree, this rain-proof jacket I bought isn’t rain-proof”
We stood together in uncomfortable silence for 4-5 seconds, broken by a clap of thunder and heavy tap dancing rain outside.
Sales assistant 1: “Oh”
I wondered briefly whether this response was in the training manual. I was sure the next one was:
Sales assistant 1: “If you leave it with us we can send it off for testing”
Me (strangely calm): “Testing for what? As you can see, I’m soaking because the jacket leaks”
Sales assistant 1: “They’ll test to see if there is a fault in the material”
Me (steam now beginning to rise from the sodden shirt): “Isn’t it fairly obvious to all of us here that there is a fault in the material?”
Sales assistant 1 & 2: (Silence)
At this point Sales assistant 1 reaches for a folder and begins to fumble with the pages in a way that we’ve all done when we’re buying time.
Sales assistant 1: “We can send it off for testing, but there’s no-one there until August 24th, and then there’ll be a backlog so they won’t look at the jacket until September”
A customer turns to face me. His face says “Good luck” without his lips moving.
Me: “Let me be sure I understand this. You’re suggesting I go away with the leaky jacket you sold me and come back in September when someone will test it to check if it leaks.”
Sales assistant 1: “Or you could leave it with us”
Me: “Until September?”
Sales assistant 1 (without a hint of apology) “Yes”
Me (glancing at the summer downpour still cascading outside): “And what do you suggest I do in this rain?”
Silence reigns, again.
Sales assistant 2 (he has a tongue!): “What did you expect to happen when you brought the coat in to the shop?”
Me (still strangely calm): “Well, I thought perhaps you might replace the faulty jacket. Or since you suggest sending it away for a month to test whether or not it leaks, which we can all see it does, maybe you could lend me a temporary replacement.”
The customer standing nearby snorts while trying contain a laugh.
Me (to customer): “Don’t waste your money, as you can see these things don’t keep you dry”
The customer heeds my advice, turns and leaves the shop empty handed.
Sales assistant 1: “We can’t offer you a replacement”
Me: “Why not?”
Sales assistant 1: “Process”
Me: “Process?”
Sales assistant 1: “Process”
Me: “I don’t blame you personally, but your ‘process’ is pretty ***ing stupid (sorry, I was beginning to lose it at this point) if it doesn’t allow you to replace a product that you’ve sold to a customer which clearly doesn’t work, don’t you agree?”
Sales assistants 1 & 2: (Silence)
A man can only endure so much silence in any one day. So I left cold, astonished and infuriated with Barbour in fairly equal measure.
So what have we learned from ‘Wet Thursday”?
1. Product superiority alone doesn’t keep customers happy if service levels are poor.
2. Apple is one of the most valuable brands in the world because it understands this profoundly and delivers it 9 times out of 10.
3. Automated messages deliver a more intuitive and rewarding experience that Barbour shop staff.
I was introduced last week to a genuinely fabulous organisation called Free Word. Their mission is both worthy and joyous – to promote and protect the written and spoken word.
We spent an outstanding evening in Farringdon in the company of some of the country’s finest young poets, including the current Young Poet Laureate for London Aisling Fahey, DJ James Massiah, and polymath Mark Rylance, whose ability to soothe, cajole & excite simultaneously through speech, whether writing or performing, is simply remarkable.
That evening I learned that our language houses a word for the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning: ‘dysania’. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
We also own a word to describe your hesitation when introducing someone whose name has temporarily deserted you: ‘tartle’. And what a fine word it is too.
I left inspired by the wonder of language, and wondering why so few brands ever use its power and range to genuinely attempt to stimulate emotions and to differentiate.
We’re all taught one or more languages from a young age. Most of us then shuffle our vocabulary like Scrabble pieces throughout our lives, here and there picking up a new word to drop periodically into our familiar speech patterns. As we saw in last month’s blog, the same is true for whole categories of brands.
If this sounds familiar and you work in branding you’ll find yourself at a distinct disadvantage. For whilst the visual impact of any branded experience has immense and instant power to persuade, it is the sound of a brand that lingers long afterwards.
This is because we access and communicate our thoughts and feelings using words. Which means that the words we use to describe our brands have the potential for greater long-term persuasive impact than what it looks like.
As a brand owner, perhaps spend a little more time crafting the sound of your brands, rather than the logo, for the simple reason that you can create a longer lasting impact on the brands’ performance and that of your business.
So this afternoon, why not follow the Twitter hashtag #freewordoftheday for some verbal inspiration instead of striding around as though you’re busy even though you’re not. Yup, there’s a word for that too...
Some years ago I took my new wife to our first ever gig, a now commonplace comeback of a band of my youth. Child number 1 was imminent and it looked like the last opportunity for a DINKY night out for before life changed forever.
In advance I thought it wise to prepare my eager but musically inexperienced partner for the evening’s entertainment. I played her the band’s greatest hits, confident that she’d fall in love with the mellifluous tones and waves of dynamic variety and of wryly-observed insights about life in my youth.
Except she didn’t. “It all sounds the same” she confessed. And, disappointingly, she was right. The key, rhythm, timbre, structure, subject matter and idiosyncratic quirkiness that made the debut single so engaging had been repeated so faithfully and repetitively that it wasn’t clear where one song ended and another began. It also quickly became very dull.
Whole brand categories fall into this trap. A player creates a new and different category and others plough in to enjoy the growth. They do everything right except create or describe anything different, therefore offering consumers no reason to choose them.
For example, here is the language used on the websites of the top 8 UK gyms and health clubs last month. It reveals the generic language of the category.
And here’s the language used by one of the follower brands.
So, how does this slavishly imitated language help prospective customers to choose this brand?
Of course, it doesn’t, which leaves price as one of the main drivers of choice. And typically this means these prices are forced downwards as customers don’t know what extra brand value to pay for. This removes financial value from the sector, making it harder to compete.
So if your brand language sounds the same as the rest of the category you need to plan for margins to be squeezed. Alternatively, surprise yourselves and your customers by singing a different tune.
We wouldn’t be here today but for our extraordinary ability to communicate. Me, you, the kids next door. None of us.
You see you don’t have to travel back very far to the days when we (Homo Sapiens) were not in the comfort of a monopoly that we are today. We had competition at the top of the food chain. And it wasn’t just from sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. There were other species of humans built much like us, doing much the same things as us, with the same needs & intentions. We were in a competitive market.
In the excellent 'Sapiens' Yuval Noah Harari suggests that a mere 170,000 years ago we (Sapiens) lived concurrently no fewer than three other 'Homo' species. Yet 100,000 years later only one had survived. Why?
Harari concludes that our dominance as a species was not due, as is commonly suggested, to superior brain size (all boasted brains of similar size). The difference between winning and losing was down to our ability to communicate.
Us Homo Sapiens used our resources (our similar sized brains) in a different way to the competition. We developed more sophisticated ways to communicate, and in so doing managed to engage, direct and mobilise people on a much larger scale than the others.
A critical element of this was our ability to use language to create stories above and beyond "Watch out, there's a tiger behind you". Uniquely, Sapiens created fiction, we could talk about things that we hadn’t seen, smelled or run away from. This was immensely powerful. It was the start of myths, legends, gods and religion, which enabled us to imagine things collectively. It was this that enabled us to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and thus take over the world.
All this may sound a familiar pattern to brand people. At its core, branding unleashes the power of storytelling to galvanise large groups of people. Brands aren’t ‘real’: the AA, Downton Abbey and Moo.com are businesses, experiences and feelings, but you can’t touch them any more than you can touch religion, laws or limited companies. At one level, brands don’t exist.
Yet brands create imagined realities out of words and symbols, and thus offer powerful ways to engage the masses around commonly held beliefs and values.
So, the moral of this story is simple: when you don’t enjoy a relevant competitive product advantage, you best invest your time creating and communicating a story and set of beliefs (branding) that can engage and galvanise large groups of people. It’s worked for us for 170,000 years.
Here at Mimo Brands we've put together here top 5 branding tips for your start-up business. New and early stage businesses usually have an unwieldy quantity of issues on which to focus their limited time. Those activities that look like delivering the least prospect of early returns often get left till later. And later can easily turn into never.
In the case of branding, this can be an expensive decision. For global giants and start-ups alike, our brands are an essential part of helping our customers to choose us over our competitors. If you don’t crack this at the outset with your start-up business, you may never get a second chance.
These top 5 branding tips for your start-up should give you a good start.
The logo is simply a visual element of your brand. Think of it as the tip of the iceberg that you can see.
The main elements of your brand will lie beneath the waterline. It is much more important to understand and define who you are as a management team and why you exist as a start-up business beyond simply making money, what position you’re taking in the market, and what you promise your fellow workers and customers alike.
Most importantly for your start-up, you need to understand why the world is going to be a better place with your business in it (i.e. what problems are you solving).
There are usually only 2 ways to make a success of your business: be cheaper or be different.
Even the most cursory understanding of supply chains reveals that, unless you possess a particularly smart business model, sustaining a lower cost base is mighty challenging if you want to make a profit.
Being different is easy to talk about but strangely difficult to deliver, rarely because of a shortage of ideas, but usually because human nature drags us back to behavioural norms as soon as there is a whiff of resistance. In short, we like the idea of being different somewhat more than the reality.
Furthermore, to be useful, your point of differentiation needs to be valued by your customers so much that they will pass on their usual choice in favour of your brand.
3. Have a point of view.
Today’s brand development is more akin to joining debates than it is to shouting your message from a soapbox.
The starting point is, unsurprisingly, your customers, about whom you should understand much. What are the pressures and interest in their lives? What makes them tick? What gets on their wicks? What helps them to decide which brands to choose in your sector?
Don’t guess. Find out and offer an opinion on how to improve their lives through what you do, how you do it, and why you’re doing it.
Once upon a time you could make up your brand’s heritage, and so long as you could tell a good story, you could convince an unknowing public that you were the brand of choice amongst the Tudors. Not any more. Social media has put an end to that.
Like differentiation, genuine openness is easy to talk about but unintuitive to most people. This is because it requires letting go and trusting others unconditionally.
It is important because being a brand owner today doesn’t mean you own your brand. Your brand is like a small child growing up in the world – you can guide and direct, provide support and encouragement, but ultimately he/she/it will be a product of nurture and nature. And you’ll struggle to control the nature part. You have to place your trust in others.
At one end of the scale you have Ricardo Semler who built his business on such levels of trust that he let his employees decide how much they got paid and the number of days holiday they could take.
At the other end it involves engaging with your customers publicly (usually through social media), quickly and honestly.
5. If you are genuinely different and better than everyone else, and will continue to be, you can worry less about your brand.
I keep hearing how the Googles and Facebooks of this world never spent a dime on advertising, so why should a start-up?
The answer is threefold:
Good luck.
If you need any help with your brand simply drop us an email at giles@mimobrands.com