The alleged bullying and toxic workplace reports emanating from Ellon and Edinburgh had me thinking back to my school days. On the remote chance my old English literature teacher is reading this edition of Friday Opinion, I feel sure he will question my use of lyrics from rapper Stormzy but will applaud the Shakespeare reference. Whatever he thinks of my quotes, he will surely be proud of my stance against bullying in the hospitality workplace. 

He was a really good teacher. He consistently managed to get the most out of class by creating an environment balanced perfectly between discipline, enjoyment, camaraderie, creativity, mutual respect and learning.

At the same school, there was a teacher who was so nice, so pleasant, but actually unable to rule a game of tiddlywinks let alone a classroom full of kids and the unruly results are the stuff of legend.

And then, at completely the other end of the spectrum, I clearly remember one teacher who ruled by fear. He wore a black school masters gown and would sweep up and down the corridors hawk-like, casting a dark shadow, looking for the slightest of misdemeanours to give him reason to flick the ear of the offending pupil and demand that pupil attend one of his daily detentions.

In so many different scenarios in life, the same cast of people crop up don’t they? Parents, for example. There are parents who broadly always get it right, achieving the balance between love and discipline in good proportion. Then you have parents who feel it appropriate to be best friends with their offspring showering them with whatever it is they want, except boundaries. Then you have parents who rear with an iron fist of fear. 

Business leaders broadly fall into those three categories too. There are those who brilliantly, skilfully and consistently display the qualities of a motivating inspiring leader getting the most out of people through clear simple boundary setting, engagement and being the catalysts to team camaraderie. There are wishy-washy business leaders, who create a dysfunctional business culture by trying to be everyone’s mate. Then, yes, there are the hawk-like, dark shadow-casting, ear-flicking bully types in business, demanding respect (but only ever really gaining hollow sycophantic respect). 

What makes a person a bully in a business? Here are some reasons:

1. Bullying is so much easier than nurturing, developing and encouraging people.

2. For some, the feeling of power is seductive and addictive and the more they taste it, the more they desire it.

3. Some people’s narcissistic ambition comes at the cost of everything else.

4. For some, power equals status. They fear losing their status and bully others in order to retain it.

5. For some, they mask their personal insecurities by bullying others to give themselves a sense of power and control.

6. The Peter Principle devised by management theorist Laurence J Peter. His principle believes people in business will rise to their “maximum level of incompetence” where they are promoted, based on their success in previous roles until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Bingo, he’s put his finger on it, some people are out of their depth and mask their own inadequacies by bullying.

As news of alleged toxic workplaces continue to make headlines in our trade press, watch as operations directors and chief executives with bullying tendencies do the following:

1. Form internal working groups that investigate how culture can be improved and present the findings as their own ideas. 

2. Up the ante on hollow, token gestures.

3. Demand their PR team releases stories about happy stuff that overly use the word “family”.

4. Booking themselves in for self-reflecting training courses in a desperate effort to reinvent themselves as empathetic leaders. 

Most will revert back to their bullying personas once the trade press focuses its attention away from toxic workplaces but, you never know, one or two may actually see the light. In summary, and here comes the Stormzy/Shakespeare combo, some leaders just get too big for their boots but beware the bullies in our sector, you are in danger of very publicly being hoisted by your own petard. 

When Tesco introduced its first small format convenience stores some years back, it pinpointed the 100 key items it needed to always have in stock at each of these outlets. The list was an odd mix including the likes of Steradent denture tablets and Carlsberg Special Brew.

 

The criteria was based on them being premium-priced products that are bought with great frequency by customers who are extremely loyal to these items, to the extent that they would do their entire shop at a rival store if these particular products were not available.

 

This importance of product selection came to mind when my local independent baker Dunn’s in north London’s Crouch End area suddenly stopped baking its cinnamon buns on weekend mornings. My children are such fans that I’d stop off on my morning cycle ride and pick up a couple on my way back home. I’d invariably grab some other items too from the core range. But when they stopped baking these particular delicacies, I ended up visiting the store a lot less frequently.

 

Pleasingly a couple of months later the buns returned to the store and I’m now back to doing my regular cycle stop-offs at Dunn’s. My suspicions are that I was not the only person who diverted their business away from the shop when this popular breakfast product was removed. I reckon Dunn’s is much more acutely aware of its ranging decisions today because the market around it has changed so dramatically since covid-19. The 200-year-old family owned bakery has had to adapt to changing market conditions like many other established foodservice companies.

 

The pandemic has directly driven great change in Crouch End. This includes – rather interestingly – an influx of new bakery businesses. The underlying appeal of the area to the baking fraternity is, undoubtedly, the increase in people who now work locally but who would have previously been travelling into central London to offices. It’s a similar story at many other edge-of-city locations around the country. These people have all built up a serious taste for sourdough (and other baked goods) during lockdown and they are consuming more of these foodstuffs locally.

 

One of these individuals did so well baking, and selling, sourdough from her kitchen that she has taken on premises in Crouch End from where she bakes and hosts bakery courses. Although sourdough is at the heart of the business, the offer has been broadened to include viennoiserie and a coffee bar.

 

The area also has a Gail’s, which has done incredibly well (always queues outside) this past year along with the rest of the chain, to the extent that owner Luke Johnson and his Risk Capital Partners has felt sufficiently confident to place the business back on the market with a reported price tag of £250m.

 

Another newcomer to the area is the very fast expanding independent chain Wenzel’s that originated in north west London but is now selling its pretzels and Challah from outlets around the whole of the capital and increasingly beyond. Just down the road from Crouch End will shortly open the latest unit from The Dusty Knuckle, which has achieved great success in east London with its baked goods and pizzas, and is now branching out. During lockdown, it cleverly used a former milk van to deliver its breads and pastries around London, which proved incredibly popular and no doubt provided great on-the-ground research into potential locations for new outlets. 

 

The influx of new businesses like these is being made possible by the closure of other operators that have struggled to deal with covid-19. Among them, in Crouch End, was ironically another bakery chain – the 66-year-old Percy Ingles whose 48 units closed last summer. The traditional London bakery was often compared to Greggs for focusing on old-school favourites such as doughnuts, sausage rolls and fresh cream cakes. However, Greggs, in contrast, has changed out of all recognition and adapted its offer and understood that Tottenham cake does not sell in Crouch End (yes, there is a branch) never mind in Liverpool.

 

Its demise, in stark contrast to the rise of many other bakers, illustrates the need to have a differentiated, up-with-events proposition and to specifically tailor the offer to the demands of customers within specific locations. And also ensure the cinnamon buns are always on the shelf in time for breakfast – certainly in Crouch End anyway.

 

Everyone today, it seems, is talking about the leadership style of Gareth Southgate, not surprisingly. Not since 1966, and Alf Ramsey, has someone brought together such a brilliant but disparate group of individual footballers to perform so well as one national team. No doubt there will be many articles, books, blogs and posts on how his management style can and should be applied to other businesses – not least in our sector. 

He seems to have created an England team who respect and praise one another, who put the team before themselves, who don’t blame anyone else (or bad luck) for a poor performance and who are determined to win for the sake of their country not their egos. It’s a team that seems to be totally aligned, focused, proud, characterful and determined to pay attention to the detail.

I was thinking about him yesterday but in a different context when I had lunch in a newly refurbished managed pub. The owning pub company had patently invested heavily in this site and it looked beautiful. We were the only diners inside though, in this 100-plus covers pub. It was cold, the menu wasn’t appropriate for lunchtime, the music was a mixture of heavy metal and country (an unusual combination), and the service was efficient but not knowledgeable or experienced. It wasn’t a bad experience; it just wasn’t a great one. Or a differentiated or memorable one.

In terms of the Euros, it might have qualified for the group stages. It might have even scraped through to the final 16 but would not have progressed further. It certainly would not be in the final on Sunday. Like a football team, it had all the same constituent parts as any other pub (manager, team, kitchen, food, drink, fixtures and fittings, etc.) but like those teams that went out of the last 16, they just were not working together. Like the England football team, this pub will have had its equivalent of Gareth Southgate somewhere in the organisation, but unlike him, they hadn’t aligned all the moving parts to produce something successful.

So, I was thinking, which brands in our sector would be in the final on Sunday? The brand needs to have a soul or an essence that pervades all it does. It needs to understand its audience and what it wants, needs and expects. It should deliver a consistently memorable experience that inspires, excites and delights. Everything needs to work together seamlessly and the tiniest detail needs to be perfect. OK, it can make the odd mistake, but the overall sense has to be one of a brand doing its absolute best to be brilliant as much of the time as possible.

It’s not enough now for our brands to just qualify or even be in the final 16. Customers, picky before the pandemic, are, I suspect, going to be even more choosy in the long term. They want to be identified with winners. They want to celebrate and talk about where they go and the time they had. They don’t want to slink away, fed up at having invested their time and money in something that never gets it right or never wins. 

I know which brands I would pick. And I know which one should win. I don’t quite have the same feeling of euphoria eating and drinking in there for two hours as I did watching England last night but it’s not far off. Brands, like the one I was in at lunchtime, should not just think good is OK – that’s like settling for qualifying. It’s not good enough. They need to have the ambition, determination, character and leadership to win. Hopefully, just like England will on Sunday.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s likely that if you have a beautifully colour-coded 12-month marketing plan sitting proudly somewhere on your desktop or cloud, you’ve been wasting your time. 

 

According to many “leading industry figures”, it might take two, even three years for the hospitality industry to “get back to normal”. Well hold on to your seat reader, because I’ve got news – it wasn’t “normal” before covid – and despite our collective refusal to face facts, it’s clear our customers, brands and familiar trading environment had slipped away from us a very long time ago. 

 

Consider the short but profound recent history of the hospitality industry. The ’90s were all about innovation and choice, with a boom of exciting new brands from grab-and-go to pubs to high-end casual dining. The Noughties brought a shift to online, where websites enabled the customer to decide, almost in real time, where to spend their cash. Then the birth of social, particularly Instagram in 2010, powered the era of the “experience economy”. Customers wanted to eat and drink, but they wanted it with bells on. 

 

But now the Millennials who drove the “experience economy” are turning 40, and Generation Z is setting the agenda. Like groups before them, they still want to eat, drink and have fun – but this group does not remember a time before Spotify, Netflix and Deliveroo, so, like everything else in their lives, they want their eating and drinking experience to be entirely on their own terms. With Generation Z (any human aged roughly between 18 and 25) accounting for 40% of the out-of-home market, not including the older groups they influence and are part of, this is a group no hospitality brand can afford to lose from their grasp. 

 

And when you add to this the fact we’re going through one of the biggest social, economic and technological shifts in history for all groups – which has been even further accelerated by the pandemic – how could any of us rustle up an effective long-term plan for that?

 

Which is why, the yearly process of a board demanding a 12 to 18-month (yes, eighteen) marketing plan from their chief executive who, in turn, demands a colourful Excel sheet from their marketing team, thick with key dates, menu launches, vanity social and “brand activation” (which will all be pushed to one side in favour of a relentless campaign of discounting or ad hoc menu changes for many brands anyway) is, at best, a waste of everyone’s time and, at worst, a yearly exercise in burying our heads even deeper in the hospitality sand. 

 

If this approach paid dividends, I’d be the first one telling you to crack on, but it doesn’t. So why do we do it? Well, mainly because it’s just what we’ve always done. 

 

History isn’t clear on who first said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results”, but it’s relevance to the modern marketer has never been more keenly felt. 

 

So if not this, what?

 

Rory Sutherland, advertising and behavioural science legend, tells the story of the “waggle dance” bee. 

 

Every morning, 80% of the hive’s bees head out on a mission to their favourite haunts to collect as much nectar as possible. They’ve done their homework and know exactly where to find the best nectar and keep going back to fill their little nectar pouches with more and more. 

 

But what happens, say, if the bees turn up to their favourite location to find a bunch of greedy cows have ravaged their flower patch? For the bees, this could spell disaster but it doesn’t because the other 20% of the bees had been on a different kind of mission – to find the next untapped source of the best nectar. And they use their “waggle” to show the rest of the bees exactly where to find it. 

 

While key dates and menu launches offer us a great content opportunity, they are not the basis of intelligent or effective marketing. In fact, research conducted by Feed it Back in January of this year revealed only a tiny fraction of people booking a “key date” meal expect or even want a change of menu. And when you consider the average casual dining brand has a customer visit frequency of fewer than three times a year (according to our findings), you have to conclude that frequent menu changes are a colossal waste of time and money. 

 

Instead, we should be gathering intelligence by getting deep into our data to surface the customer acquisition, conversion and retention opportunities that exist in the here and now, and use the creativity and innovation this sector is known for to exploit them to maximum effect – while keeping back 20% of our resource to identify and explore new trends in our data, which will drive brand development and business resilience by enabling us to adapt when our nectar starts to run out. Just like our little bees.