Food and beverage social media marketing works best when you protect what makes the product special and let customers help shape it. Gerry Hopkinson, founder of agency Unity, tested a PizzaExpress redesign in one Richmond restaurant before rolling it out. Fans became advocates, and the changes stuck.
Gerry Hopkinson ran Unity for 15 years, stayed on after selling it, and now works as a cultural strategist. He joined me and Will Ockenden on Embracing Marketing Mistakes to talk about PizzaExpress, a Pernod Ricard drinks brand, and the commercial decision he still regrets.
His stories offer four lessons for anyone marketing a restaurant, a food brand or a drinks label.
Lesson one: ask your most loyal customers before you change anything
Gerry’s agency had worked with PizzaExpress on a jazz stunt, and he knew the brand well. At a tasting in Soho, the marketing director asked what else they should do, and after a couple of cocktails he told her the truth. The restaurants looked old and tired, the acoustics were poor, the menu needed a refresh and the service was wanting.
She spun on her heel and walked out. A week later she called him in, and he was braced to be fired. Instead she said he was right, but that PizzaExpress fans were so loyal that changing a single topping could send them wild.
His answer was to ask the fans. He asked for one struggling restaurant and creative freedom, and made a bold offer: “if we don’t smash it out of the park, then fire me.”
Lesson two: turn one restaurant into a living lab
The team took over the PizzaExpress in Richmond and invited customers to help reimagine it, which Gerry says was around 2012. They assembled a panel of what they called lab technicians, including the head chef, designers, a professor of acoustics from the University of Rome and a theatre director.
Customers suggested breakfast, a takeaway counter, and programmable music to cut the noise around each table. There were new colours, a new logo and new uniforms. Diners got a good deal on a meal and voted on what they liked. Whatever they liked rolled out across the estate, and whatever they did not was wiped out.
The big insight came from the agency’s head of planning, a doctor of social psychology. She argued that simply inviting people to get involved would turn them into super advocates. It did, and Gerry says the logo and colour scheme from that redesign are still in use.
I made the point on the recording that this was a real-life A/B test of a restaurant. Most of us test a subject line and call it research.
Lesson three: protect the one thing customers love
Gerry says the innovation that makes a food brand desirable must be guarded from people who do not value it. His words: “the innovation that creates prestige and distinction and desirability is the innovation that has to be maintained and nurtured and protected at all costs.”
Operations still matter, he says, with margins, supply chains and price control all needed. But “you don’t let those guys make decisions about the customer experience.” His example is KFC, where “it’s about the chicken, stupid”. Everything else, including tone of voice, exists to serve the taste of the chicken.
I added a related frustration. Chief marketing officers often stay only two or three years, and many arrive wanting to change everything, including agencies and brand assets. Gerry agreed, pointing to Specsavers and Kit Kat as brands that found one joke or line and wisely kept telling it.
The mistake: Changing a loved product or brand because a new person wants a fresh start.
Why it happens: New marketing leaders are judged on visible change, whereas loyal customers are judged on nothing at all.
The fix: Identify the one thing customers love, protect it, and test everything else with those customers first.
Lesson four: loyalty pays, even when a bigger brand calls
Gerry’s biggest regret involved Absinthe, we all remember that one from shots at the bar it is a Pernod Ricard brand with tiny volumes but proper history. His agency researched where the creative class gathered in London, found it was Soho, and built a platform called Think Work Play. Creatives interviewed other creatives about how they think, what they are working on and where they play.
The brand’s volume grew by 300 per cent, and fashion brands wanted to collaborate. Then a large brand house invited the agency to pitch for another, wildly famous brand. Gerry’s team said yes, which meant telling the Pernod Ricard team they could no longer work together.
His gut told him otherwise. He recalls his moral compass saying, “You’re selling out, don’t do this.” He did it anyway and regretted it. His summary was short: “Loyalty pays, it pays off.”
I raised the awkward flip side, which is that loyal agencies still get dropped when a new client arrives and brings their own people. Gerry accepted that, and said the best brands keep long-term agency relationships so that the agency becomes their knowledge centre.
My view on this: test it with real customers first
I have judged awards, and the entries that win now tie their objectives back to business impact. The Richmond restaurant is exactly that kind of story, because it started with a risky idea and finished with customers who had a stake in the result.
Gerry’s approach also fixes a problem I see often. Brands hire a new marketer who changes assets that were working, then discovers they do not work as well. Testing with the people who already love the product is cheaper than that.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with Gerry Hopkinson on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and see Gerry’s current work at We Make Progress.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing and PR leaders share the career mistakes that taught them the most.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
