Creating a Branding Strategy for better Customer Experience.

Challenge

The Open Oven Pizza Company turned up the heat on Toast to create an authentic brand with everything on it. What was delivered put a smile on everyone’s face. Ian Humby and Jon Teeluck (the owners) approached Toast with an exciting branding project that had a fixed launch date and an as of yet unknown set of requirements. Toast loved Creating a Branding Strategy for a better Customer experience, it is exactly the strategic challenge we like to work on.

The first thing Toast did was sit down and establish exactly what the known parameters were – literally the: who, what, where and why!

By doing this, Toast very quickly understood that we needed to help define the positioning, naming and branding of a brand new catering venture being created for the new Cornwall Services on the A30 just outside Roche.

Approach

The senior brand team in Toast, Simon Browne and Chris Tymon, sat down with the clients and as part of the initial branding brainstorm & research identified that the user experience of the customer would be an important factor due to the nature of the product and cooking process that this should be an essential part of the brand experience.

To understand this Chris sketched out rough ideas of what the customer would see as they entered the services and how they would interact with the USP – a full-sized open pizza oven.

In doing this we could ensure that any naming, positioning and subsequent branding reflected the experience – which is always difficult when creating something for the very first time.

Application

Having created a comprehensive look and feel for The Open Oven Pizza Company, the earlier sketches were then used to brief the team that were going to build the catering unit in the service station.

This again confirmed that the long held belief in Toast that if you get the initial branding idea right from the beginning then all applications flow easily from it – from the look and feel of the kitchen to the signage and staff uniforms.

This consistency of message through every element of the branding allows for a much more fulfilling brand experience for the customer and avoids any of the contradictions that some consumers get from larger fast-food brands that promise one thing and deliver another.