Luke Mangan’s recipe for creating a brand from organic ingredients
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Restaurateur, businessman, mentor, chef. Natasha Menon talks us through the project to document and formalise a brand from component parts grown organically over a decade, and that’s inextricably linked to the identity of its founder, Luke Mangan. By Peter Roper.
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This article originally appeared in The Identity Issue, our October/November issue of Marketing mag.
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The unchecked growth of Luke Manganâs empire over the last 10 years left the company with an amazing array of feathers in its chefâs hat, but the brand with a lack of strategic direction and consistency and clarity of brand positioning and communication.
The business was performing exceptionally well financially, but marketing and communications manager Natasha Menon saw there was an issue with recall and recognition, and an opportunity to take Luke Mangan and Co from an entrepreneurially-built enterprise to a unified brand that could be a platform for further growth.
Menon wanted to tell the story, not of Mangan as a chef, but of Mangan as the man wearing a multitude of different hats: a restaurateur, businessman and mentor.
The Luke Mangan brand, it should be prefaced, can be split into four areas, or the âfour main mealsâ as theyâve been affectionately titled:
- Partnerships:Â with P&O Cruises, Virgin Australia, Hilton Hotels and Eastern Oriental Rail,
- restaurants:Â Glass Sydney and Mojo Sydney, Salt grill restaurants in Surfers Paradise, Jakarta and Singapore, a Salt tapas and wine bar in Singapore, Salt and World Wine Bar in Tokyo, Amilla Fushi and Finolhu in the Maldives,
- Providore:Â a range of products, including gifts and vouchers, food products and experiences, and
- development:Â the arm including the Inspired Series education program and the Appetite for Excellence Awards.
Menon remembers issues with ârecall and recognitionâ of the brand, although not necessarily Manganâs name. âPeople could recall his name, but due to this extensive amount of growth, they couldnât remember where it was associated,â she says. âIt was either âLuke Mangan, the Virgin Australia resident chefâ or âLuke Mangan, the P&O cruise ship guyâ.â
The brand, which has seen Mangan become the first ever chef with products on planes, trains, ships and shore is spread over five continents, 19 restaurants, a handful of partnerships and more. It was a global entity in need of brand loyalty.
The ensuing implementation of brand unity across half the globe was a monumental task that took 12 months and involved asking what staff , partners and guests thought about Mangan the man, to try and ascertain and define Luke Mangan the brand.
The brand strategy work undertaken over the last 12 months was planned out and broken into six parts.
- redevelopment of brand strategy,
- redevelopment of marketing communications strategy,
- redevelopment of digital strategy,
- business development,
- internal marketing/organisational restructure, and
- PR communications strategy for new brand position/brand refresh â the search for Australia’s biggest foodie.
After speaking to dozens of people, âfrom wait staff to senior execs, to current partnersâ, a pattern began to emerge. The pattern was âa very strong sense of loyaltyâ associated with Mangan that âyou donât generally associate with chefs,â Menon says.
So the brand image, much like Manganâs character, would encompass loyalty, cooperation and relationships. Manganâs strength is building and cultivating relationships; so each of these points would be focused on in terms of relationships â with partners, producers, ingredients, and the team of up-and-coming talent and staff.
âRelationships may be a key ingredient to our business success, but it only actually works because of our team. Having good food, good wine and, most importantly, a really good time is what weâre all about, and what we believe every dining experience should be,â says an inspirational Mangan quote in the brand outlines.
The venture was, says Menon âmuch more than just publicityâ; it was truly around building a business, much more so than when chefs usually hire marketers to promote their own brand image. âWhat was interesting about Lukeâs was this was going to be a brand positioning strategy that was going to lead his whole business strategy as well, because heâd never had that defined,â explains Menon.
Uniting a staff of hundreds of chefs, wait staff and operations staff all over the world, to build a brand to create brand loyalty, would be no mean feat. A lot of responses, Menon recalls, were along the lines of âbrand loyalty? Whatâs this jargon? Whatâs this marketing girl talking about?â
A series of brand guidelines were developed, which, when followed, would align a restaurant team with the Luke Mangan and Co brand image. The problem with this, was that âchefs donât read brand guidelinesâ.
So how would they go about producing brand guidelines that would cut through the scepticism of the chefs? Simple. They put them in a handy document entitled, âChefs donât read brand guidelinesâ.
They also created a new range of websites for each arm of the business, each conforming to the new brand identity as outlined in the guidelines. This was a âbeastâ of an undertaking, says Menon.
âWhat we wanted the experience to showcase on the website was to reflect Luke as an individual. The tone of voice, the direction of how and what imagery we use was very much driven by him.â
Social media was also a heavily utilised tool in the establishment of the brand identity, because, says Menon, âItâs the most reactive base for us to communicate with our customers,â adding, â[itâs] a huge part, an area we are now looking to continue, evolve and grow.â
Partnership contracts form some of the brandâs biggest ventures, and Mangan takes an active role in building and nurturing them all. âA word Luke refuses to use is ‘consultant’,â says Menon. âItâs purely because his belief is that a consultant is somebody that consults, but is not involved. We really position our brand as an extension of their team.â
With Virgin Australia, a dedicated team defines and specifies the business class food and beverage menu. âA full service experience,â says Menon. âIn a communications context, we create a restaurant experience in the sky.â
The partnership with P&O Cruises sees a sole Salt grill restaurant on five of the P&O Cruise ships, each run by the internal Luke Mangan and Co team.
The partnerships have been a success to date, and the brand consolidation has been successful in promoting and engaging new partnerships. The partnership with Eastern and Oriental Express is an example of one of the âgreat wins that have come off the back ofâ the brand strategy, says Menon. It sees the brand add the âtrainâ stamp to its âplanes, trains, ships, shoreâ conquest, opening a Salt grill on âAsiaâs most luxurious trainâ. Mangan also acts as an ambassador for Tourism Australia, where he sits on an advisory board with the likes of Donna Hay and Peter Gilmore.
The latest aspect of this enormous brand development project is the search for a âCEOâ, a culinary experience officer. Operating in October after an applications and three-month shortlisting project, it essentially sought to find âone individual that encapsulates the same passion and love for food, wine and great timesâ of the Luke Mangan brand. The shortlist process involved engagement with all the brandâs partner companies, involving them on the panel discussion to narrow the running down to about eight to 10 candidates, âbut maybe a bit more,â says Menon, before mentioning over 4000 people applied for the position.
For the month of October, the selected candidate will be trained up by Tourism Australiaâs social media team, undergo a three-and-a-half-week trip to develop content for Luke Mangan channels, go on the inaugural Eastern Oriental Express journey and attend two new restaurant launches in Japan.
âEssentially, theyâll be an ambassador [for] our business,â says Menon. The idea of such a role was in answer to the question of âhow do we get this message out there without talking a whole heap of marketing jargon,â she says.
Choosing a brand ambassador gave a âsense of accessibilityâ to the project, and the fact that these days âeveryoneâs a foodieâ makes for a highly engaged audience on social.
âItâs really for somebody that wants to put their name in front of some quite influential figures within the food and beverage scene across Australia and the travel scene,â explains Menon.
Another aspect of the rebrand was the part development/ part redevelopment of the Luke Mangan four squares brand logo. Prior to Menonâs involvement, the âmeaninglessâ four squares were everywhere.
âOne of the first jobs I had to do,â recalls Menon, was to go to every one of the companyâs restaurants, picking up every piece of collateral each restaurant had, to get a better idea of how it was being used in different ways. It was a âhorrifically painfulâ exercise. âIt was being used as a diamond, as a shape, as this, as that, as one square or two.â
This liberal and varying use of the four squares brand logo is but another example of the âinconsistency and lack of clarityâ surrounding the Luke Mangan empireâs brand before this undertaking.
Regardless of how Menon felt about the four squares at that time, the idea was not to âshift too farâ from this original logo from a creative perspective. Instead the decision was made to embrace, perfect and align the four squares to a uniform design and use across the whole brand.
Essentially, the task was to âreverse engineerâ a meaning onto them. The âsea, sky, rail and shoreâ quadrifecta or the companyâs four arms of âpartnerships, restaurants, Providore Range and developmentâ are both offered up by Menon as potential ideas for what the squares could represent.
The Luke Mangan (non) brand guidelines show just how strictly the brand now uses the four squares across letterheads, business cards, email signatures, Providore Range packaging, menus and online.
The rapid growth also meant the management hierarchy lacked structure. âThere was Luke, and there were 700 people underneath him,â says Menon. Building a management structure from the ground up made it easier to envision how âa business strategy could evolve up through thisâ.
Communicating the structure and unified brand strategy began at the âtroop levelâ. âTheyâre the core of our business,â says Menon, âthe bread and butter of any service related team.â After this were the four lines of the business, each of which now has its own head.
If anything, the new master brand identity helps Mangan and Co make operational and partnership decisions. âHaving a clearly defined brand position enables us to decide if weâre going to partner with somebody, or if weâre going to open a restaurant. Are the audience who come to eat at the restaurant the type of people whoâll appreciate our brand? Or if itâs a partner, is this the sort of partnership where weâll equally benefit one another?â says Menon.
âBefore, we never had that sounding board to check. But now, weâre able to define and specify the direction we need to keep targeting.â
For Menon itâs been a thoroughly rewarding experience.
âFrom a marketing perspective, the rewarding component is walking into a business that doesnât necessarily understand the value of what marketing and communications can do, and then shifting the angle to focus marketing and communications for a very centric focus in decision-making processes.â
âItâs blown my mind,â she says.
