Mancunian Foods

Mancunian Foods are a wholesale food supplier that work with a range of different hospitality clients. They have a wide client base in the north west of England. They offer sales and specials to clients on a monthly basis but do not offer an e-commerce functionality to their website because they like the process to be personal.

I was tasked with improving the marketing strategy to improve customer experience and to help attract new customers.

What Did I Do?
Branding, Web Design, Print Design and Email Design

Challenge
Mancunian Foods had an inconsistent marketing strategy. Despite having been in operation for 15 years, they had no set branding guidelines, no website and did not use spending data to market their customers digitally with email campaigns.

Insight
It became clear that this inconsistent marketing strategy was causing multiple issues. Firstly, having inconsistent branding led to issues in consumer confidence because customers were unsure they were purchasing from the same company as they had previously.

There was also no online / physical presence for a customer to make informed decisions on costs or products.

I was tasked with benchmarking and researching local competitors to see how they were implementing their marketing strategies. This allowed me to understand what customers expect from wholesalers in the area and identify what Mancunian Foods could be doing differently.

Solution
The solution was identified as creating a simple unified brand presence that worked across different channels from print to web to ensure consistency and enhance customer confidence.

After the brand was established we worked on several elements that we felt were the most important:

• Website – A new online catalogue website that was easy to use on both desktop and mobile was produced. This was something that had not been previously looked at. With over 4000 products with many different variations, it was vital that the search functionality was easy to use and that the product cards were user friendly.

• Email Design – New email designs that could be used for the next month to highlight specials were created. The aim of these was to attract customers to purchase stock at a cheaper price. Previous monthly specials had been something that the client had struggled to sell.

• Printed Branding – Printed branding material such as leaflets, catalogues and vehicle wraps  were designed and produced. This gave the Sales Team something physical to hand out when meeting potential new clients on the road.

Did it work?
After 3 months of working on the project the client presented the analytics of how the rebrand and digital marketing had worked.

• 112 new customers in comparison to the previous quarter with the website and branding cited as one of the key ways that new customers had found the business.
• An increase in business from lost and dormant customers who had not made a purchase in over 12-18 months, which led to increased sales. This was attributed to the monthly email campaigns.
• The Sales Team noted more interaction on products that were labelled as monthly specials. They felt the printed and email marketing was the driving force behind this.

What I would do differently

• Branding – I was not overly happy with the logo and felt this could have been more unique as opposed to simply following what the competition was doing. Unfortunately, the client did not want the branding to be too different because they did not want to alienate current clients. 
• Lack of social media – I felt that social media would have been easy to set up and utilise. This would have allowed current clients to interact with the brand to view specials and add testimonials. Unfortunately, the client did not want to go down this route.