About BrandCents: Helping Brands Fly

Post by: Alex Deakin in About BrandCents

“BrandCents is a specialist consultancy. We love helping small & medium sized businesses scale & succeed”, says Alex Deakin, principal consultant & founder.

Specialising in multi-site retail, primarily food & hospitality, BrandCents has worked with a long list of brands from Zambrero in its infancy – now a 200 store chain to most recently, Results Laser Clinics – a 50 clinic laser, skin & beauty business on the rise of the wave of awareness in personal appearance.

Other restaurant brand clients, include Pizzaland, Bella Pasta, Pizza Piazza, Pizza Hut, KFC, TacoBell, A&W, Long John Silvers, Gloria Jean’s Coffees, Wow Cow Super Chilled Yogurt, Mad Mex & Wagamama.

“We love helping small & medium, multi-site brands scale up for success”

A background in Beer, Food & Advertising around the World

“I started my career with one of the big brewers in the UK – a great training ground covering brand & product in FMCG & multi-site retail in the form of pubs, clubs restaurants & hotels. Drawn to the excitement of advertising agency life, I expanded my learning in creative & production, on a range of products from Satellite Broadcasting, to Smiths Crisps, Taunton Cider, Bright Reasons restaurant Group.

Switching back to the client side, after a secondment with PepsiCo, I spent the next 10 years with Yum Restaurants International, fortunate to experience local, regional, International Marketing roles in London, Paris, Antwerp, Sydney & Dallas, Texas.

Yum! has some great systems & a fantastic culture & created a base for my insights, new product development & strategy work.”

“Up front & personal experience of hospitality, retail & franchise systems, in all languages, shapes & sizes”

Multiple high profile, international marketing roles, in numerous countries;

Global Marketing Manager Gloria Jean’s Coffees (Sydney Australia – 960 stores in 37 Markets)
Director of Marketing Pizza Hut International (Dallas Texas, USA – 4000 stores, 80 markets),
Marketing Lead for a Woolworth Division
GM Marketing, New Product, Food & Beverage for the transformation of Ardent Leisure Indoor Division (Kingpin, AMF & Playtime)

have provided upfront personal experience in launching & growing hospitality, retail & franchise systems of all shapes & sizes.

Our Services

Our extended team of experts

We work with ‘A Coalition of the Willing’

For large or complex projects we bring in proven expertise, we call it the coalition of the willing because it is like a large extended team. We have all worked together on many different projects & cover a huge range of skill sets.

Recent Projects

Getting Beautiful Results with Digital

Working with Results Laser Clinics to create their digital Customer Journey, collateral, Customer experience tracking & loyalty scheme. in the process creating a new website, to better reflect their current branding & a revised booking system which yielded a 40% increase in on-line bookings.

“I was impressed how quickly Alex became an expert on our booking platform, adding value across the business in strategy, customer journey, experience & loyalty”

Paulina Saliba – CEO Results Laser Clinic

A brand facelift for bowling

A complete brand transformation was needed to “make bowling cool” & take Ardent’s Kingpin out of sticky-carpeted bowling into multi-faceted entertainment for young socials. This included redesign of everything brand: all physical & digital collateral, in-venue decor, new entertainments, stylish food, drink & event menus, featuring high quality images from the foodphotographer. Brand tracking picked up a significant improvement in customer value.

Opinion

What’s new in food?

We have been seeing “Natural, ethical & authentic” for some time. Personalisation” is now becoming mainstream & key to catering for the everyday needs of vego, paleo, keto, macro choices.

“Experience” is everything from dine-in. It needs to be unique, authentic & frictionless, otherwise there are plenty of food courts & Uber Eats to choose from.

What’s exciting in marketing?

Affordable Cloud, iPaas, Saas & A.I. – This is a reality for small to medium business, especially with Google Cloud Services & it is an opportunity for personalisation, increased sales & loyalty, not just labour reduction.

360 Degree Experience – brands are evolving ‘texturally’, with events, art & sounds being used to define brand feel & appeal to cohorts.

The key watch outs for new business

Green-washing – there’s a lot of rhetoric but not a lot happening on a large scale – although its understandable; Australia suffers from oligopolies, limited choice & high costs at every stage of the business chain.

Unpredictable Franchising – Disappointing! its such a great opportunity: lower capital expansion in exchange for management experience & a proven system but many Franchisors in Australia have not done the right thing. This needs to change.

Low margin delivery is suffocating dine-in experience – ghost kitchens are on the rise

“Digital overwhelming Brand” – Small businesses are becoming wholesale slaves to digital channels & aggregators. You need an omni-channel mindset & ecosystem. Too many small, successful restaurants close down as low margin delivery orders suffocate eat-in ambience & experience. Ghost Kitchens are appearing as a way to test new food concepts. They have no shop front or wait staff, lowering the normal restaurant overheads, providing food for delivery only.

BrandCents Consultancy is an independent Marketing Consultancy, specialising in multi-site retail, primarily in food and hospitality. Reach out for help with New Concepts, Products & Launches, Brand Transformation, business growth & improving Customer Experience.