EE, Burton’s Biscuits and Just Eat on city-centric marketing

Steve Newiss, chief commercial officer, Burton’s Biscuits

Food needs to adapt to what is working in the local market and why. A multinational could take a more hardline approach, saying “this is our brand proposition and we will spend to bring the consumer to it”. But companies like ours are more flexible.

We need local knowledge and relevance and the locals provide that. We have a distributor in Shanghai who has excellent knowledge of the area, and the whole package is a collaboration. We only supply one master distributor then that business supplies others within that geographic sphere. We work together, but the distributor brings the local knowledge; we bring the core brand.

Spencer McHugh, director of brand, EE (formerly Everything Everywhere)

We are initially launching our 4G mobile service in 11 cities. The reasons aren’t marketing driven, it was more of a technology infrastructure decision, which has determined where the network goes. So clearly, while we are launching the brand nationally, it is really important to have a strong regional element to the campaign in those 11 launch cities, based on customer communication but also advertising, retail and marketing.

I think it is important to strike the balance between national and regional. We have our own existing customers that are in those areas and we have done quite a bit of research around launching the campaign, both nationally and regionally.

Paul Cook, head of global insight, Just Eat

When we’re in the office and are planning our sales expansion, we absolutely need to know which takeaway restaurants exist that are in the same towns, so that we can create maximum coverage in an area. Our aim is to have every takeaway restaurant that can deliver hosted on our website.

We are a business that has been purely online, but we are now in a position of beginning to understand the importance of the nuances of neighbourhoods – customers in different areas want different things. That is how we’re looking to shape the business.

However, even longer-term, when we’ve ideally got every restaurant signed up, there is still going to be a proportion of a population who are not near one of those restaurants, particularly in rural areas, where takeaways just aren’t feasible as a business. So there will still be people who can’t engage with us.