3663 in the UK is changing and it’s not just our look! We do have a great new image and new logo, but the change is a lot more fundamental than that. We have started on a journey that will take us a few years, but we know where we are going and have developed some great tools to help us get there!
It all began in 2009...
Through the tough economic climate in the last two years, 3663, like many companies, put a great deal of thought into where our energies should be focused, to be sure that after the recession we would come out in a market-leading position.
This resulted in a mammoth research project, gaining insights from the industry, the marketplace, our customers (both lapsed and current) and our internal teams. To have clarity for our ongoing strategy and focus, we needed to identify our core brand positioning along with a real point of competitive difference.
At times the feedback we received might have been a little difficult to hear, with views like:
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Though this was balanced with some more positive views, including:
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The brand positions under consideration included being seen as the leader in providing – great value, food expertise, product range, national infrastructure, sustainability, innovation and service. What came out clearly from our stakeholders was that five of those pillars were not seen as either leading or unique, but as an entry-level requirement to be ‘in the game’. They simply expect the big players to be able to deliver on those fronts. Innovation was also an assumption across each pillar, as they don’t want things to become static. So what did that leave? The clear position of difference came out as service. From our customer’s point of view, none of the key foodservice players in the UK are holding a true service excellence territory and they would very much like to see a John Lewis, M&S or Amazon in the foodservice sector. |
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Though challenging, we decided to take up the gauntlet and go for this service positioning, which represents a huge opportunity in the UK market. We recognised at the outset that to make the move to customer-centricity genuinely happen, we would have to change a few things…
To start the change, we agreed our new company strategy – but a stated strategy wasn’t going to make an impact without some fundamental change in internal behaviours, so a new company vision, mission and values were also introduced.
Various workshops were held to start the embedding process for the new vision, mission and values, followed by an internal competition to identify what being customer focused would be like for different functions. We then need to recruit
internal facilitators to support the ongoing induction
of the new 3663. Through the research process we also asked our customers about our brand look and feel, we showed them
lots of suggestions for new styles and colours and got really good feedback on what would work for them and what
wouldn’t. From this, we developed our new style guide and our new logo. The colours in our new pallet are now all food colours, and the blue and red (which is hugely associated with discount and value products in the UK) is no longer! Our colours are now fresh, vibrant and modern, much more cheerful and friendlier than the stark choices we had before.
When using our logo, we have stopped saying we are ‘first for foodservice’ as our customers felt this was us talking about ourselves, not putting them first.
A really challenging but vital part of this change in identity is our new tone of voice. We had feedback that we could come across as aloof, authoritative, formal, distant and impersonal. To show true customer focus, it was essential that we became more warm, friendly, fun, caring and personal. Our new tone includes more customer-friendly words such as ‘helping’ ‘listening’, ‘supporting’ and ‘together’ – it is now more in the first person, about ‘you’ (the customer) and less about 3663 (though we would now say ‘us’ to be less formal). This is a gradual move as it involves a great deal of training and change in our culture, but it has started. From the feedback we have had so far, it has been very well received. One example is our new corporate website, which customers love, and the number of enquiries we receive from this channel has increased tenfold.
Before the site was busy with a lot of talk about 3663. Now it is more modern and focused on what we can do to support our customers – see www.3663corporate.co.uk.
We intend to keep listening to our customers at each stage on our journey and have already had some really helpful feedback on the first test of a new vehicle livery. They loved the livery style, but they preferred the strapline ‘Inspired by you’ to the ‘truly tasty together’ we initially put on the truck. A very important area for our customers was the look and quality of our own brand product range. They told us they found our own brands confusing, that our product quality wasn’t consistent and, of great significance, that the packaging didn’t communicate the quality of the product inside. This proved for some to be a major barrier to purchasing from the range.
We have completely reviewed our own label product range and are relaunching the brand in a style to suit the new corporate brand look. We have created a circle design that stands as a quality mark for ‘quality you can always trust’. To substantiate this mark, every item is now blind tested against competitors’ products, and only products that make the grade get into the range.
We are pleased with the feedback from our customers so far on the changes we have made, but we do know that this has to be about more than looking good. If our customers think this is just a facelift, we could lose credibility and struggle to gain the service reputation we are seeking. The next steps on our journey involve us continually reviewing internal and external feedback so we know what we can improve on, and we have also committed to being honest and open. If for any reason we can’t deliver on any promises made, we will tell our customers or our people why.
Other ideas in the pipeline to aid us on our journey include: developing a customer service charter to help us quantify our service levels and measure our performance; reviewing our processes to become easier to do business with; implementing a new internal recognition and suggestion scheme; and coming up with new ways of working that meet our customers’ needs.
We would love to share details of the launch of our new e-trading website so watch this space for more news. We are designing a site to exceed industry standards and deliver a service more in line with state-of-the-art retail online shopping. After all, that’s what our customers want and we’re listening!
In the spirit of our new collaborative style, we would welcome any views or feedback you have on our journey or our destination! Please e-mail us on YourThoughts@3663.co.uk. We would love to hear from you.
Bidvest Foodservice group – Europe 3663 Wholesale – more information here