“What did you do in the covid culture war dad/mum?” This might well be the question your kids ask you ten years from now when we look back on this extraordinary time in our lives. I doubt that most council or police licensing officers would really want to reply: “Well, I spent my time saying to young people in nightclubs ‘your covid papers please’ and then chucking them out if they couldn’t prove their vaccination status.” I don’t think this is what they signed up for when they joined their local council or police licensing team. And, save for a few cranks and zealots, I don’t detect much of an appetite for this among licensing authorities or police – who are struggling to carry out basic duties due to lack of resources and staff absences resulting from the “pingdemic”.

I am, of course, being deliberately provocative in the question above because I want to highlight how polarised public opinion has become on the issue of so-called covid passports. At the heart of this is a fundamental question: “Is getting the jab an ‘I’ issue or a ‘We’ issue?” For ultra-libertarians, it’s an “I” issue. For them, getting vaccinated is a personal decision and no one, under any circumstances, should ever be coerced or even nudged by the threat of coercion into undertaking a medical procedure. For the ultra-communitarians, it’s a “We” issue. For them, getting the jab is a civic responsibility and if you refuse, you’re letting the side down, you’re irresponsible and selfish and you’re throwing granny under the bus. 

And recent recruits to the communitarian position include President Macron of France, and the new Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. Both these leaders are saying proof of vaccination will be required to gain access not just to nightclubs but to supermarkets, shopping malls or even to ride on a bus or a train. “If you refuse to fulfil your civic responsibility and get vaccinated then, come the next wave of infections, you will be the ones forced to stay home,” declared President Macron.

But for many in the trade, and many councils and police licensing officers, the issues are as much about practicalities as they are about principles. What exactly is a nightclub? How does it differ from a large, city centre bar? And how does a bar or a nightclub differ from a large, busy pub with a 2am licence? These are not abstract questions but ones that go to the heart of whether covid passport requirements will be seen as fair, let alone practical or enforceable. How does a busy bar with a large outside area control a situation where access is from multiple points outside a loosely defined perimeter? And if a covid passport is only required if you enter the building but not the outside, seated area, is the operator expected to check each customer’s mobile phone for proof of vaccination every time they visit the toilet or go inside to the bar to buy a drink? This is unworkable.

Both the ultra-libertarian and the ultra-communitarian positions are extreme and absolutist – they brook no compromise and admit to no exceptions. It seems as if the middle ground has melted away and people are forced into tribes that talk past each other and have nothing in common except a feeling of mutual incomprehension and loathing. Here in the UK, it seems as if our government wants to triangulate between these two extremes. On the one hand declaring “Freedom Day” and the end of legal restrictions, but on the other, giving notice that admission to nightclubs and other crowded indoor venues will require proof of vaccination after the end of September this year. 

Personally, I don’t rule out the requirement for vaccination in any and all circumstances, for example, for those working in care homes where 40,000 residents have died from covid, or for doctors or nurses in hospital settings where so many covid infections have been acquired. And I can already anticipate the pile-on on Twitter that I will get for such a heretical statement – “It’s a matter of principle, you health fascist.” 

Well, to those people I say: if you’re going to argue, as I and many others opposed to blanket lockdowns have that enhanced shielding of the old and medically vulnerable would have saved many tens of thousands of lives, and that the key to this is controlling infection in hospitals and care homes, and between the two, then you can’t will the ends if you won’t will the means. When people seek employment in these occupations, they sign up to special, professional responsibilities. But young people going to nightclubs have no such obligations and I believe that domestic use of covid passports as a condition for accessing ordinary social life, including entry to licensed premises of any type is illiberal, discriminatory, unfair, unworkable, and unenforceable.

 

Last week, Peach continued the restart in its usual way. We drafted the Peach guidance two weeks out as what you think it should be and what you are going to want to do. That involves talking to the whole team, waiting for Boris and waiting another four days for actual guidance. Then, with 48 hours to go, with a cold towel on heads, our executive team: operations director Chris Stagg, myself,  marketing director Rebecca Wilkins and finance director Tony Bobath finalise the choices and issue it via all team communications channels. On masks, our choice was to ask the team whether they wanted them – 60% said no, and on asking guests, 60% said yes. Normally, we go with team-first approach at Peach and, this time, we agreed a two-weekly review and went with the majority of guests. We will only take them off when the cases start dropping in our geography and more guests are relaxed. We will aim to take them off to make those team members who wish to take them off happier. Team welfare, hospitality, guest perception, guest safety, team safety, ping warfare, the law and profit – all balanced. That’s making a holistic choice – it’s hard. 

 

Well we all made that choice this week. Hard but not impossible. And there’s a bigger one on the horizon. It’s how to do the right thing now to ensure our grandchildren live on a healthy sustainable planet. As Mike Berners Lee writes “There Is No Planet B”. This was the book that changed me. At my heart, I am ethical but I hadn’t understood what my business and personal choices over the past 57 years had done. I still eat steak – awesome free-range blue French-cut rump from Aubrey Allen is my choice. I drink lots of Greene King IPA (I have a “traditional” palate and this is a gorgeous, easy pint). I fly to Kenya twice a year to go see the conservancy in the Mara we support, and there we have created a regenerative grassland scheme using cows and shared ownership (a world first) that is supporting the Maasai people through a cow economy, which has created thousands of tonnes of new roots and prairie grassland, turned desertified mud into swaying grasslands with wildebeest, lions leopards and elephant all co-existing with the Maasai herders who are paid by Peach and my herder supporters. It took seven years to get right. Holistic is hard. 

 

Last week, Peach helped launch the Net Zero Pubs and Bars initiative with NetZeroNow. Aimed at helping SMEs (ie, single sites and small-to-medium multiples) reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. Check it out right now – it is a real step forward. http://www.netzeronow.org/pub and www.netzero.bar #NetZeroNow 

 

It is simply: 

• An industry protocol that sets out a standard for net zero that allows pubs and bars to be certified and receive an accreditation mark to display to guests

• A digital platform (website to you and me) to allow all the pubs and bars to calculate their current carbon emissions, set targets for reducing future emissions and compensate for historic emissions

• An opportunity to share findings from the industry as we measure ourselves and improve

 

Author Simon Sinek says “start with ‘why’”. If you haven’t read his amazing stuff yet, please do, or just watch him on YouTube. Pub, bar and restaurant businesses have a unique position in society to actually make a difference because everyone goes to a pub, bar or restaurant. We can change the world. Holistic is hard – we need to be profitable while making the right choices for team, guest, planet, community, supplier, and Peach shareholders.

 

Please know your numbers. Sign up to NetZeroNow and start learning what the journey involves. It’s not as scary as you might imagine. 

 

Peach will be sharing all its lessons with NetZeroNow week by week, month by month, throughout our journey to NetZeroNow. 

 

There is no planet B #NetZeroNow

 

In 1994, Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby, the owners of a business they had set up just four years earlier, were invited to present to Tesco, which was thinking of starting a loyalty scheme. At the end of the presentation followed a long and awkward silence, before Tesco’s then chairman, Lord MacLaurin, famously remarked: “What scares me about this is you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years.”

 

The software and pioneering data-led approach Dunn and Humby demonstrated that day enabled Tesco to double its market share in little more than a year and completely transformed the way the country shopped. It’s been 26 years since Dunn and Humby used their expertise to help Tesco launch the Clubcard, almost 20 years since Nectar launched, 23 years since Boots launched its data collection tool, Advantage – and even new kids on the block Netflix and Spotify have put collecting and using data at the heart of their business model since their founding in 1997 and 1996 respectively. 

 

Supermarkets and other retailers take data collection extremely seriously and, as a result, know how often you visit, how long you linger, the journey you’ll make around the store, your pricing sensitivities, which brands and products you’re loyal to and which you could be turned by, your life stage, your insecurities, and your aspirations. 

 

Netflix and Spotify, which harvest data from that first “free trial” sign-up, are constantly using the data they gather to segment and push you along a sales funnel so seamlessly, it sometimes feels like they know you better than you know yourself. They even know at what point you’re likely to cancel your subscription and can take relevant action to avoid that too. 

 

And thriving high street retailers such as H&M, McDonald’s, Zara and Nike make data collection and its deployment a foundation of their marketing, commercial and operational strategies. All these businesses collect meaningful data at every turn and, most importantly, they know how to use it to drive short-term sales, long-term customer retention and unrivalled loyalty. 

 

So given the challenges we were facing long before covid took us in its grasp and the highly uncertain future ahead, it seems odd that hospitality remains one of the only customer-facing sectors still believing we can know our customers, their behaviours, mindsets and motivations well enough to drive optimum sales and build genuine business resilience through anecdotal evidence alone – and often just by looking at a handful of them whenever we visit a site. 

 

I’ve written before about the significant, but rarely acknowledged, evolution hospitality has been through even in the past ten or 20 years, the era of personalisation we now live in, and how the average leadership team is light years away from Generation Z – the digitally native and increasingly demanding 18 to 25-year-olds who account for more than 40% of the market today (and is a group literally growing by the day).

 

And I’ve hammered home the startling new reality that exists – the brands that don’t know their customers in intimate detail (particularly those who represent the most value to them) will lose them to the brands that do. 

 

Because the survival of both the majority of operators and our industry as a whole will depend on our ability to understand and influence prospective and existing customer’s behaviour and mindsets – both online by thinking like an e-commerce business and in-venue by responding to previous or likely behaviour long before they step over the threshold. 

 

It’s clear that to be a customer business in 2021 and beyond, you must become a data business. So why do we find it so hard as an industry to embrace the use of data?

 

It’s fair to say the typical hospitality business is somewhat unique in the challenges that arise from its blend of in-person, emotionally charged, often instantaneous proposition – after all, Zara, Netflix and Tesco have never been held accountable for the success or failure of someone’s 21st birthday, a spontaneous and desperately needed wind-down after a tough day at the office – or, more tragically, the death of a loved one who had simply eaten the wrong food. 

 

It’s also true that, as an industry, we’re still miles away from taking marketing seriously at all, let alone constructing our businesses around it. And if you speak to anyone in hospitality it’s hard to imagine how data could exude the same passion, sense of vocation and sheer grit as many of us have at our core. 

 

But that’s the huge opportunity we have to grasp – because while Sainsbury’s, Nike or Netflix have the data and the incredible insights it brings, they don’t have the same ability to execute it with the absolute heart that sits at hospitality’s centre. And so we must embrace meaningful data collection whole-heartedly – because data that tells us how to attract customers who will represent the most value to us, convert existing customers to spend more money and retain them for as long as possible – brought to life with the passion, empathy and creativity this industry is known for would be a very powerful force indeed. 

How much do you think you would need to spend to uplift sales by 9.1%, increase dwell time by 11 minutes or increase sales by $300m dollars a year? The answer is – significantly less than you might imagine.

All of the above were achieved by the application of behavioural science; a field built over decades with robust research on how people make decisions (purchase or otherwise).

As author of The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton said: “Whether you’re trying to get customers to switch from a competitor, to buy a greater range of products or to pay a premium, businesses need to understand behaviour change. Behavioural science – the study of how to effectively change behaviour – should, therefore, be a topic all businesses are interested in.”

Now, I don’t profess to have access to a stash of secrets that will instantly give any business a boost to the tune of $300m dollars, but it’s fair to say that it’s probably more likely that it would be both easier and (significantly) cheaper with a good understanding of behavioural science to achieve such a thing.

So, how were the above three examples achieved? The first two, by changing the in-store music (easy) and the final, so-called “$300m dollar button” was just a slight change in the customer purchase journey on a website (namely switching at which point a user had to make an account to the end of the process, simple). In each case, the people behind the decisions knew enough about behavioural science to hypothesise the likely customer behaviour and optimise accordingly.

I have been fascinated by behavioural science for almost ten years now and could wax lyrical about its abilities to boost a business. But if I were to throw a challenge to the practice, it would be that it’s yet to formalise itself into a digestible process or model, making it a little hard work to pick up for those who are yet to use it’s invaluable insights. Let me try to ease the burden.

For some, even the word “science” causes their eyes to glaze over. But bear with me. The practice of behavioural science has been active for decades and through the accumulation of studies on how people behave in given circumstances, scientists have begun to formulate a set of likely “rules”, “procedures” or “prototypical responses”. To give these their fancy titles, they’re called “biases” (the way a person may be biased towards one decision over another) or “heuristics” (simple rule-of-thumb decisions). Still with me? Let’s press on.

Put in the simplest of terms, the list of biases and heuristics can be thought of as your shopping list of insights that, at any point, you could pick up and start trying.

The “Peak-End Rule” is one such bias. Through research, behavioural scientists have determined people are more likely to evaluate and remember an experience, not as a whole, but by the sum of its most stand-out moments (the “peaks”) and the final moment (the “end”), and that these moments can be entirely subjective.

This insight tells us that instead of working tirelessly to elevate the entire objective experience (expensive and hard to achieve), it would be as effective, if not more, to work on adding a few positive subjective peaks (say, colouring for adults left at the tables and a surprising playlist only played in the bathrooms) and an uplifting end (imagine leaving a restaurant and seeing a big button with the words “compliments to the chef” written on it that, when pressed, gave you a boost (because gratitude makes you feel good) and perhaps played a sound in the kitchen to boost the mood of the team and positively boost productivity – you’d remember that, right?

These are just some ideas where a business could implement the Peak-End Rule. The point is, comparative to other actions, you could choose to improve the entire objective customer experience (more staff, higher-quality food, building renovations, new furniture) by, instead, changing the subjective customer experience (how they feel about it); it is decidedly cheaper, easier to implement and could deliver significantly more return on investment. This is where the true business transformational power of understanding behavioural science lies – knowing how to change the subjective experience of a customer (cheaper and easier) than meddling with the objective customer experience (more expensive and likely lower ROI). It is also worth knowing behavioural science can help in so many areas that people don’t even think to try it, such as encouraging people to take the stairs, order more wine, boost staff morale or reduce crime – the list goes on.

At a time when hospitality is fighting to survive, simple and highly effective changes brought about by understanding behavioural science could provide you with invaluable uplift. And the best way to get started is to simply find a list of biases, choose one or two biases you think could help you improve or optimise a certain challenge you’re facing and put them into action. Remember, when dealing with people, it’s always a matter of averages and likelihoods (not certainties), so each time you implement something, just watch for the result. If it worked, bingo! Scale it up. If not, no problem, tweak it or try something else.

Here’s a good one to get you started: The Von Restorff Effect states things that stand out and are distinctive are more likely to drive better recall and, therefore, be top of mind. This could be transformational for a hospitality business. So what could you do right now that’s easy and cheap to make your business more distinctive? (I still quite fancy my idea of a compliment button).