Listen to all episodes on your favorite podcast platform:
Transcript (Download)
Rupert, welcome to the EW360 podcast. I’m so pleased to have you on today. Lovely to meet you and thanks for asking us.
To kick things off, tell us about Hot Pickle. So Hot Pickle is a brand experience agency, been going since 2009. I can’t believe it’s over 15 years now, working for some of the largest kind of global brands. So everyone from Unilever, Diageo, we’ve done work for the BBC, we’ve done work for Heinz, Moet Chandon, a whole host of Amazon, a whole host of businesses.
Well, let’s start with the origin story. And I love the fact that I’ve read Hot Pickle enough just in researching questions and things like that for this particular show, but I’ve never actually said it yet. And that’s fun to say. But let’s start with the origin story. What led you from the client side to founding Hot Pickle? And you started with a Marmite pop-up, if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?
That’s correct. That’s correct. But I’ll tell you a very funny story about Hot Pickle, though, is the name, because it does make people laugh. And every time I go to reception of a major kind of corporation, you introduce yourself as an employee of Hot Pickle and they always ask, do you make them? And I’m like, no, we don’t make any hot pickles. We don’t make pickles. We don’t make sweet pickles. But what we do now, though, is we give every client of ours every Christmas a jar of hot pickles. So there is now some real pickles in the business.
But so the origin story is very simple. So I used to be a marketeer at Unilever. I left Unilever to go and do an MBA. I had delusions of grandeur of joining the world of private equity. And then the 2008, 2009 crash occurred and I needed to find a job. And I got talking to a guy called Will Hobhouse, who is of the Fortnum and Mason’s Selfridges fame. And he had said that he’d spotted a trend of pop-up shops in New York. And he thought London was kind of ripe for its first, I think, quirky pop-up. I mean, fashion stores have always done kind of sample sales, but no one had taken a sort of grocery brand and tried to create an experience with a kind of retail element to it.
And as a side hustle, I was running the licensing interest of Marmite, having run the Marmite brand. And I thought, what the hell? It’s either this or what we call in the UK the doll, which is being on benefits. So I was like, okay, let’s do a pop-up shop. And we went for it. We created a two-story store on Regent Street for one of the UK’s most iconic brands in Marmite. But let’s be honest, not a brand known to be on the sort of fashion streets of London. And we created this brand experience and retail store. And we sort of crossed our fingers and hoped it was going to work. And it was a great success. So therein lies the story.
And are there any lessons from those early days that still guide your approach today?
Absolutely. So the first thing I would say is breaking rules. We had the sort of blessing and benefit of complete naivety. So myself and two other guys, one who still remains in the business and co-founder, both actually Americans. So Patrick and I are still very much in business along with another guy called Andy. None of us had any retail experience. So we went into running the retail side of the business with a completely fresh approach.
So we broke every rule. We didn’t have disciplines in the same way that retail businesses do. We had orchestras in the window. You got a discount if you wore a tea cozy on your head. We changed prices on a regular basis. And we still do that today. As a creative exercise, we did this thing called Rules of the Game, where we write the rules of any brief and then we break them. And I think that’s sort of the first thing that’s consistent in what we do.
The second thing is:
Have fun.
Create a bit of theater.
Create a bit of entertainment, and people will then spend money with you.
You know, you try and get too serious about what you’re trying to do and you lose the soul and the spirit of it. And we’re fortunate. We work with kind of lighthearted brands. So that’s part of the sort of premise of what we’re trying to create.And, you know, we are creating human experiences. And if our staff and our team members are not having fun, they don’t then kind of project the kind of right atmosphere into our experiences. Then you’ve obviously got all the sort of the strategic underpinning. You know, I was fortunate that I had a pretty disciplined training at Unilever and I knew how the Marmite brand worked. And it was very easy to be creative because you had this strategic underpinning. We do the same about all the experiences we create.
You know, I think one of the things our clients would say about us, yes, there’s the lovely creative, yes, there’s the beautiful aesthetic to our experiences, but it’s underpinned by rigorous strategic thinking and commercial acumen. You know, a lot of our stores, our retail stores, it’s not just brand experiences. So there has to be that rigor to the way that we run those experiences. You know, everything from taking the money, to be honest with you, has to be very disciplined. And those are some of the sort of kind of tenets that we’ve held on to from day one.
You know, Hyde Pickle has become a leader in building brand homes, which is a fantastic phrase. For those unfamiliar, and I was until I started researching this, what exactly is a brand home and why are they such a powerful tool for brands and retailers? So really, I mean, other words for it would be brand showcase, you know, brand citadel, physical spaces that are the sorts of, I guess, the pinnacle of the pyramid. If you can imagine a sort of pyramid of brand experiences, you know, from, you know, the bottom of the pyramid, kind of maybe a sampling, a temporary sampling experience. At the top of the pyramid is a physical space, the most expensive, the most extravagant, the most immersive version of that brand, the physical manifestation of that brand, the home of that brand.
You know, if I want to give a good example, would be the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. You know, it is a visitor attraction. It is a communication platform. It is a museum to the brand. That is what we build. So we build these physical spaces where consumers and the brand engage with each other. There’s often a retail element to them. There’s often, you know, multiple activities going on in that space. They are dynamic. You know, they are not a static piece of communication that is developed, you know, and then left untouched. Again, in being physical, they’re very human experiences. So people play a big part in those activities and in bringing the brand to life.
And a phrase we like to use as a business is they’re a place to have a dialogue, not a monologue. So typical, you know, kind of advertising above the line work, I’m thinking particularly around TV, tends to be, you know, a one-way piece of communication. A brand home is a two-way piece of communication. You know, and that is really their kind of role.
So take us behind the scenes of the brand home experience and, you know, how you go about creating something immersive like that. I mean, I know that, you know, over here, you know, I’m from the Pacific Northwest and, you know, I could point you to, you know, where Starbucks has one of those. I don’t go to it very often anymore, but nonetheless, it’s, you know, pretty representative of their brand.
What’s involved in the creative and logistical process from all the way from ideation to execution? So you could imagine it’s a pretty in-depth activity because unlike a kind of producing an ad where you might have a single narrative you’re trying to tell, with a brand experience, you have the benefit but the challenge of being able to tell multiple stories.
So, you know, let’s take Guinness as a good example. There’s the origin story you want to tell. There’s a production story you want to tell. There’s an advertising you want to tell. You also want to give people a hospitality experience too.
So the first thing we do is a pretty sort of robust exercise of going, what are the stories we want to tell? Yeah, in a very functional sense. And then we start to work out how do we bring those stories to life in an interesting way? Yeah, that it doesn’t turn into a just a sort of textbook of the brand. And then you layer on top of it, how are we physically bringing those experiences to life? If we have to work within a space, then we’re clearly thinking about then we’ve got this number of these stories. We want to dramatize them in a certain way, but we’ve also got to fit them architecturally within the space. So therebecomes this game of how do the various jigsaw pieces fit together?
Interesting. You’ve been doing work now with Buffalo Trace, as I understand. That’s correct, yeah. What sort of things do you do with them? You’ve done, I know I was reading about this, I haven’t seen it, but there’s all kinds of saloon-style seating. What do you think about when you go to engage all five senses to create something memorable like that?
Well, it’s interesting. So there’s a challenge with Buffalo Trace, which is unique, I guess, is lots of the spirits brands have brand homes, and they’re often set in their production facility. So you go to the home of Johnny Walker, you go to the home of Laphroaig, and it’s surrounded by a production facility. The difference of Buffalo Trace is London, and that’s the one we’ve worked on, is a long way from the home of Buffalo Trace. And we’re not bringing the production facility over to the UK. And it’s also not as well-known a brand in the UK.
So what we try to create for Buffalo Trace is a tasting experience in central London that tells some of the story that you would get to enjoy if you were in the home of Buffalo Trace. But the focus is largely on the tasting experience. So bringing the product to life, explaining how a bourbon is different to a scotch, telling some of the stories of the brand so that we can induct people who don’t know anything about the brand, don’t have the history of the brand, and can get excited about it, and start a new ritual, start a new routine and a habit of drinking something that it isn’t so commonly consumed in the UK as it is in the States.
Interesting. How do you go about measuring success in experiential? And what kind of commercial impact have you seen from the Buffalo Trace project?
So we have varying briefs from clients. In some cases, they very much want to sell things. So the driver becomes sales through the till. And I think about a story ran for Pokemon just prior to COVID, where we had queues going around the block for about a mile and a half, and I will give exact numbers, but we were in lots of naughts. And that was very much a sort of commercial retail brand experience versus the Magnum pleasure stores of this world, where it was really about how do we get consumers to engage with the brand and share content? So 50% of people who went to the Magnum pleasure store made their own customized Magnum, and then they shared it on socials.
So it really comes down to what’s the client trying to do? Where are we in the funnel in our experiences? Are we trying to drive consideration? Are we trying to drive sales? Are we trying to just be a kind of dynamic billboard for the brand? And every single brief is different. I think for Buffalo Trace, really, it’s about introducing the brand to the UK consumer and creating some UK evangelists. The sales part of it is really important, but what’s equally important is liquid on lips, getting people to try those tasting experiences.
And looking ahead, how do you feel that the experience economy is evolving? I mean, you mentioned things like tying into social and things like that. What shifts are you seeing in how brands think about retail and live engagement and all that you do?
Look, I feel quite fortunate and excited. When I started the business in 2009, I was paranoid I was doing something that felt very sort of analog and a bit sort of Luddite-ish. And I don’t claim to have been any great strategic decisioner, and being brutally honest, I’m excited because I think consumers are more and more craving human interactions. We spend so much time on our phones, so much time in front of screens that actually we’re looking for those antidotes. We are looking to get out there and meet with people and experience things. And you only need to read thedata around Gen Z and the desire to buy experiences over products and stuff. So I think we’re in a really exciting territory. I think if I compare the output of people in our space now with, you know, 10 years ago, it’s more immersive. It’s more detailed. It’s more considered. There’s clearly a lot more competition. There’s no question about that. So, you know, the bar has been raised significantly. But we’re seeing really, really, really interesting work.
And I think where the industry has got better is they’ve realized that they can’t exist in isolation. So you need to create an experience that works within an integrated marketing campaign. You really need to think in the planning of that, of these experiences and those processes for there to be a subamplification of that experience, you know, into people’s own networks. Because that’s when the payback comes. Because it’s not cheap. You know, building a physical space is an expensive exercise. You know, it’s a labor-intensive, it’s a human exercise. It requires lots of fixed costs. And the way that you get value back from that is if you can drive authentic and organic content so that the experience reaches beyond the people who physically attend it.
You know, one thing I’m always curious about when it comes to any experiential sort of project is what is, I mean, is it defined by the brief or is it something that you work on together that determines whether or not something is pop-up versus permanent or seasonal versus not, you know, all of those variables? Budgets tend to determine it. You know, small budgets equal pop-up, big budgets equal permanent.
The thing we say to clients is, you know, on the whole, we will design an experience exactly the same way that it’s pop-up and permanent. In fact, we built lots of pop-up stores where people walk in and go, is this a permanent store? Because the level of detail and consideration around the materials, it feels like it’s permanent. Now, what we might do is give it a veneer so that it looks permanent, but actually the materials are quite temporary in their nature.
I think the thing that we have seen and learned from is if you’re going to do a pop-up store, there’s a minimum amount of time that you need to be around because you need to build some momentum. You know, the worst thing you can do is spend a whole lot of cash on a pop-up store in an obscure location for a very short period of time and pray that people are going to come along because it’s very difficult to buy football. So you need to be around for some time to make the numbers kind of stack up.
Well, you are making some incredible things. I love going through your website and just looking at all of it. If one wanted to find out more about you and Hot Pickle, where would they go? I already know where they should go, but we need to hear it from you.
Come down to the Buffalo Trace Distillery’s tasting experience on Long Acre. We’re involved and have been involved for some considerable time with the development of the new Guinness experience that will go near into Covent Garden. And I hope in the end of this year, early next year. The team are up in Scotland in Lot Lomond doing a whiskey distillery. Get in touch. Contact us on the website. And we’d love to talk to anyone.
Excellent. Well, Rupert, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for having me and have a great day.
