How Mad Mex's current positioning fuels their renewed take on innovation
The brand has moved away from its 'shock and awe' approach, saying that it is now focusing on communicating their core values.
Authentic, connected and cheeky - these are values Mad Mex is looking to further communicate to its customers as it rides the wave of its current brand positioning.
Once heavily featuring luchadors in their branding, the Mexican chain now touts its menu as 'Fresh Fuel for Life', signifying the chain's intent to not only respond to a global demand for better-for-you options, but also to trust in their core values that they hope resonates with its customers.
QSR Media spoke with its CEO Clovis Young, who explained how Mad Mex's repositioning revitalised their approach in innovation, the latest in their announced plans for Asia, and why culture and brand purpose is important in the sector.
QSR Media: What is your take on innovation and how does it play a role in Mad Mex?
Clovis Young: Innovation is critical to everything we do. In creativity and business, it’s super important. I think there's a difference between creativity or innovation as it stands. You know, Elon Musk wants to build a community on Mars. The way we look at innovation is we want to bring all the separate ideas and best practices that are in the marketplace. They can be technology, [it] could be new food sources and we bring those together in our unique way to package up a really unique value proposition for customers so I think that's kind of how we've approached innovation.
It's about understanding what's available and how to bring that together. So, we really want to make those decisions [for] the best interests of not just our core customer(s) but all of our potential customers. If we're bringing in a new product [as] a kind of a replacement or an additional item [such as] sour cream, we want that to also be vegan and open and friendly so [we are] keeping a lot of doors open.
QSR Media: What was the reason behind the ‘Fresh Fuel For Life’ repositioning?
When we first opened up in Australia, the purpose of our branding was to to really shock and awe people into realizing [that] what we were doing was a new style of Mexican food. So we had a wrestler; it was quite an intense a(nd) strong branding proposition but I don't know [if] that actually told our story and our values as clearly as I think we wanted it to do.
So over the last two or three years, we have really thought about how we take the values we have always had - this kind of core belief system - and how we get that documented and then bring that to life in the store experience in the branding. So "Fresh Fuel for Life" touches on our core values; it's about hav(ing) a big opportunity with our single life to go out and do something amazing and how we get that fresh healthy food, how we go out and give you that fuel to go out and live your big life. Our purpose is to find opportunities to inspire people and to also feed them to go out and do the big things in life.
QSR Media: Tell us more about Mad Mex's culture and brand purpose and how these set you apart from competitors.
We always knew intuitively what the brand believed in: we believed in people, believed in culture, believed in taking big challenges and accomplishing big things. But we didn't have a way of really wrapping that up and communicating it in the best way. So we spent a lot of time defining and getting clear on what those beliefs were that led to our purpose.
So, our purpose is to inspire bold honest and healthy living, which is a big high-level statement, and we do that through our values. Those values are: Authentic, Connected and Cheeky.
Authentic means [whether you] are willing to show up every day and try to figure out what you need to do to be a little bit better. [Being] connected [is] about constantly making connections - whether that's between your teammates or with you and your customers or just in life generally.
And cheeky - it's a Mexican restaurant so it's very much about having some fun because we didn't get all dressed up for a serious day at work. It's a fun business; we want people to have fun.
QSR Media: Could you tell us more about Mad Mex’s Asian expansion plans?
We think Asia is an amazing market. We've seen over the last five years a real embracing or change or shift in the Asian consumer towards healthy food and I think that's kind of a new a new movement in some of the cultures we are looking at.
We're very excited to be tiptoeing into that space to see how we bring our unique product and mix to those customers, involv(ing) those customers because the opportunity is obviously very big if you get it right. We've got some fantastic locations; we're down by the...Marina Bay Financial Centre, which is kind of the heart of Singapore and from there we expect to grow in the city and then, hopefully, to some of the more regional centers.
We're going to the Petronas [Twin Towers] in KL (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)...so it's the most iconic place in Kuala Lumpur so we are super excited about that. (Editor's Note: The chain recently opened a store in Suria KLCC, also located in Kuala Lumpur.)
QSR Media: Any other developments the market could look forward to?
We have an awful lot coming and I think the “Fresh Fuel for Life” positioning gives us an incredible runway to go out and see how we bring this idea of inspiring people to go out and live a big life, how we do that through food stories and how we do that by encouraging people to go out and live these big dreams.
As those things kind of come together, you are going to see an awful lot of new innovative things coming out of Mad Mex but we'll be launching most of those in the first quarter of next year, so stay tuned.
Watch the interview below:
