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12 BANDT.COM.AU MAY 01 2009 It’s a very simple question. And for many people, this will be relatively easy to answer – their favourite brand will either be Google or Apple. A harder question for many is: what’s your favourite Australian brand, and why? While you ponder your answer, I’ll share mine with you. Sipping an All Berry Bang smoothie one lunchtime it occurred to me that I had my favourite Aussie brand in hand – Boost Juice Bars. Boost provides my day with a bold splash of colour, and passes the taste test and the health test. There is also the brand experience of the juice bars themselves, which a bottled smoothie just can’t deliver. Boost staff are friendly and always seem to be enjoying themselves, despite making their 100th smoothie of the day. So just what is the brand’s magic ingredient? Well for starters, they have a pretty good brand philosophy – simply “Love life!” Brooke Ruscuklic, Boost’s international business and marketing manager, says: “Our product is about the entire experience – the theatre of seeing your smoothie made in front of you, the vibrant environment with bright colours, loud music and happy people. Naturally, when you walk out of a store you’re likely to be feeling pretty uplifted before you’ve even had a sip. That’s the Boost Juice difference!” From a marketing perspective, I think Boost is a very interesting case study in the franchise model, and there are plenty of catering success stories in Australia. According to a recent BRW magazine feature, the top 10 fastest-growing franchises here include three caterers– Grill’d, SumoSalad and Healthy Habits. Boost doesn’t make it into the fastest-growing list this year but it topped the BRW “Fast franchises” list back in 2005. Today Boost has over 220 global stores and is expanding into China. So what can marketers and wannabe franchisees learn from the Boost example? What is the key to franchise nirvana? I asked Ruscuklic what makes a great franchise partner. “Someone who is into it because they live the Boost values, as opposed to taking it on purely as a business venture. They instinctively get the ‘Love life’ culture, and are as passionate about the Boost brand as we are. And the very best franchise partners are the ones who are working in their business as well as on their business.” It seems to me that one of the key things behind running a successful franchise is when your grassroots staff live and love the brand. Last week I read a survey from Careercast.com listing advertising as the fourth most stressful job around. It turns out that we narrowly lost out on a podium position to surgeons, commercial airline pilots and photo journalists. Personally, I only have to look in the mirror to confirm the ravages of my day job. When I started out I had a thick mane of dark, ringleted hair, olive skin and stood at an imposing six foot three. However, the survey did give me cause to think about why we ended up just below a selection of jobs which might potentially require you to land an aeroplane in the Hudson River, dodge sniper fire in a war zone, or where people genuinely do die if you mess up. I could, of course, reach for the usual ‘woe are us’ reasons – eroded margins since the glory days of the 1980s without client-service expectations diminishing, or advertising being on the frontline with industries that suffer when recessions blow into town. I’m sure the world weeps for us. Us and estate agents and financiers. Truth be told, though, I suspect that there are two big reasons that advertising can kick the clackers out of you. One’s endemic and another is a blight that we bring upon ourselves. The endemic reason lies in the fact that this is a deeply subjective industry with no objectively right answer. Worse still, everybody has an opinion, leaving you in a state of almost perpetual argument with a suite of self-proclaimed experts that include your opinionated self. I did debate club at school for a couple of hours a week and that knocked the wind out of me. Little did I know that I’d be doing it for the duration of a career. (Interestingly, one of the least stressful jobs on the survey was that of a computer systems engineer. I mean, the last time that anything argued back at them was Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) The self-generated reason lies in the Lord of the Flies environment that advertising tends to breed. Lots of Type A personalities with big egos and low self-esteem makes for an industry atmosphere often more akin to American politics than a trade union. I doubt actuaries (second least stressful profession) preen themselves so relentlessly at industry functions and then stab each other in the back so adeptly in the blogosphere. No wonder life in advertising, to borrow a Thomas Hobbes phrase, is often nasty, brutish and short. You can’t get away from the arguments, but you can be nice. Failing that, you could always become a statistician. comment SO, JUST WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE BRAND? WE’LL ALL BE DROPPING LIKE FLIES PRETTY SOON TO MAKE A COMMENT EMAIL [email protected] Adam Joseph Insights manager, Herald Sun Al Crawford Executive planning director, Clemenger BBDO BTMAY01_12.pdf Page 12 24/4/09, 10:52 AM
