IN-DEPTH CASE STUDIES
GREAT BRITISH CHEFS CEO OLLIE LLOYD
the heart of this is our content and our stories, but we’ve taken that content and put it at the heart of social.” Indeed, Lloyd cheerfully describes the brand’s content as unashamed food porn, and the tone carefully combines the instructional with the aspirational. “If you look at our Facebook page,” he says, “that’s pure adult entertainment. Our recipes are lovingly photographed – we don’t use stock photography. We’re much more engaged than that. That, I think, is what generates the buzz and the sharability of all content. We’ve also got over 200,000 followers on Google+, which makes us one of the 500 largest Google+ brands in the world. Most people haven’t really engaged with Google+, but we believe it’s an interesting and evolving platform.” In the massively crowded food space,
differentiating the brand is clearly vital. For Lloyd it’s the stories behind the food – and the chefs themselves – that make Great British Chefs distinct, and he aims to apply the same responsive approach to brand partnerships. “We don’t go to brands and say, ‘here’s a template, would you like your logo in the corner and we can feature your products on our website?’ We talk to brands about what their story is, and we try to find a way where we can tell their story in a way that’s relevant to our community.”
W
STRAWBERRY TART. PASSION FRUIT VANILLA CHEESECAKE.
IF YOU LOOK AT OUR FACEBOOK PAGE, THAT’S PURE ADULT ENTERTAINMENT”
In the case of a mainstream brand like
Tesco, that partnership has been built around parents and kids; Great British Chefs are collaborating on a free app designed to get kids cooking and understand more about food. “However,”
55 issue 17 may 2013
says Lloyd, “if you look at our partnerships with brands like Kikkoman Soy Sauce, it’s much more experimental. Central to our approach is the idea that different brands have different partnerships. What’s happening in this space, I think, is brands are spending lots of money building what I call islands: small websites with small amounts of content that no one visits. What we do is
produce, publish and amplify, and that means we’re able to tell a much broader, richer story across a variety of areas.”
ith three successful apps under their belt already, including one voted into the ‘Top 100 Apps Ever’ list by Apps Magazine, how does Lloyd think brands should
approach the potentially tricky business of app design? “Again, I think it’s about differentiation and quality,” he says. “Too often, people just reconstitute content and put it out. If I think about the work we’ve done with Apple, we looked hard at the technology, at our own content, thought about what the consumer wants and tried to deliver an app that ticks all those boxes. With us you can do things like email an entire recipe straight out of the app. We’re not following the model of walled content. We want people to engage with our story and brand and we’ll enable that in every possible way.” And yet, says Lloyd, apps are not a major revenue stream for Great British Chefs. “The new Tesco app is free, and that’s because we see it as being about reach, storytelling and engagement. There are apps we’ll do in the future which will be paid for, and they’ll be more particular and specialised. But for me it’s all about quality, and understanding how we’re different from everything else out there. It’s one of the most competitive market places. Anyone who thinks they can just build an app, launch it and that people will download it is out of their minds.” So successful apps need to establish a
brand’s identity and extend that brand’s reach?
“I think so,” says Lloyd. “One of the things people forget sometimes about tech is that you really need to have a story people are going to remember.
greatbritishchefs.com
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