Sometimes working on big, broad brand strategy work I risk losing the view of the business at a simple level: make more money than what’s been spent.
As much as I love talking and reading about culture, concepts, big ideas – as well as be occasionally exasperated by overusing these buzzwords, my line of work is also a line of business cost.
I used to work on the marketing and advertising of Subway (sandwiches) when I was at Saatchi & Saatchi in Singapore, many years ago.
The fast food brand is entirely made up of franchises, small to medium business owners who have one or a few shops.
They don’t have much time for lofty philosophical talk about the semiology of meatballs or the deeper human truths associated with salad toppings.
They want and need to know, in simple terms, if these ads and promotions will sell sandwiches, how much they cost, and how much they could expect to get back on their investment.
The franchisees pay money into a central brand and marketing budget. Subway has centralised management functions financed by these budgets.
Our clients were the Asia-Pacific director, marketing director for Singapore, and there was an elected representative board of franchisees, making sure we’re not wasting their money, they had to give final approval for spending the budget.
It was complicated at times, though I have to say it also kept me grounded.
One time, I remember we presented creative advertising concepts for an important campaign coming up for a new range of products; it was all about the launch of their breakfast offering.
We were hoping to talk about the ad ideas in that particular meeting, but the conversation was waylaid: there was animated talk about the food cost of the promotion, the franchisees pulling out calculators and debating things, getting into the nitty gritty of how many cents could or should be offered as a discount for such and such thing.
I started asking questions about their food costs, did my best to appreciate that we were no longer talking about Subway the global brand, but that one Subway shop in that shopping mall, owned by a small business, and all the others like it.
The debate got to a place where they seemed to agree on a cost figure, and they wanted to advertise a promotion offer with a discount of $x.
I didn’t think it seemed particularly attractive for customers.
While listening to them, I learned that same $x amount was also the cost of a coffee.
Looking at the situation from the consumer’s point of view, breakfast with a free coffee sounded like a much better deal than buying breakfast with a small discount of $x.
Once that was settled, we were finally able to talk about the advertising concepts.
Free beats paid for consumers.
Money saved and earned beats conceptual thinking for business.
