What are the top 4 marketing challenges that Pie Face's CMO, Ben Macpherson, faces?

Find out in this interview, the next in our CMO Series, as we catch up with the CMO of rising QSR star Pie Face -  Ben Macpherson.

QSR Media: How would you define your CMO role at Pie Face?

Ben: Responsible for marketing our brand and business to prospective franchisees, and our brand, products and store experience to consumers.

The key objectives of my role are to ensure the:

• acquisition of new franchisees to our system;
• promotion and differentiation of our brand;
• acquisition of new customers for our stores;
• average "value" of our customers increase (in terms of annual spend); and
• improvement of our franchise partner relationships. 

QSR Media:  What challenges do CMO's face in the QSR space?

Ben: How long do we have?

For Pie Face the marketing team's key challenges are:

• Treating each store uniquely. Because Pie Face has an all-day/night offering, stores from 15sqm to 200sqm, in transit, destination, food courts, CBD, suburban, and regional, each store has different sales profiles. No one merchandising plan works for all stores. Pie Face groups stores into 5-6 types, and within this several subsets. Each store needs to have its own promotional and merchandising plan;
• Balancing brand management vs promotion -- driving short term sales. For Pie Face we have a quirky, fun, premium brand. We need to stay focused on keeping the brand authentic. We run the risk of looking too much like a "chain" and alienating our customers. However to drive sales, we need to think and act like a sophisticated QSR focused on driving store KPI's. Balancing these two is sometimes challenging;
• Ensuring we invest time where it is most productive. We have stores which are performing well (and don’t ask for any help), stores which are doing well but still in establishment mode, and then we have a few stores which are not performing to standard. We end up spending a lot of time on the non-performers. While necessary, it robs time from the stores with operators who can really leverage assistance and focus from the marketing department; and
• Keeping our franchise partners happy, while staying focused on the group's overall objectives.

QSR Media: "Pie Jam" tell us about this campaign?

Ben: Pie Jam is unique, https://www.pieface.com.au/piejam – it is an innovative live music tour of over 240 unsigned Australian music artists jamming at 40 Pie Face stores around Australia to drive acquisition of new customers and brand differentiation. 

We are a young chain with a limited marketing budget. We were looking for ways we could combine customer acquisition (to drive sales at store level), and brand promotion. With a unique and highly differentiated brand, we are always looking to do things which are a bit "left of centre". One of our core brand elements is Creativity (hence the faces on our pies!!). We never wanted to be associated with the "footy" pie…rather we are a tongue-in-cheek bakery café offer. Our products are hand drawn by our central kitchen team (under the supervision of our french born and trained pastry chef Francois Cointrel). Music and creative arts is an area we will continue to explore…and we all just felt it would be cool to have our stores turned into mini live music hot spots all over our cities.  

QSR Media:  How would you describe the "Pie Face" brand?

Ben: Convenient, fun, cheeky, creative, quality. 

QSR Media:  What do you think of Celebrity Chef endorsements of QSR's?

Ben: This strategy (celebrity collaborations) is a well worn path for all types of brands (not just food), and it was only a matter of time before it featured in force in the QSR space.

While we are not fans of this branding strategy at this stage, the science behind the strategy is reasonably sound. For us, we don’t feel we need to do this with our brand (yet) as we think the food offering is credible and we don’t need to polish it in that way.

It all depends on how integrated the collaboration is.

If its one product, or just a TV ad — in essence this is just a cosmetic ambassadorship -- a "trick" to get people interested in the brand/products, but it doesn't change underlying offer. Ultimately I don’t think consumers are that gullible. A brand that is not authentic these days in a social media world, have an entirely different challenge ahead of them.

If a chef is genuinely working with the QSR to fine tune the entire menu, or a major portion of the menu then this is a different story. This is a great re-invention opportunity and can really drive brand acceptance and loyalty. 

QSR Media: Pie Face spends a lot of its marketing budget on Social Media, tell us what activities you do and what kind of results you are getting?

Ben: We actually don’t spend too much of our money on social media (yet). We are working to integrate social media into our brand and communications programs. The key things we are doing are:

• Using our Facebook / Twitter account / fan base to speak directly to our customers;
• Coming up with quirky ways for our fans/customers to interact with each other and us. Like Pie Cam. We also use our Facebook and email subscriber bases to cross promote each other; and
• Displaying a Pie TV (social media screen — Twitter and Facebook) in selected stores so Pie Face fans can interact with other Pie Face fans (and us) from around Australia and have these interactions on display for all to see.
• We have a really full agenda this year in terms of building out our social media practice…watch this space.