PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hughes: 00:00 Hey everyone. Today, we have John MacDonald on the podcast and John comes to us from the GIANT Company where he serves as the Director of Marketing Operations and Meal Solutions. And he’s responsible to lead the Creative Advertising Media Strategy In-store Execution, as well as drive the Merchandising Meal Solutions Initiatives for the family of brands that live under the GIANT Company. In John’s 29 year professional career, he has held several leadership positions, in the healthcare and the retail industries, supporting professionals and customers. He’s Ahold Delhaize, GIANT career began in 1999 with the Ahold Financial Service Group and has progressed to his current role at the GIANT Company and his recent former role at GIANT Food in Landover, Maryland as the Chief Marketing Officer. There he held the creation and stand up of a fully decentralized marketing organization, executing the strategic sales and marketing plans, media digital strategies and the CSR pillars of the company ensuring responsible retailing and community engagement.

John has a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Bloomsburg and holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from LVC or for those who aren’t local Lebanon Valley college. And has attained a Black Belt Level of Process Improvement in Lean Six Sigma. John also serves on the board of directors for Perry County Literacy Council and teaches undergraduate and MBA courses at Elizabethtown College and Masters level courses for LVC.

Welcome to the Fork and Lens podcast brought to you by Viscul. Oh, smells delish.

Well, thank you for joining us.

John Macdonald: 01:47 It’s my pleasure.

Jessica Hughes: 01:49 I’m so glad. This is our first in person recording.

John Macdonald: 01:53 I love doing things in person.

Jessica Hughes: 01:54 I was so excited when you said, “Let’s do this in person.” Because I was like, “Oh finally, I don’t have to worry about someone calling in via phone or via video chat or…”

John Macdonald: 02:03 To tell you the truth, I was just scared that my technology at home would not work.

Jessica Hughes: 02:06 Well Greg’s didn’t, I will tell you that.

John Macdonald: 02:09 Really?

Jessica Hughes: 02:09 Yes. He was trying to use one of [inaudible 00:02:11] set of headphones and it wasn’t working. He’s like, “We either need to reschedule or I’m going to call in via my phone.” I was like, “Just call in via your phone. We’ll make it work.” Because I know to lock him down and to lock me down is…

John Macdonald: 02:24 Well, I knew because everything’s kind of easing up a little bit here that I would… Plus I need to get out, I’ve been in the house for 75 days. I’m ready to get out.

Jessica Hughes: 02:32 Yes. And how much of your family is at home with you right now? Is everyone?

John Macdonald: 02:35 All my kids are at home, yeah.

Jessica Hughes: 02:37 So yeah, you were ready to get out.

John Macdonald: 02:39 I am ready to get out.[crosstalk 00:02:40] absolutely. But it’s fun.

Jessica Hughes: 02:43 Good. Good. Okay. So we were chatting a little bit before we started and pressed record, but essentially over the past five years, you’ve helped GIANT Food as well as the GIANT Company look at their rebranding efforts as all the brands under Ahold Delhaize, have kind of divided into their own divisions.

John Macdonald: 03:03 Right.

Jessica Hughes: 03:03 So tell me about how that kind of came to fruition and how you got to the point of, “Okay, now we need to set up brands for each of these different areas.”

John Macdonald: 03:13 Yeah. I just think it was really smart to decentralize the companies. I’ve been with Ahold Delhaize for 18 years and I’ve seen a centralization, I’ve seen the decentralization, but the one thing that I’ve always consistently seen is the struggle we had as a centralized organization to really connect with the customers.

Jessica Hughes: 03:13 Mm-hmm (affirmative)

John Macdonald: 03:34 So when we were Ahold USA and there was three brands, there was Stop & Shop, GIANT Food and GIANT Martin’s now the GIANT Company, we went to market very similarly, right. And we had stores from Maine all the way down to Richmond and we bobbled the ball a lot of times. We would talk to customers in Richmond on New Year’s about pork and sauerkraut and down there is a whole different thing. So it just kind of brings to light the very intricate nature of the local market. So when we decentralized, I just thought it was really smart because the customers are different, the nomenclature is different. How you talk to people are different. The food that you sell is a little bit different. And so when we decentralized, I went down to GIANT Food to lead their marketing efforts and we quickly got to a point where we said, “We really want to speak about the brand to the customers in a different way.” And most of the other, if not all of the other brands at Ahold Delhaize were thinking similarly.

Jessica Hughes: 04:34 Right.

John Macdonald: 04:35 And when you do that, there’s this dance that you have to play between experience and data. We quickly went in, when I was at GIANT Food, we quickly went in and did some market research and we looked at standard things, demographics, age and you always discover a lot of different things. But one of the most important voices to always talk about, because when you get into brand repositioning or brand refreshes, it’s a part of a conversation first.

Jessica Hughes: 05:05 Right.

John Macdonald: 05:05 So we have to talk to, we had to talk internally about it. So there are people that have been at these brands for 30, 40 years and they mean something to them. I mean, they really do. And they mean something to the people. So you have to have a conversation first in the organization. What does the brand mean to you? What do we as a company stand for? What do we do? And then you have to go out and you have to do the research and you have to say with that idea of the brand, is it relevant in today with the customers? And all three of the Legacy Ahold USA brands did that. Food Lion had done that a while ago, and I know Hannaford had done that too. And they’re… Food Lion, Hannaford, very strong in their markets, very clear on how they go to market, very clear on their customer and they’re… You could tell that, it’s great to talk to them about those things.

One of the other great things about the decentralization is you get to talk to all these people about how did they do this and what are they doing? And I learned a lot. At GIANT Food it was a discovery.

Jessica Hughes: 06:01 Yeah.

John Macdonald: 06:01 I will tell you that, because even though I worked with all these brands at Ahold USA, when you’re in the market, it’s different and you realize in GIANT Food, they deal with the Washington DC Metro and the Baltimore Metro area. It’s very dense, it’s very limited. The GIANT Company, we have Philadelphia and Harrisburg and Altoona and West Virginia and you couldn’t be more diverse in terms of a market. So you discover that the customers are way different.

Jessica Hughes: 06:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Macdonald: 06:29 And so you go through those things and you look at customers and you look at their shop, you look at people also that are shopping your stores, but you have to look at people that don’t shop your stores. Because you have to be something from market. So when you get into that, those insights and the blend and that dance between experience and insights is really key.

Jessica Hughes: 06:49 So you dove in?

John Macdonald: 06:49 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jessica Hughes: 06:51 You got the data?

John Macdonald: 06:52 Yeah.

Jessica Hughes: 06:53 You talked to customers and I know for GIANT Food especially, it’s such a diverse-

John Macdonald: 06:53 Well you guys were such a big part of that.

Jessica Hughes: 06:59 Well we were, but it’s such a diverse culture down there. In the sense of you have these pockets, like you have Chinatown in D C, you have all these different cultural pieces to it that you want to serve the greater but you have to focus in on something in order to at least hit a target.

John Macdonald: 07:20 Yeah we… One of the things that we looked at when we were at GIANT Food was… And I’ll tell you one of the things that really surprised me is when you look at GIANT Food and you look at their history in the market, yeah they’ve been in that market for almost a hundred years, right?

Jessica Hughes: 07:20 Right.

John Macdonald: 07:37 So it was family owned it… The strength of that brand was fantastic and that’s what I’ll have to say about both GIANT Martin’s and GIANT Food and Stop & Shop, the strengths of those brands is tremendous-

Jessica Hughes: 07:50 100%.

John Macdonald: 07:50 Right? So top of mind awareness of GIANT Martin’s and Stop & Shop is high. Top of mind awareness of GIANT Food was extremely high and their market position close to their next competitor, which was Safeway is large. I think GIANT Food had, at the point I was there had a 21% market share and Safeway had a 7% or 8%. So there was a big gap between those two. So no one needed to be reminded who GIANT Food was.

Jessica Hughes: 08:16 Right.

John Macdonald: 08:17 So it was really, we came to the decision real quickly that it was a refresh. It was just a re… It was reinventing, not reinventing, but re-introducing that brand to the market. And the thing that I found that I get back to it, that surprised me the most was how transient the nature of that market is. So people come in and out of that market every five years. And then the pe… So 30% or 40% of the people in that market come in and out.

Jessica Hughes: 08:45 Right.

John Macdonald: 08:45 Government, military, there’s a lot of things going on down there. But then the other thing that we found is that the people that live in that market, they move every couple of years. So there’s two things that came out real quickly to us. One, you have to reintroduce that brand on a regular cycle.

Jessica Hughes: 09:00 Yes.

John Macdonald: 09:00 Because if I come in from New Mexico and I don’t know anything about the grocery store, and someone says, “What’s the grocery store?” I want people to say, “GIANT, GIANT Food.”

Jessica Hughes: 09:00 Right.

John Macdonald: 09:09 And so you have to reintroduce that brand all the time. What does it stand for? What does it look like? And then for the people that move, you have to have consistency of the brand all around. So if I’m in Alexandria, Virginia and then I move to Bowie, Maryland, I’ve got to have the same type of experience or at least the offerings should be very similar.

Jessica Hughes: 09:28 Right.

John Macdonald: 09:29 So that the experience with my brand is different or is the same, but in other brands which are spread out like GIANT Martin’s, you still have to do that. But I think the immediacy of it is not, is what I felt down in GIANT Food. So we had to get all of that together and quickly come up with, “What do we stand for? What do we want to be? What were we and what are we going to be in the future?”

Jessica Hughes: 09:53 Right.

John Macdonald: 09:54 Pretty quickly. And we had to look at what it looked like and what it felt like, because not only did we have our own people to kind of educate, people make a mistake that when you introduce or redo a brand or you kind of repurpose a brand, it’s just all outward facing. Most of it has to be internal, because the big brand people, the brand advocates come from-

Jessica Hughes: 10:14 They’re all internal.

John Macdonald: 10:15 Yeah, absolutely. You got to be able to speak about it.

Jessica Hughes: 10:17 Obviously you did a lot of market research around it, but then when it came to the look and feel and that kind of refresh of things, how did you approach that? And how did you get the collective buy in of the people that were the stakeholders in those decisions?

John Macdonald: 10:30 Yeah. Like with all brands and… We went through it, the GIANT Company too. You develop an idea of what the brand should be and you develop an idea of what your story is. And we all have the idea of even our own personal brand. So the look and feel of it comes about what’s the best way to represent that. And so for GIANT Food, what we did was, we took everything that we did at Ahold USA and we put it out and we laid it out. And we made some very conscious decision with research. And I remember having a conversation with Gregg Dorazio one day and he said to me, “I think we should go lean all in on purple.” And I said, “Purple?” And-

Jessica Hughes: 11:17 It was a surprise to us.

John Macdonald: 11:18 I’ll tell you, look purple’s one of my least favorite colors. But when you make decisions about a brand, it’s not about my personal preference-

Jessica Hughes: 11:25 That’s right.

John Macdonald: 11:25 It’s about what benefit would purple and these types of things have and very… A small amount of companies leaning on that color. It’s a very arresting color. People pay attention to it. It looks great in print and it looks great if you do it right. But you got to know where to use it, where not to use it.

Jessica Hughes: 11:46 Right.

John Macdonald: 11:47 Because it is an arresting color. So you go in and you create this idea of it has be relevant with the brand voice that you want out there. So we had to do all that pre-work first, then we have to go through, what you guys know is concept and then talk about it in concept and review and you put it down on paper and you put it up on the wall and it has to feel right.

Jessica Hughes: 12:11 Right.

John Macdonald: 12:12 Once the smaller group, I’m a big fan of small group, quick development. And then develop your story, your points and you get it right with the people who know things and know the reason we’re doing it, you get it right there. And then that way you can go out and [inaudible 00:12:30]it.  And you have to socialize this in the right way. So small group development then we go to executive committee and we get that buy in. And once you get leadership buy in, then you cascade that buy in down.

Jessica Hughes: 12:12 Right.

John Macdonald: 12:41 And with all of that, it’s about proof points. Why are we going in with these three or four colors? What do they mean? And for some people like you and me, that conversations awesome.

Jessica Hughes: 12:54 Right. We get excited about that conversation.

John Macdonald: 12:57 For people who run stores and people who run other operational areas or for people who run finances, that’s a very difficult conversation.

Jessica Hughes: 13:06 Yes.

John Macdonald: 13:06 And I can tell you, because I started my career in accounting. And when you put a spreadsheet-

Jessica Hughes: 13:13 Which is a total different conversation of how you went from accounting to marketing.

John Macdonald: 13:14 That will be a different podcasts. But when you hold a spreadsheet in front of a creative person, you see eyes glazing over. And so the point of this is you have to know how to talk to them and what to talk to them about. So when I would talk to [Gordon 00:13:32], I would explain it in a very broad sense and why. When I would explain it to other people who don’t need that broad sense and that big spectrum, I would talk about benefits to them and why it would be. Or I would pick and choose. Some people may not need to know that we’re going to lean in all on purple, but what they may need to know is how we’re going to message things.

Jessica Hughes: 13:51 Right.

John Macdonald: 13:52 So you really develop the story for the audience that you’re going to talk to. But at the same time, what’s really hard about that is you have to be consistent as a brand for all of those stories.

Jessica Hughes: 14:06 Yes. And this actually, it’s a lot like sales in the sense of you cultivate your… You know what the product is, you know exactly what you’re selling, but for different people based on their communication styles or what they’re concerned about, you tweak it, ever so slightly to say, “Okay, this is what they’re going to want to know versus …” If I was selling a fax machine, if we even know what a fax machine is anymore.But if we were selling a fax machine-

John Macdonald: 14:30 I know what a fax machine is [crosstalk 00:14:30]

Jessica Hughes: 14:31 Some people want to know how every little thing-

John Macdonald: 14:35 Works.

Jessica Hughes: 14:35 Operates. Whereas other people are like, “Is it going to send a message that I need it to send? This all I need to know?” And there’s that entire spectrum in between then. And they want to… YOu have to cultivate that.

John Macdonald: 14:45 Yeah. There’s an important step before you even get to some of those conversations, is you have to explain about where the brand is going.

Jessica Hughes: 14:51 Yes.

John Macdonald: 14:51 And so GIANT Food and the GIANT Company have done… We’ve done really good jobs at making sure that when you talk about a brand and you talk about a refresh of a brand, because that’s what both of these companies really have done. It’s not a reinvention. It’s not… Because both the brands are strong, there’s historical elements, people believe in it. So there’s nothing wrong with the brand to begin with, it’s just a refresh and a modernization.

Jessica Hughes: 15:18 Right.

John Macdonald: 15:19 So one of the things that you do is you develop the ways that you’re going to talk about that brand and we both… Both GIANT Food and GIANT Martin’s and GIANT Company talked about the brand in terms of, what are the key things that are important for it, right? So what about the people? What about the brand? What about the community? And there are these pillars, but they all have a base that the entire brand is built on.

Jessica Hughes: 15:19 Right.

John Macdonald: 15:48 And there’s these really old school views of brand building as a house. And for me, I kind of see through all this modern, really good creative ways, it’s still a house. You still have a base and a GIANT Food. We called them foundational elements and at the GIANT Company, we call them our heritage. And for grocery stores in particular, there’s always this base of price, assortment, quality and service.

Jessica Hughes: 16:19 Yes.

John Macdonald: 16:19 Because in any retail function, if you don’t have those things to hold the rest of the brand up, especially in grocery, to me I think, I think all the other stuff, people just won’t pay attention to.

Jessica Hughes: 16:31 Right. It’s almost like your value system, if you will. If you’re not true to that, you’re not true to anything.

John Macdonald: 16:35 You’re not true to that if you don’t hold it up. Look, the other thing that I found too, is that when people talk about experience for the brand, especially in food, let’s have really nice wood fire stoves and all these things, but really when you walk into a grocery store, there’s some very basic things that you want.

Jessica Hughes: 16:51 Right.

John Macdonald: 16:52 You want it to not smell bad.

Jessica Hughes: 16:54 Yes.

John Macdonald: 16:56 When you [crosstalk 00:16:56]. You want it to be clean. You want product on the shelves. You want someone there to say, “Can I help you when you need something?” Right? You want good bathrooms. You want some very regular things. And then again, those are the foundational service and experience elements that you build on top of it. So the first thing before you get to all those colors and things, you make sure that that base is solid. 

Jessica Hughes: 17:17 Yes. And make sure that you have your brand story in clear focus.

John Macdonald: 17:21 Absolutely.

Jessica Hughes: 17:22 Like that’s, I think always my thing is you can’t build a brand without knowing what the story is that you’re trying to tell. And that manifests itself, not just in messaging, as you think of a campaign story and what is the story that we’re telling, but what is for better explanation, the why of what we do, what we do and who we serve and how are we going to market with that?

John Macdonald: 17:44 It’s so essential. And I started out our conversation by saying, you have to have a conversation internally.

Jessica Hughes: 17:44 You do.

John Macdonald: 17:50 And one of those things is you have to have a conversation with leadership and people that work in management and say, “What does the brand mean to you?” And if you can articulate that in two minutes and you can articulate it genuinely and without a lot of buzzy words then I think you become believable and you actually… You can evangelize it a lot better to other people. And I’m always a big proponent that if people believe in your brand, if they can talk about it easily and they could talk about it with passion, then other people will believe that. So you have to find ways to get people excited about the brand.

Jessica Hughes: 17:50 You do.

John Macdonald: 18:31 But also you have to find ways to teach them how to talk about the brand.

Jessica Hughes: 18:34 Yes.

John Macdonald: 18:35 Because some people are good at it and some people are not

Jessica Hughes: 18:37 For sure. And I think that’s part of building a culture as well.

John Macdonald: 18:42 Yeah.

Jessica Hughes: 18:42 If they’re not good about talking about it, they haven’t fully experienced the culture of a company.

John Macdonald: 18:46 I think that’s such an important point and I’m glad you brought it up because I actually forgot about it. But the… It’s so important and I think at the GIANT Company, one of the things that I really admire and just think is best in class is how, not just the brand work that we talk about, but how the entire company is moving along. The GIANT Company is very purposeful in how we’ve been moving through brand work, right. And it’s taken us… So at GIANT Food, I needed to do it really, really quickly. And we kind of took one approach to it. And I’m a big believer that there’s multiple ways to build brands. At the GIANT Company, I love the fact that we took our time in a couple of different sections, but it was very purposeful in bringing the entire company along with us. We have 35,000 of associates, 32,000 to 35,000 associates.

Jessica Hughes: 19:39 Right.

John Macdonald: 19:39 And when I say everybody has to speak about the brand and feel the brand-

Jessica Hughes: 19:44 Literally.

John Macdonald: 19:44 We believe… The GIANT Company we believe that and we have to get down to everyone. So we’ve very purposeful in how we develop the story for our company, the story for the brand and how we integrate that back into our associates. They are the best brand ambassadors we have, we have to bring them along. And plus, if you’re going to be a brand that holds these values, then you have to take a look at your proof points and you have to recognize where you’re good, where you’re bad, where you’re not and you have to make adjustments. And I think this GIANT Company has been just spectacular in how we address those things as we discover them.

Jessica Hughes: 19:44 Right.

John Macdonald: 20:18 We’re taking a lot of time bringing up speed, developing the associate and the team member value proposition along with the customer value proposition. And when you put those two together, something special comes out I think.

Jessica Hughes: 20:30 Yes. And I think that’s one of the things that we’ve valued so much working with all of you. We got the opportunity to work with GIANT Food as they were going through all of this. And now we’ve had opportunities to kind of play with some of the stuff that the GIANT Company is doing. And it’s interesting also for us because they do serve two drastically different populations. At least in terms of whether it’s demographics or diversity even.

I mean, in Central Pennsylvania, we have diversity, but it’s not nearly as strong as the Baltimore DC markets and just being able to kind of launch into some of the heritage things around that as we talk about ingredients and recipes. And we’ve partnered with Ahold Delhaize on fresh stories for so many years. And as we talk about fresh stories, even it’s, how do we take fresh stories to the cultural level, in the sense of, if you’re from The Caribbean, there are certain flavors that are something that resonate with you versus someone who came from Asia. And how do we bring that on the market? And that’s something that your merchandising teams are amazing at doing, is even looking at the GIANT Company, the selection that you find in the Heirloom Markets in Philly versus what you find in a standard grocery store here in Mechanicsburg is two completely different things, to the point that, if I end up at an Heirloom Store for work, I’m taking bags of groceries home.

John Macdonald: 22:00 One of the other great things about working at a couple companies within Ahold Delhaize is I’ve seen that, right?

Jessica Hughes: 22:00 Right.

John Macdonald: 22:08 So this is a weird example, but I’m going to bring it up because this is just conversation, right?

Jessica Hughes: 22:12 Right.

John Macdonald: 22:13 So when I moved down to DC and I stayed there for a little over a year and I would shop at the GIANTs down there, I would go to the grocery store and I would try to find potato chips.

Jessica Hughes: 22:23 Okay.

John Macdonald: 22:24 Most of that isle is Lays, right?

Jessica Hughes: 22:24 Right.

John Macdonald: 22:27 But we’re spoiled here in Pennsylvania because the snack capital of the world, I guess we can call ourselves. There’s so many different varieties of potato chips. So I go in there and I can’t find anything. So when I would come back on the weekends sometimes, I would have to go to GIANT here in Pennsylvania to grab my favorite bag of chips and take them back down. We even had, to tell you the truth when I went down to the GIANT Food, I took… There was a couple people that came down with me, right?

Jessica Hughes: 22:52 Yeah.

John Macdonald: 22:52 And the culture clash, wasn’t a clash. It was such an interesting thing and we had this potluck dinner one time at work of all the foods from Pennsylvania, so that our friends from Maryland and DC could try pickled eggs and hog maw and all these things and pork and sauerkraut and all these things that maybe we do or cheese steaks, because they don’t really know what a cheese steak is down there. But then our Maryland friends brought us real good crab dishes-

Jessica Hughes: 23:21 Yes.

John Macdonald: 23:21 And things like that. So I guess my roundabout way to getting to your point is that the other smart thing about building a brand in a decentralized and very focused way in the market is you find out what’s important and people, customers and associates are so appreciative of that. So we go down and we talk about Maryland crab season and we talk about that in a much bigger way, because it Ahold USA we couldn’t just talk about it in one market. But when we talk about it down there, people go, “Oh, that’s right.” And you go back into the archives, one of the first things that Gordon asked me to do when I got to GIANT Food was, they have this archive room and they had all these yearbooks from like-

Jessica Hughes: 24:05 I remember that.

John Macdonald: 24:06 Did I ever show you this?

Jessica Hughes: 24:07 Yeah.

John Macdonald: 24:08 And I would go in there and I would pace through those. And there were these big Crab Fest and all these things. And then up here, the GIANT Company, we have great things on New Year’s day and we have other things, so local snacks and produce. You were talking about apples earlier, it’s just celebrating the local apple orchards and the local business that we’ve been able to curate at the GIANT Company is been appreciative by our customers, but also by me as an associate, because I love supporting those local businesses. They produce such great food and it’s recognized and it’s a good proof point for us to talk about.

Jessica Hughes: 24:45 Yeah. And you mentioned Food Lion because it’s part of the Ahold Delhaize family. And that’s something that they’ve done really well is taking it almost hyper-local in the sense of, to the store. And they do that, not just in merchandising, but they also do it in the way they give back to their communities and all those different things. And I think this is a trend, especially coming out of everything that we’ve just experienced over the past three to four months, is the fact that I think local is going to be that much more of a focus as it comes to brands and what are the offerings and all those different things.

And it’s very interesting to watch different brands come at it from different angles. And you said earlier, there isn’t essentially a set recipe and how to formulate, how to refresh a brand or establish a brand. Instead, there are a couple of different ways of coming at it. And I think that’s very interesting because I actually had a conversation not too long ago with someone and I’ll have to link the episode in the show notes, but essentially we were talking about how different agencies approach the creative process differently and gathering up that information. But at the end of the day, it gets us all the information that we need in order to do our job to benefit you. And that’s kind of interesting because I know that you’ve worked with other agency partners and all of this, as well as us. And I’m sure we’ve all come at it from different perspectives, but at the end of the day, what you’ve gotten is something that is working.

John Macdonald: 26:13 Yeah, to me… So this is just me talking. Local is such a powerful connection to a group, a community, a person, a customer’s identity, right?

Jessica Hughes: 26:25 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Macdonald: 26:25 So the closer you can get to that and the closer you can connect to [inaudible 00:26:30] the more power that you will have in affinity with that customer. The more… I don’t know how much people can love a grocery store, but I think the more that you can do things like that and you can support locally and you just support your community and you can show it in a really real and authentic way.

Jessica Hughes: 26:51 Right.

John Macdonald: 26:51 Then I think that has the basis of a really, really good brand. And people can… Look customers are very savvy today.

Jessica Hughes: 26:58 They are.

John Macdonald: 27:00 I think I’m kind of savvy. I know you’re savvy.

Jessica Hughes: 27:02 I think you’re savvy.

John Macdonald: 27:03 Hopefully, hopefully. I think people see through things from a mile away if you’re not real and authentic about it.

Jessica Hughes: 27:12 So true.

John Macdonald: 27:13 And so it’s really important to do it and not just do it in a way that say, “Oh, I have local crab.” But you got to know what to do with that. And you have… There’s several click downs and that’s a buzzword that I’ve been using lately.

Jessica Hughes: 27:26 Click downs, something like the word pivot?

John Macdonald: 27:29 I’m going to pivot, I’m going to click down, I’m going to… But there’s ways to go deeper into local that’s really key. And I think Food Lion is fantastic at it.

Jessica Hughes: 27:43 Yes.

John Macdonald: 27:44 But I think we’re all starting to really understand-

Jessica Hughes: 27:47 [crosstalk 00:27:47]

John Macdonald: 27:47 That is… And I’ll say it again, I honestly believe how smart it was to let those brands go and be really, really centered in their local market.

Jessica Hughes: 27:55 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Macdonald: 27:57 Because it was really a mandate for us in both the companies I’ve worked for, at GIANT Food and at the GIANT Company to really find out what that is.

Jessica Hughes: 28:06 Right.

John Macdonald: 28:06 We, at the GIANT Company we’ve been really focusing a lot on our big markets, like the [Haley 00:28:13] market [inaudible 00:28:13] New York, [inaudible 00:28:15] and then Philadelphia. And really deep diving back into what’s really important there because we lost a little bit of that when we were a centralized organization, but it’s so smart to go back and do that. And I know when I was at GIANT Food that we lost a little bit of vision. Now, once you kind of reconnect there, people feel it and people know that it’s authentic and they wanted it. I can tell you that when we did research down in DC for GIANT Food, they want GIANT Food to succeed so much. Here in Harrisburg and in Philadelphia, they want GIANT Martin’s to succeed so much. And so you just got to, you got to give them what they want and you gotta succeed.

Jessica Hughes: 28:51 You do. But I guess my question to you would be, how did you go about that in a way that didn’t alienate someone? So for instance, I know that as we were talking about the GIANT Company and the new logo around that, there were a lot of conversations around other brands who had changed their logo. And they felt like the world was like, consumer population felt like the world had come to an end. Like, “You’re no longer the company that I’ve supported all these years.” Just because of a logo change. And then there’s the other company. The other part of the population which is like, “I didn’t even notice a change.”

John Macdonald: 29:21 Right Again, like when you and I walk into the store, we see everything that’s different- [crosstalk 00:29:28]

Jessica Hughes: 29:27 Right

John Macdonald: 29:28 Most people that walk in the grocery store, they want to know where their item is and how much does it because.?

Jessica Hughes: 29:32 Right.

John Macdonald: 29:33 All this stuff on the walls, nobody really pays attention to and we know that. I think the biggest thing was to me, both GIANT Food and the GIANT Company had such strong positions, their brands were very recognizable. The GIANT Company, the logo had been around for so long. At GIANT Food, the logo was changed in 2008.

Jessica Hughes: 29:54 Right.

John Macdonald: 29:56 Because GIANT and Stop & Shop up in Boston had a relationship. And, they were managing kind of about of the same company. So they had similar traits.

Jessica Hughes: 30:05 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Macdonald: 30:06 But there was an affinity for both of them. And when you look at what we did in refreshing those logos, that’s all it was. It was a refresh that the new GIANT Company logo for our stores doesn’t look that much different, but it feels a little bit more modern. The letters coming together, the G is still very [inaudible 00:30:25] there’s a fresh leaf in that A. And I thought that was really, really smart because what you have the propensity to do, if you’re one of these big brand marketers is you just want to change the things that, “This is fresh. This is that.” But really the smart thing to do is how do you evolve it to be more modern. The GIANT Food, we didn’t change the font of the logo at all. All we did was change the ratio of the fruit ball and the words, right?

Jessica Hughes: 30:06 Right.

John Macdonald: 30:49 So the fruit bowl is real big and the words are real small. We changed that ratio down because we went to [inaudible 00:30:55] about GIANT. So that was just a modernization and just a slight change of it. And so by doing that, there is a feel that something is different, but there’s a respect for what we’ve done in the past.

Jessica Hughes: 31:06 Yes.

John Macdonald: 31:07 And there’s a modernization of what that brand is. And then that… Because if you change it too much, it’s a distraction to what you really want to talk about, I think.

Jessica Hughes: 31:15 It is. And I think that’s really important to note and you couldn’t have said it better is the fact that it was a change in the look and the feel of the visual. It wasn’t a change in who the company was going back to what we talked about with values and the brand’s story, that didn’t change at all. We change the way that we talk about it slightly. And we change the way it looked and in the way it felt slightly. But to the consumer, it was those little mild tweaks. It wasn’t something that was like, “Oh wait, hold up. Like, we’re not changing the whole foods. We’re not changing into Shop or Safeway. We’re not changing it into all these other… No, we’re maintaining who we are and we’re going to continue to provide you with what you expect out of us and hopefully raise the bar in the process.”

John Macdonald: 31:59 Yeah. And then once you get past all those kind of visual aesthetics, it’s about how you genuinely talk to the customer.

Jessica Hughes: 32:05 Yes.

John Macdonald: 32:06 How you talk to your team members and then what do you put out there to support them? What are there all the reasons to believe that what I’m saying is true. And so that’s why when you do a brand modernization, it’s much more than just marketing, putting something together. It’s a really concentrated and purposeful set of activities that go across the entire organization from HR to operations, to accounting believe it or not, to marketing, to merchandising, at least in our teams. To make sure one, we all talk about it the same way, but how you approach it and your voice. And it’s not teach you and it done, this is an ongoing thing that evolves.

Jessica Hughes: 32:47 Yes.

John Macdonald: 32:47 And it is a long way to go. GIANT Food is in, let’s see what are we in now? 2020?

Jessica Hughes: 32:53 Yeah.

John Macdonald: 32:53 So they’re in the… We did that in 2018. We launched it at the end of 2018, so they had all the end of 2018 into 2019, we’re into 2020. So they’re just like a year and a half or almost they’re going to come up on two years, it’s their journey. At the GIANT Company we’ve taken very purposeful steps and we’re kind of two years into that journey. And we’ve launched our logo. We’ll have a little bit more to go this Fall. And I think once those things come in, when we introduce those things to the public, it will be like, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Because you do all these things first in order to make sure that what you say, people can believe in it. You have to do it or else it’s just smoke and mirrors. And nobody, nobody, everybody can see through smoke and mirrors anymore.

Jessica Hughes: 33:35 They can, I mean, we have so much access to information at our fingertips. You can’t get around it anymore. So what were some of the things that maybe you did at GIANT Food that didn’t work as well for you, but when you came to the GIANT Company, you’re like, “Okay, I’m not going to do it that way.”

John Macdonald: 33:51 Well, I had a much broader set of responsibilities at GIANT Food because I started, basically yet we had to stand up an organization that for all intents and purposes was really an operational company since 2004. So they merged with Stop & Shop in 2004 and Stop & Shop did  some shared services with them. So they were basically a company that ran the stores, had a divisional presence of the small marketing group. But then when we came in, we actually had to stand up merchandising areas. We had to stand up marketing areas.

Jessica Hughes: 33:51 Yes.

John Macdonald: 34:29 So the things that I do at the GIANT Company are a little bit different. So I told you about these meal solutions-

Jessica Hughes: 34:34 Right.

John Macdonald: 34:34 That I’m in charge of now, I told you about the marketing and the advertising and some of the creative. So it’s a little different. And I think that there isn’t much that I would do differently because I think because the two companies are absolutely different in terms of their target customer. They’re different in terms of their store sizes. They’re different in terms of their geography. I always thought that the GIANT Company… If you compare to what we were at, Ahold USA, you had all of these different customers from Boston to Richmond. But if you look at the GIANT Company and its footprint of the four States, which is Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, it’s almost like a mini East coast in one company. It makes it a lot more complex because-

Jessica Hughes: 35:20 It does.

John Macdonald: 35:21 [inaudible 00:35:21] GIANT Food, it’s Baltimore and Washington, very dense, very put together. But I have urban customers in Philadelphia. And then I’ve got really rural customers in West Virginia. There’s not much that I would do different. I just think… Goes back to our conversation earlier, you have to adapt what you’re doing to the audience that you’re speaking to.

Jessica Hughes: 35:42 Right.

John Macdonald: 35:42 And so at GIANT Food it was a different brand. And you do things particularly that way, because it’s just not the customer, it’s the internal associates. It’s the way that the company is positioned in the market already. And you just have to adapt yourself up to a different one. So when I came back up to the GIANT Company here, it was about re-educating myself in, who is our customer? Who’s the target here? What do they need? It’s more in line with my own shopping experience and what I think.

Jessica Hughes: 36:11 No, you’re exactly right. And I think the whole experience that we approach as an agency to working with brands is first and foremost, who are you as a company? And who is your customer? Because at the end of the day, that’s the foundation of it. And then you start understanding those pillars. Right?

John Macdonald: 36:11 Right.

Jessica Hughes: 36:32 And it’s just like for us as a creative agency, we’re looking at our manifesto and what are the values of our company. And there’s not a lot of creative in there. And that is, been a talking point amongst us internally. And my response is always creative is the bar. This is what makes us go out above and beyond that bar. And I think that’s really important to understand as a business, in the sense of how do you take… What the minimum expectation is. As a creative agency, you expect really good creative, right?

John Macdonald: 37:04 Right.

Jessica Hughes: 37:05 And then how do you build upon that in terms of experience and offerings and all those different things, to make sure that your clients and your customers are having the best experience possible?

John Macdonald: 37:15 It’s got to be hard because I would expect you have clients that tell you exactly what they want and they’re kind of conservative. And then you have clients who say, “You know what, just do whatever you want. And then surprise me.” Do you have any clients to say that? No?

Jessica Hughes: 37:29 Actually we’ve had a few, there are a little fun to work with. Until you give them something surprise and unexpected and they don’t like it. Thank you for the free rein but some direction would have been nice in those circumstances. But then there’s a wagyu farm we’ve been working with for a few years and when we first met them and they showed us a brochure they were using. If you know anything about Wagyu, it’s expensive but the brochure looked backyard BBQ. But that’s the way the brand originally looked. Was… It just… It looked like something that I was going to go and buy from the local butcher shop for Saturday’s barbecue and not something that, literally costs over $10,000 a head in terms of a cow. So they were just kind of like have at it and so we had at it and we literally, we sat down for the presentation meeting and put the deck in front of them and we went on page two. And the owner was like, “This is good. I’m done.” Like, “Run with it.” And I was just like, “You don’t want to see everything else?”

John Macdonald: 38:37 I’m a big fan of the whole nudge, push, shove type of thing. So if I know where we want to go, right, that’s my push. But then sometimes to convince people, you got to shove them all the way over here. So they go, “Oh my God, that’s awful.” And then they’ll come back to where you want them at the beginning, because if you just nudge somebody they’re not going to do it.

Jessica Hughes: 38:57 This is true.

John Macdonald: 38:57 So we did that at GIANT Food. I mean, I remember a couple of times where we put the brand book together and we were talking about how everything looks. And even when we were working on the office and we did all the décor there, you show some people some renderings. And the first thing I want people to do is to be a little shocked.

Jessica Hughes: 39:16 Right.

John Macdonald: 39:16 But then I know that we can reign them back into to where we want to be. So the whole nudge, push, shove, it’s kind of… It’s an interesting way to kind of go out, especially things like brand development, but some people are a little, they’re a little afraid of that. I think what you want to do is you want to be purposeful on where you go. It has to be, again, there’s this dance between everything with me in particular is a balance between really good support and experience and a really good push and shove of data and knowledge and customers and good brand marketing.

Jessica Hughes: 39:16 Yeah.

John Macdonald: 39:48 And I think if you can do… You have to pay attention to where that goes and what circumstance you can use those things in. And then you can do some really special things if you get that balance, right. Especially in my industry, which is a very traditional industry. Because we sell Cheerios and food and it’s not really sometimes that exciting.

Jessica Hughes: 40:12 Onions and lettuce.

John Macdonald: 40:12 Onions, Lettuce, Cheerios-

Jessica Hughes: 40:12 Milk.

John Macdonald: 40:14 [crosstalk 00:40:14]

Jessica Hughes: 40:16 I love it. Well, thank you so much, John. I appreciate it.

John Macdonald: 40:19 It’s been great.

Jessica Hughes: 40:19 Is there anything else you want to add?

John Macdonald: 40:22 No.

Jessica Hughes: 40:22 Okay. [crosstalk 00:40:24] other topic that maybe we should just record another one while we’re here.

John Macdonald: 40:26 I don’t know, you want to talk about meals? We can talk about meals all day.

Jessica Hughes: 40:30 [inaudible 00:40:30] for another one?

John Macdonald: 40:31 Yeah. Let’s do that.

Jessica Hughes: 40:31 Let’s do that. Maybe we’ll cook up some meals.

John Macdonald: 40:35 I would love to do that.

Jessica Hughes: 40:36 Alright.

John Macdonald: 40:37 I’ve got some good stuff too so…

Jessica Hughes: 40:38 Sounds good.

John Macdonald: 40:39 Alright.

Jessica Hughes: 40:40 And make it into a chop challenge. How about that?

John Macdonald: 40:43 Why is everything a competition?

Jessica Hughes: 40:45 I don’t know. It’s marketing.

John Macdonald: 40:47 Yeah, I guess, I guess you’re right. No, this has been great.

Jessica Hughes: 40:50 Yes. Thank you.

Jessica Hughes: 41:09 Thank you so much for joining us today. You can find John on LinkedIn as well as follow GIANT Food and the GIANT Company on all platforms.

As always every meal is better shared. Feel free to share fork and lens with your team, colleagues and friends. If you enjoyed today’s message, please subscribe to get weekly access to new recipes for creative and marketing success. You can also check us out at forkandlens.co or viscul.co. Until next time.