Lessons from a car designer - Lesson 2 - "stay on story", "be brand led and customer driven"

Lessons from a car designer – Lesson 2: “Stay on story, be brand led and customer driven”

When J Mays talks about the interaction of the design team and the marketing team it reminded me of some of the same challenges we faced in menu development. He had two key points that are really easy to understand but tough to act upon consistently. First a notion about “staying on story”, or as we all know it avoid “scope creep”. Staying on story is one of the key elements to being able to be true to your brand. It requires a discipline that provides “guide rails” to focus the energy of creating something new that will be able to be true to brand, meaningful to the customer while still differentiating from the competition. This staying on story approach really can be used as a filter as you brainstorm new ideas for the business. Does it make sense to add an obscure new item say “shrimp burgers” when you are all about farm to table? But hey “shrimp burgers” are all the rage on the Florida Gulf coast, as they should be, but by staying on your brand story of farm to table, they have no place in your brand. I know this is a simplistic example but in most cases “scope creep” and staying on story are just that simple. We have a tendency to over complicate things just because we over think the solutions or new ideas because we want to be competitive, who are we really competing against. Sometimes “staying on story” helps us strengthen our brand instead of dilute it. Too many times I have sat in meetings and watched folks dilute the heck out of a brand to just compete in the short term instead of for long term growth of the brand.  So “staying on story” is a tool to focus us on being “brand led and customer driven”.  Again sounds so simple and it is, but really hard to live it with each and every decision. In the past we have treated being “true to the brand and driven by the customer” as mutually exclusive ideas but they are both intertwined in a successful brand life. Being “brand led” is making the first round of decisions based on filtering using brand standards to determine if the new ideas fit or are an evolution of the brand. If they don’t stand up to this test, it is best to discard them even if they are resonating in the greater competitive environment. This early filter supports a “fail fast/ fail forward” mindset which we will cover in later articles. Now if the new ideas are on brand or support the evolution of the brand, move on to the next step, are the new ideas customer driven or better yet do they meet a need that the customer is seeking from your brand. You have to have a clear picture of your core user or targeted user to really be “customer driven”. The best example I can give of this is the turn around of Arby’s led by Paul Brown and his team. He presented a case study of how they did this by embracing this “brand led and customer driven” mentality to achieve the success they have now. When Paul came on board he looked at the research to see what the core user wanted or thought of Arby’s. He found that Arby’s clearly owned the male millennial user group because of their love of meat based sandwiches. He focused everything around the brand target of owning this position with millennial males. And the next several months of revamping the menu and food all were customer (target) driven while being lead by the brand position of “we got the meats”. Ultimately Arby’s has continued to “stay on story” which is why they have sustained consistently positive same store sales since 2009. Also they have benefited because their relationship with the franchise community has become an asset to their system because franchises like staying on story.

So you see a car designer knows they have to create cars that build and evolve brands by being brand led but customer driven – literally. In the case of Arby’s, no difference other than staying on story has delivered more customers, sales and delicious food. There is one last lesson I learned from listening to J Mays, how to innovate by “playing to the edges”. We will cover off on that in the next time.