Komosion affiliate Anna Jones began her career in the United States working with established brands like General Motors and Hasbro for the William Morris Agency. Upon arriving in Australia, she joined Red Rooster to run its marketing function and ultimately reframed the business, recognising that it had been focused on the wrong competitors and the wrong primary marketplace opportunity …
John: Today I’m at Luna Park in Sydney, where I’m joined by Anna Jones. Anna is a sole trader who specializes in helping businesses make the cultural shift required for business transformation. She also works with established brands to help them uncover unmet customer needs. Anna built her marketing expertise first in the US and then in Australia. She has worked with some massive brands, including General Motors, on projects investigating the future of transportation. Anna joined Red Rooster upon arriving in Australia and, as we’ll hear, she helped the brand get back to its roots—roast chicken—for four years. She also recently worked at Guzman y Gomez as the Chief Marketing Officer, where her priorities were brand purpose, vision, and customer experience. Today, the ten-year-old Mexican fast-food chain turns over more than one hundred and fifty million dollars a year. Today, we’re going to talk about how Anna leverages her experience to help brands become more aware of their customers’ needs. Anna, welcome to Customers Matter. As I’ve just mentioned, you started your career in the US. Can you tell us a bit about your experience there and how that shaped the work you do today?
Anna: When I went to Los Angeles, I started working at a company called the William Morris Agency, which is the oldest talent agency in the world. Everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Lady Gaga and Martin Scorsese were our clients. We worked with corporate clients to encourage them to use entertainers to tell stories for their brands. It was there that I started working with some of the big retailers in the US, like Williams-Sonoma, Hasbro, and General Motors. It’s really where I started to get back to my passion: retail and the customer journey.
John: Tell me a bit about the work with the likes of General Motors and Hasbro. What specifically did you do, and how did that part of your career unfold?
Anna: General Motors was my main client while I was there. This was over ten years ago, in the very beginning of brands being involved with entertainers; now it seems like it’s everywhere, but at the time it was really new. I came in right when we were working on a partnership with the first Transformers movie. All of the cars in it were General Motors vehicles. In a nutshell, we helped brands understand how they could leverage their core business to their benefit using entertainment to help tell their story. For General Motors, they had cars—that’s what they sell. When we did partnerships with movies, we worked “upstream” with the directors and producers. Directors and producers want cars for their movies because they want to blow them up and crash them, which is very expensive. Being able to get cars for free was a huge relief for their budget, allowing them to afford better talent and effects. For General Motors, they would much rather give cars away than spend money on promotional support, which is what happens if you partner directly with the studio. The Transformers partnership was phenomenal because the cars were the characters. I also worked with General Motors on their green technology. At the time, they were launching a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. The entertainment industry has always embraced climate change and the need for a shift in our species’ behavior. We used influencers to help raise awareness for their green initiatives.
John: And you mentioned Hasbro as well.
Anna: Hasbro was interesting. At the time, they were just a toy manufacturer. We helped them understand that they weren’t just a toy manufacturer; they were an IP company that created some of the best franchises in the world. Transformers was a significant partnership between General Motors and Hasbro. Back in 2006, Transformers was a dead brand. I remembered it and loved it as a kid, but it was sitting on a shelf making no money. We helped them look at their properties and realize they weren’t just toys, but entertainment properties. If you reinvent these properties at a time when the kids who grew up loving them now have their own children and want to relive those memories, it can be a huge success.
John: There are some parallels with Lego there, aren’t there?
Anna: Actually, I knew the people who did the Lego deal. For years, no one would buy into a Lego movie; they didn’t believe in it or understand it because Lego doesn’t inherently have a story. Transformers and G.I. Joe clearly have stories, but Lego is an inanimate object. It took some visionary directors to realize it, and obviously, it was incredibly successful.
John: I think I know the answer to this, but obviously, there was an Australian in your life somehow.
Anna: Yes.
John: Can you tell us how you went from New York to LA and now to Sydney? How did that happen?
Anna: I met an Aussie boy in Los Angeles and he brought me back to Australia. I moved to Perth in 2011, spent three years there, and I’ve been in Sydney now for three years.
John: When you arrived in Australia, was this another evolution for your career? You’d had the excitement of working with Hollywood and big brands, so how did Australia unfold for you?
Anna: At that time, I was looking to go “client side.” I knew that’s where I wanted to be. I was working with Mattel, supervising their global Mattel Girls business. When I moved to Perth, I met with agencies, thinking I would work in advertising. Randomly, an agency said, “We want you here, but we don’t have a role. However, one of our clients, Red Rooster, needs someone to fill in for a couple of months as their Marketing Manager.” I thought that was great. I was a vegan at the time and didn’t eat fast food, but I took it on. Their Marketing Manager had left, and they were trying to find a replacement. About three months into the role, I started to see a real opportunity for Red Rooster if we got it right. I had many discussions with them about where the business should go, and they eventually asked me to stay on.
John: For a born-and-bred Aussie looking at KFC, McDonald’s, and Hungry Jack’s, Red Rooster would have looked like a massive challenge. What did you do to grapple with it, and what was the opportunity you saw?
Anna: The biggest opportunity I saw was that Red Rooster was sitting in two businesses: fast food and roast chicken. I remember saying early on that I thought Coles and Woolworths were our biggest competitors. They told me, “No, it’s McDonald’s and KFC.” I went in, did the fast-food thing, and it was obvious to me that it was a dying industry driven by low margins and cost-optimized products. It wasn’t going to be a recipe for success. I couldn’t just say, “Trust me, let’s go after Coles and Woolworths”; I had to prove it. I did a lot of work understanding the future of the dinner market. There was a changing landscape in how Australians and people globally eat dinner and cook. I had seen what Whole Foods was doing in the US and what Tesco was doing in the UK with ready-to-eat meals for mid-week dinners. I sized up the opportunity and looked at where roast chicken sat in that. The fast-food dinner industry was worth about 2.6 to 2.8 billion dollars, while the mid-week dinner market was 13 billion dollars. It was clear where the opportunity was. It was just a matter of getting the business to re-look at internal priorities and where we spent our money to focus on the roast chicken market.
John: For those who may not be regular Red Rooster customers, what actually happened in practice as a consequence of reframing the business?
Anna: A couple of things happened. We tried a bunch of things that didn’t work, but we tried them anyway. For the take-home meal occasion, we tried providing a roast chicken with coleslaw and dinner rolls along with a recipe to turn them into something else. We pushed the envelope to see if we could get into that take-home space. We launched delivery, which was hugely successful, and the most popular delivery product was just a single roast chicken. There was always a question inside the business about whether a roast chicken was worth $12.95 or $13 when Coles and Woolworths were dropping prices to $8.99 or $9.99. Because their labor costs are smaller, their margins are different, so we couldn’t afford to discount that much. We tested it in a market and found that while some stores saw 300% growth with a $9.99 chicken, they didn’t make money. However, we found that people made impulse second chicken purchases. People take a roast chicken home, put it in the fridge, and eat it over a couple of days. When it was cheaper, they would buy a second one. We capitalized on that with a “two for twenty” deal. This protected our margin because we were selling two chickens and getting the volume growth. We also added recipes and tips on how to use that chicken later on.
John: So, you were learning about the customer experience through trial and error and prototyping?
Anna: Yes, piloting things and understanding how people were buying from us and the roast chicken occasion. We looked for the right price points, promotions, and add-ons. We cleaned up the menu by removing artificial flavors, colors, and MSG. We talked about the quality of our chickens. At Coles and Woolworths, a chicken might sit in a plastic bag for eight hours. At Red Rooster, we wouldn’t sell it if it had been in a warming unit for more than two hours. The freshness and quality were there; we just needed to tell that story.
John: Subsequent to that, you worked with Guzman y Gomez.
Anna: Yes.
John: Can you tell us about that experience and how you grappled with the customer experience for that brand?
Anna: At Red Rooster, we had to look at where we wanted to play, but we also had a big project to clean up customer service. That brand had been neglected and was in decline; when things are in decline, people cut costs and stop investing. When I left Red Rooster, I thought I didn’t want to work in food again. I wanted a new category and was happy to stay in retail, but just not in fast food. Then someone introduced me to the founder of Guzman y Gomez. It was an interesting opportunity. They didn’t have customer service problems or a business in decline. The challenge was that, being a founder-led business, they didn’t understand how to scale. They needed to find their differentiating factor and a strategy to drive them forward. It was a brand with a lot of potential. First, their food was great. Having worked in fast food, I know everything usually comes in pre-cooked and you just fry it. At Guzman y Gomez, everything came in fresh. I looked in the kitchen and asked where the freezers were, and they told me they didn’t have any. No freezers, no microwaves—it was amazing, and they still had the required speed of service. I thought the product, experience, and store design were good, and they had fantastic franchisees. My job was to figure out how they were going to grow and scale. I’ve always wanted to clean up the fast-food industry to prove you can have healthy, nutritious food and still be profitable and fast. We worked on animal welfare by launching free-range chicken, and they are still working on free-range pork and hormone-free beef. They aim to be the first completely artificial-free and preservative-free brand.
John: How does that address the challenge of scale you identified? How have they solved that problem?
Anna: They are still working through that. Many founder-led businesses trying to scale lack internal resources or a strategic plan. They often scale too big and fail because they don’t put the necessary processes in place. The shareholders at Guzman y Gomez did the right thing by going on a massive hiring spree before they scaled. They hired a CEO, myself, a COO, a Head of Property, a CTO, and a CDO. They invested in the business because they knew they needed that expertise to scale. They also looked at whether the right market was food courts, drive-throughs, or home delivery. Getting that structure and strategy right is vital for a retailer to scale.
John: You see delivery as a really important part of the future landscape of food in this country?
Anna: Absolutely. Delivery is going to continue to grow. It is challenging if you don’t have a product that delivers well; for instance, fries and bread rolls usually don’t deliver well. Roast chickens, burritos, and pizza deliver beautifully. It’s about understanding if you should deconstruct things or have customers add their own chips to a burrito bowl so they don’t get soggy. Every time you deconstruct, you have extra packaging and costs. There are also questions about whether to do it in-house or outsource it to companies like Deliveroo or Foodora. There isn’t always a clear answer, but I think every fast-food brand should be in delivery in some sense.
John: Is it the customer experience that needs to guide the equation? What is the “true north”?
Anna: It is understanding the customer experience and the financials. For example, some of Red Rooster’s biggest delivery markets were regional areas. Deliveroo can deliver wonderfully in the city, but they can’t in regional areas. In those cases, you have to have your own drivers and app systems, which is a big cost. You have to understand where the demand is coming from. If people only want roast chickens, you can use a different delivery model than if they want chips. You must understand the customer and build a system that supports that demand.
John: You’ve had a really interesting career path, working with global brands and then cutting your teeth on dynamic local businesses. What led you to become a consultant and move out of being “client side”?
Anna: I’ve been doing it for about eight months now. I’ve always wanted to do it. These transformation projects are hard work. I was at Red Rooster for four years, and it was hard every single day. I knew that once the business was transformed, I was going to leave. Part of me didn’t want to work that hard again, but another part of me got addicted to that kind of change. Guzman y Gomez was a different type of transformation, but still very much a transformation. I realized I got bored being a day-to-day marketer just doing Facebook posts and launching a few products. I wanted to work on transformation projects with brands. As a consultant, I can give them guidance on how to structure things and then let them get on with it.
John: Are you at liberty to talk about who you’re working with?
Anna: Yes, absolutely. I’m working with a food brand called Soul Origin. They are growing incredibly, with 75 stores across Australia. It’s a food court business focusing on sandwiches and salads. Similar to Guzman y Gomez, they are interested in being a healthy fast-food option—convenient but nutritious. I’m helping them with the cultural piece as they scale fast. I’m also working with a company called Job Getter, which is a recruitment site that helps retailers and job seekers find the right fit. Finally, I’m working with Ormina Tours, a travel brand that does luxury tours through Europe.
John: That’s a nice spread of work. I’d like to conclude with the importance of cultural change and change management in business transformation. What are the key lessons you’ve learned about ensuring alignment and getting people to go on the journey?
Anna: The key is that it is a journey you have to go on together. As a consultant, I can facilitate that rather than being the person inside the company spearheading it. I truly believe brand identity comes from within; it’s what people believe the brand is. Often people think they just need a new tagline or campaign, but you actually need everyone inside the organization to believe in what the brand is trying to do. Whether it’s cleaning up the fast-food industry or changing how job seekers are treated, it needs to be a fundamental belief. When I go into brands, I start with an internal audit. I interview everyone from the staff to the shareholders and ask them what they think the brand means. There’s often more alignment than people think, but they just don’t know how to express it. Pulling that together to create a brand identity and embedding it with behaviors, beliefs, and values is where you have to start.
John: So, you truly are an agent for change?
Anna: Yes.
John: Anna, it’s been lovely talking with you.
Anna: Thank you so much.
John: Thanks very much for taking the time to be with us today.
Anna: Thank you for the opportunity.
John: Thank you.