Glug x giffgaff: Disrupted. Now what?

As the final London Glug event of 2017, my expectation was this was going to be something special and the presentations from Giffgaff, Bompas & Parr, Ugly and Uncommon didn’t disappoint. So without further faff here is a summary of their talks…

Giffgaff: Disruptive. Now what?

The initial part of the presentation delivered by Tom Baird (Brand Director), got straight to the point, the mobile industry is at saturation point and there are serious problems with the current business model…

• Bad customer service
• Low levels of loyalty
• Confusing tariffs
• One way relationship
• Lack of responsibility
• Long contracts

The main stream mobile businesses are aware of these issues and have been for some time but there is no incentive to address them.

Tom and the other Giffgaff founders looked at the industry and asked themselves a question, ‘is there a better way to run a business?’ Their decision was to create a company ethos of, ‘we are a new way of doing things and our ambition is endless’. This was eight years ago and the company’s success has grown through constantly evaluating what is happening in the industry and challenging the status quo.

At the core of the business were eight founding principles, all aimed at delivering the best service to the customer. A simple example of this is their approach to dealing with customer queries. The mobile industry standard for answering a customer query is 17 minutes, with no guarantee of receiving the correct answer or resolution. The Giffgaff approach is a community based system, where a query receives an almost instantaneous answers and you will get your issue resolved.

A key factor in delivering this new business model is the people they bring in, as discussed by Alastair (People Partner). He immediately highlighted a surprising statistic, only 17% of the workforce are engaged with their job. The challenge for Giffgaff whose aim is to continue to be disruptive, particularly as it grows into a big organisation, is how does it make sure all its employees are engaged?

There has been a learning curve as the business has scaled up. The first lesson learned is, choose wisely! Following the All Black methodology of building a team and filtering out the ‘dickheads’!

People who join the team adopt the ‘Giffgaff way’, this means indviduals who will collaborate, are gritty, curious and positive.

In the return the organisation provides an environment that:

• Empowers them to build
• Discovers their strengths and plays to them
• Sends feedback. Measures. Then acts
• Is fun – it doesn’t take itself too seriously

Website: Giffgaff

Bompas and Parr: How to be [and stay] disruptive

For those of you unfamiliar with Bompas and Parr, they’re an agency specialising in food, drink and flavour, describing themselves as experience designers.

The agency developed from an idea to create connoisseur jelly and sell it commercially, not a disruptive now but nine years ago wasn’t seen as feasible, but they had confidence in their vision and developed this to create surprising and unique experiential events for their clients. These have included…

The Kill it, Eat it workshop designed to teach people about the reality of how their food is sourced.  This required participants to humanely killing their food (a crab), cook and eat it together to discuss the experience. As you can imagine this wasn’t universally well received and some workshops had protests.

Armpit sniffing speed dating – getting the participants not to wash for the day, cover their face and using body odour to pick prospective partners. There was proven science behind the idea and it resulted in three successful relationships! But how to turn this into the next Bumble???

Naked whisky tasting, where each vintage was paired with a person of the same age. The whisky was licked or slurped from their naked bodies, with the oldest bottle available to sample being a 44 year old malt. (See slide 3.)

What drives the agency can be summed in their alternative presentation title, ‘how do we get away with it?’

1. It should be hard
2. Innovate for its own sake
3. Is it a bit weird? Great!

(See slide 2 – Take home message.)

By looking at the experience and find new ways to sample drinks, food and flavours they continue not only to create memorable experiences but allow participants in these events a unique insight into the products or ideas.

There ethos is probably best summed up by their final quote from William Blake, ‘…the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom…’.

Website: Bompas and Parr

Ugly: The ups and downs of building a challenger brand

The soda/fizzy drinks industry is facing a bleak fact, soda is dead!

• There is a massive decline in sales
• Millennials aren’t drinking it
• The industry is still delivering the same message it has been for the last 100 years, even though it no longer works

However, people still love a cold can moment!

Part of the problem lies in how the soft drinks industry sells the product, commercials promising models, beaches and an exciting lifestyle which bear no relevance to the product or the consumer.  What is apparent is people want authentic rebels and the not the advertising engineered ones, like the recent PR disaster Pepsi had with infamous Kendall Jenner advert.

What the public is craving is the truth, citing a George Orwell quote, ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act’.

Truth is at the core to the Ugly brand with the rollercoaster ride in creating the product being a key part of the company message, demonstrating their dedication to developing the best product possible for their customers.

Hugh (CEO) highlights building a challenger brand is a marathon not a sprint and getting there will take you through extreme highs and lows.

He started with Vita Coco, part of a disruptive community and had seen the impact these companies were already having on the food industry. In his travels he’d seen what was happening in other markets like Japan, where no sugar drinks were the norm, yet in the UK no available options. He kept seeing people spending money on healthy lunches only to counteract the benefits with sugary drinks. It was clear the drinks market had further potential for disruption.

In May 2013, Hugh and his partner decided to create a new drink with no sugar and flavoured only with fruit juice. A simple product like this shouldn’t take long to develop, there original schedule was three months to launch… 18 months later the business was fully up and running.

In May 2015, Ugly 1.0 developed an issue when all 40k units of stock went off, which meant they had to re-develop the product and the business had to temporarily pivot.

January 2016, Ugly 2.0 launches but now a fizzy drink. Sales increase and they’re able to secure more investment.

The product has now evolved into Ugly 3.0, run by a team of only six people, it’s a polished professional company and the product is about to be distributed in the US.

They’re a lifestyle brand and not promising a lifestyle like their competitors.

What they’ve learned…

1. Team work make the dream work
2. Ikigai
3. Patience and hard-work (a lean startup philosophy)
4. Stand out
5. A great brand is a story that never stops unfolding

Website: Ugly

Uncommon: A new type of advertising

The advertising industry is the last bastion to be truly disrupted and the aim of Niels’ company, Uncommon, is to change the current perception of the industry.

At a point in the 1990s the public had a positive association with commercials looking forward to them more than the programmes they were watching – Gold Blend, Cinzano Bianco, Cadbury Flake, Smash, R Whites Lemonade, Boddingtons, etc. Since then the perception of advertising has changed dramatically, with adverts being negatively viewed and most people doing anything to avoid them.

For most people advertising no longer has impact – if brands were to disappear the majority of people wouldn’t notice, there is no brand loyalty (see slide 1).

The Skip Advert button is the best thing to happen to the industry, as it’s forcing industry to look at itself and ask what is it doing and why is it no longer resonating with the public.

What Uncommon is doing is promoting brand messages that it really believes in, like Halo a biodegradable coffee system or Headstart Recruitment who have an alternative approach to recruitment. If an agency doesn’t believe or is passionate about the message it’s promoting, then why should public invest that message (see slide 2 & 3).

For anyone willing to instigate change the will be always be negativity (see slide 4), but as people understand the motivation and the benefits to products/industry the perception of those individuals will change. However regardless of how successful you are there will alway be doubters (slide 5 & 6).

The world has changed, how a brand/advertising is developed almost like the concept of a traditional career is evolving and a different approach is needed, nicely summed up in the final slide which is a quote from Liam Gallagher.

Website: Uncommon