During the dot.com boom there had been many businesses starting up on the internet, and most of them trumpeted their cutting-edge technology. Most of their clients found this hard to follow: the "look at our amazing technology" opening line was usually followed by an over-excited delivery of a string of technical jargon, incomprehensible to anybody but a committed computer nerd.
Creating an exciting PR campaign was the aim of these firms, but all they succeeded in doing was dazzling the potential clients and investors. Sourceree Solutions was founded in 2000, and is really a supplier of solutions for supply-chain event management. In other words, the business helps firms locate supplies and confirm their origin online.
Sourceree needed to make an impact both with potential customers and with potential investors (the firm was hoping for an injection of venture capital at the time). When the business started out, there had been already numerous others offering online solutions for all kinds of issues, and in most instances promoting their wonderfully clever software. Sourceree made the decision to be different-after all, supply-chain solutions is a pretty mundane business to be in, and trying to make it exciting was probably never going to function.
The company's PR campaign emphasized their experience of the supply-chain event management marketplace, and their knowledge of how a big number of businesses were now using the internet to solve supply-chain problems in ways that would have been impossible only a couple of years earlier. The campaign also highlighted instances exactly where research showed the level of losses being incurred by companies whose supply-chain management was inefficient.
The campaign worked out fine. People appreciated the focus on customer problems instead of on the "look how clever we are" boasting of other dot.coms, and venture capital flowed in. The business has gone from strength to strength ever since.
In order to stand out, you have to be various. Sometimes this means doing something that seems absolutely crazy-and may actually BE crazy. On the other hand, it doesn't pay to look foolish. It is a fine line between being startling and being stupid.
In recent years the fast-food industry has undergone marked changes. Competitors has increased significantly, with American fast-food restaurants covering the world and British home-grown versions losing ground.
Individuals have turn out to be an excellent deal more sophisticated in their eating habits, too-the chips-with-everything tradition of British cooking has taken a downturn as people have turn out to be more attuned to healthy eating and more exposed to goodquality world cuisine. Rising standards of living and better home cooking have also led towards the downfall of many British catering institutions such as roadside transport cafés and fish-and-chip shops.
Small Chef is an icon of roadside eating for British motorists. Established for 50 years, the chain has served up literally millions of meals, mainly traditional British fast-food mainstays such as all-day breakfasts and pie and chips.
In 2007, though, the company went into receivership, victim of falling customer demand and increased competition from chains such as McDonald's and Burger King. The restaurants were seen as old-fashioned, unhealthy greasy-spoon cafés. Chief executive Ian Pegler decided to pull off a PR coup by recruiting world-renowned chef Heston Blumenthal to revamp the menus.
Blumenthal runs what is frequently known as the world's greatest restaurant, and quite clearly is neither acquainted with, nor has much sympathy for, the greasy fry-up approach to cooking. He has no real qualifications for turning around a restaurant like Little Chef (even though he did eventually come up with some excellent ideas, after one or two false starts). His worth lay in the PR impact of employing him in the first place-in reality, Channel 4 made a documentary about the whole process, generating considerable publicity in the national press.
Pegler could have chosen from a number of other celebrity chefs with better track records in turning restaurants around (Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay are two obvious examples), but choosing Blumenthal was a better PR coup precisely Because he was a square peg in a round hole.
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