Your Story is Your Lifeblood, by Lois Parmenter
The Laundry in Brixton – a great example of strong story-telling.
Here we are again, in the second national lockdown of 2020. If the first period of mandatory isolation and economic hiatus taught us anything, it was the degree to which our sense of sociability and measure of a good time is linked to our ability to eat and drink out. The vast majority of us found ourselves lamenting the loss of the pub, the local Italian restaurant, the clumsy latte art on our morning flat white that we sloshed around as we ran for the tube, far more than we might have expected to before they were wrenched unceremoniously from our daily experience. As Anna van Dyk so eloquently expounded in her article, ‘Eat Out to Help Out’, we have an innate, emotional connection with our favourite hospitality businesses. We have come to know some of these places as members of the family, so much so that the realisation that the first lockdown could mean permanent curtains for some of them came as a very nasty shock indeed. We hadn’t contemplated a world without them.
The most successful hospitality businesses that will emerge from the train wreck of 2020, will be those who understand this emotional connection and use it to bond with their customers. What comes to mind when you think of marketing? Do you think of a slimy, exploitative yet necessary evil? Does it occupy a flowery, nice-to-have-but-not-critical space in your business plan? Without properly embracing modern day marketing, you or your company are seriously limiting the difference you can make in the world. This may sound grandiose, but we know from Lockdown 1.0 how much of a void the loss of the hospitality industry left in people’s lives. If you know for a fact that the experience you offer your customers is one that makes them feel looked after and treated, it follows that without marketing your business effectively, you are robbing potential customers of the emotionally rich and engaging experience they could be sharing with you.
I have worked in environments where marketing was viewed as an afterthought, something that could be assimilated into other job roles and was retrofitted to support operational or sales-driving activity, as opposed to being the driving force dictating said activity. The problem with this is that the story you tell your customers about who you are, where you came from, what you stand for, what you can promise them will never be consistent or authentic. It becomes like the game we used to play as children where you had to make up a story using a collection of random, arbitrary nouns, adjectives and verbs.
The game was fun because the tale you invariably ended up with never made a blind bit of sense. If you write the story of your business based on every knee-jerk reaction to the performance of your bottom line, the impression your customers will get of what you’re about will be muddled, contradictory, a mix of discount lunch deals and pricey, ticketed supper clubs. They won’t connect with who you are and bond with you emotionally because they won’t ever feel like they really know you. Marketing at its best is honest, empathic, generous and authentic. It combines brand building with narrative to develop your business into a character with its own personality – one that customers want to see progress, and whose story they want to be a part of.
Another myth of marketing is that you have to have a whole team of people to make it happen. While it may be true that large, multi-site operators benefit greatly from having at least a few heads in the marketing game, little independents can shout just as loudly with only one or two people waving the flag for marketing, as long as they know their story. I have worked for the multi-site operators of which I speak and, once the need for a more dedicated approach to marketing was acknowledged, even my very small team was able to begin building the narrative and tone of voice that our group of businesses could become synonymous with. Hawksmoor is a great example of a collection of restaurants who know without a shadow of a doubt what kind of story they want to tell. Every piece of external — and, I would imagine, internal — communication and content they put out could almost be consumed without their name on it, and those familiar with the brand will instinctively know it’s from them.
Difficulties in big corporations arise when different voices want to tell different stories or, worse still, when those who drive the agenda do not care about or understand the story the marketing department is trying to tell. It can be challenging to attempt to explain why jumping on the back of every latest trend or trying to be everything to everyone is a dangerous strategy to employ. Customers are very wise to this kind of thing these days and they see right through inauthentic behaviour from companies. It can be almost impossible to win back the favour of a customer who has recognised an incongruent tangent in your story and stopped believing in the whole thing. For this very reason, independent businesses, quite apart from being disadvantaged, have the power to market exactly how they want, to tell their story unimpeded. You have the freedom to use language and tone of voice that’s right for you; you are invariably closer to the story of your business because it is your personal story and there is so much more authenticity in this. The Laundry in Brixton has pitched their marketing strategy particularly well. Mel, the proprietor, is a New Zealander who began with a wine shop, showcasing the best varietals from each of her home country’s regions. The kiwi sense of humour shines through every piece of content and the respect for the ingredients they are using is clearly celebrated from their website, to their lockdown-prompted produce store, to the captions on their Instagram Stories. There is no mistaking the story they are telling.
In the post-COVID world of hospitality, no business can afford not to take marketing seriously. Digital marketing in particular is the last line of defence (or should that be attack?) in a landscape of boarded up shop fronts and clingfilm-clad bars. Just because you are out of sight of your customers, does not mean you need to be out of mind. Use this lockdown to keep your narrative consistent, to emotionally engage with old and new customers and to make sure that when you reopen your doors, they are there, lining up to be part of your story.
Lois Parmenter is the PR and Marketing Executive at Metropolitan Pub Company.